DAY 89 – Kalgoorlie – Menzies (Gwalia)

Good Morning Kalgoorlie!
 
Low 5°c (41°F) – High 22°c (72°F)
365km
 
Another cold morning and despite knowing we had a pretty big day ahead of us, we got ourselves organized and out of the park just before 9.30am.  Heading north once again we found ourselves surrounded by vivid red dirt and a real sense of being right back in the outback.  I don’t know exactly what it is, but both of us respond so strongly to the outback in a very “connected” way, it has felt so good to leave the pastures and large cities behind us.
 
We always get a bit of a laugh at some of the signs during our travels – a more recent one has included Kangaroos (great big ones if perspective counts for anything) jumping over Cows.  We are yet to see this phenomenon and our trip is the poorer for it.
 
Various mine sites are all along the Goldfields Highway and we passed many road trains and also vehicles transporting mining vehicles and equipment, possibly more than we’ve seen in past days in this short space of time.  Our overnight destination for today was a little town called Menzies, 135km from Kalgoorlie, which has a super Council run Caravan Park possibly one of the neatest and easy access parks we’ve stayed in and with power and water for $30 it was pretty good value.  After arriving in Menzies just after 11.00am, getting set up and having a bite to eat, we set off for another 105km to where our attention lay for today – a little ghost town called Gwalia.
 
Located on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, the long-abandoned town of Gwalia stands testament to the booms and busts of the gold rush era. Standing in the shadow of what is still one of Australia’s most prosperous gold mines, Gwalia’s heyday came to an abrupt end in 1963, when the closure of the mine led to the town becoming all-but-deserted overnight with residents grabbing what they could carry, jumping on the train and waving goodbye to the dusty red streets forever.
 
Gwalia’s story dates way back to 1896, when three prospectors hit the jackpot and found gold in this remote region during the height of Western Australia’s gold rush. Word quickly got out, and by 1897 there was a fully operating mine on the site, named “Sons of Gwalia”.  Before long, the town caught the eye of up-and-coming young American geologist – and future 31^st US president – Herbert Hoover, who travelled up by camel from Coolgardie, 274km (170mi) to the south.  Convincing his bosses in London to invest in the mine, Hoover was soon appointed manager and applied radical cost-cutting schemes that put the Sons of Gwalia on course to be one of Western Australia’s most profitable gold mines.
 
As the mine and workforce grew, so too did Gwalia. At its peak, the town was home to 1,114 people, most living in tumble-down cottages built from corrugated iron and timber, or taking up lodgings in temporary boarding houses for single men. They would shop in one of the town’s two stores, go to church, send their kids to school and drink in the Gwalia State Hotel, one of the few brick buildings in the town.
 
Although the Sons of Gwalia was one of the most profitable mines in Australia at the time, producing over 2.644 million ounces (75 million grams) of gold (worth roughly AU$3.5 billion in today’s prices), by the late 1950s the tides of change had turned against the town.  On the night of 27 December 1963, it all came to an abrupt end when a serious accident caused the mine to shut down.  With thousands of workers instantly unemployed, the race was on to rush home, grab whatever they could carry on their backs and catch the train to Kalgoorlie to find work.  In their haste, everything else was forgotten: pots and pans left on the stove, tables set for a meal that would never be served and long-loved toys strewn over the floor. By morning, the dusty streets were eerily empty, and the flimsy houses that had once been so full of life were silent.
 
In just three weeks, the population dwindled from more than a thousand to just 40, and the hotel shut its doors for the last time. Gwalia became a living ghost town.  In the 1970s, the government moved in to demolish the town, with Gwalia’s story destined to be lost to time like so many others in the area.  Realising the historical importance of the town, however, the few remaining residents banded together and campaigned to stop the demolition.  Collecting snippets of history, from photographs and newspaper clippings to old vehicles, mining equipment and family tidbits, they pieced together the story of Gwalia, spending the next few decades converting the old administration buildings into a museum, restoring the rusted tin-shed cottages through an “Adopt-a-Cottage” program and turning Herbert Hoover’s former mine manager’s house into a luxury 1930s-style B&B. 
 
Despite the evacuation of the town, there was still a lot of interest in the Sons of Gwalia mine and the gold that lay beneath the surface, and so, after 20 years of lying dormant, in 1983, the mine was reopened.  Still in operation today, the mine is now the deepest trucking mine in the world, and, since its discovery in 1896, has produced over 5.5 million ounces (156 million grams) of gold – worth over AU$13.7 billion – making it one of the richest gold mines in Australia’s history.  Today, Gwalia’s streets are still as empty as they were on that fateful morning in 1963 – bar the occasional tourist, the odd mining ute and the wild goats that now call this town home.
 
Gates made of old metal headboards, rooms wallpapered with hessian sacks and old newspapers, workshops with rusting car parts and tools, smokey kitchens and pressed metal ceilings and wall panels, you get a real taste of what life would have been like for the miners and their families here at the time.  We had to wonder what it would have been like in the heat of summer as the area has an arid climate, with very hot summers and cool winters and having recorded temperatures up to 49°c (120°F). Rainfall is very sparse but there still would have been many nights huddled round the wood stove and pots catching the drips of rain from a leaking roof.  We enjoyed a good hour and a half wandering around and through all the cottages and sheds before heading a little further north to the town of Leonora.
 
The first European explorer to visit the area (in 1869) was the same John Forrest who would become WA’s first Premier 21 years later.  On 21 June 1869 Forrest's party made camp near a conspicuous hill, which Forrest named Mount Leonora, after his six-year-old niece Frances (Fanny) Leonora Hardey.  In 1895, gold was discovered in the area by prospector Edward "Doodah" Sullivan at the Johannesburg lease just north of the current townsite. In the following two years a number of rich finds resulted in rapid development of the area. The Sons of Gwalia gold mine brought Leonora to the attention of the world.  By 1897 a residential and business area had been established, and the town was gazetted as Leonora. Fast forward to modern day Leonora which was home to a detention centre, for asylum seekers relocated from Christmas Island, for four years from 2010.
 
Heading back to Menzies we stopped off at Lake Raeside which is part of a larger lake system that begins north of Leonora near Sir Samuel at Lake Miranda and extends south-east to Lake Goddard – a distance of over 800km.  The lake is generally dry, covered with a thin film of salt and has features typical of the area. During extreme rainfall, the lake can be transformed into a flowing waterway and takes on the dynamic characteristics of a real river.  We also stopped to photograph a huge rock that some clever person had painted to look like a giant frog as well as a few other sights on our way back to the van where we were treated to an amazing outback sunset.  Peeking out between some buildings in the park was the clock tower, the warm colours and textures provided by the stonework really stood out in the rich light of the sunset.  The tower belongs to the Town Hall & Shire Office with the first section of the building built in 1896 and an extension added in 1900/01 to include Council Chambers, administration offices, public library & reading room with a town hall located at the rear of the building. A clock however was missing for many years as a clock for the tower was sent out from England via S.S. "Orizaba" in 1905. Unfortunately Orizaba sank off the Coast of Rottnest Island. Eventually a clock was installed in the tower and unveiled on 1st January 2000.
 
It was warm enough to have Kitty’s pen set up and she was most happy to be able to sit outside with Shane.  Unfortunately a few friendly mosquitoes gathered quite early so I decided not to join them, preferring to sit inside with the insect screen closed and keep my blood to myself.