A Miner part of Western Australia

---

I am in Kalgoorlie with nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon. My train doesn't leave for another 9 hours, and the town has virtually shut down - nothing is open. No shops, even supermarkets to supply myself for the 2 day train trip, are open.

We arrived very late Thursday night because it's a 6 hour trip and we didn't leave Perth until nearly 8 pm. There were 12 in the mini-bus, all teachers and most of us Canadians. A trip was organized for all the exchange teachers in the Perth area to Kalgoorlie for this week-end, and Wendy invited me along. The timing was brilliant, any other week-end and I would have missed the trip. And the trip was in the right direction, I will just pick up the same train in Kalgoorlie, rather than taking the train from Perth. Sunday morning the teachers returned to Perth and left me in Kalgoorlie, in a town in which everything is closed.

Kalgoorlie is a gold mining town. Gold was discovered here in 1880's and it's been bringing people here every since. The first morning, Friday, we visited a state run school on the edge of town attending almost exclusively by Aborigines. There are many special programs for these students, and we saw a small sampling of this. We attended a math lesson, and a traditional dance lesson. Lunch was cooked for us, including some damper, an Aborigine bread - that's good bush tucker. These students come to school already disadvantaged, but the state does try to give these students all the help they can. Unfortunately, almost all of these Aborigine students will drop out of high school. The school has a mixture of Aborigine programs and western style lessons, a balanced approach is being attempted.

In the afternoon, we were driven to the local headquarters for the Royal Flying Doctors Service. These doctors and nurses fly into the remote bush to save lives. However, the program is underfunded, and while the state and federal government does fund the service, they do not give money for new equipment or airplanes - all this capital must be raised by donations. The RFDS performs a valuable service to a large area, it's too bad the government doesn't recognize it's importance. Without this service, many of the remote mining and cattle stations might not be viable, thus taking away from the all valuable economy. How much does the RFDS add to the economy, while how much does it cost the government?

In the late afternoon, we toured a brothel. Yes, you read this sentence correctly. Kalgoorlie was an outback mining town, with many men and not enough women. Naturally the working girls followed. There are only a couple of these historic brothels left, and while they are still in use, you can also tour the buildings. We toured one building now owned by a women (who used to be a man). And for added kicks, they do let rooms for a night to people who want to say they slept in a brothel, instead of the typical staid motel.

The next day we went to the look-out of the super pit. This is a huge open pit mine, 600 m deep and 3.2 km long and 1.4 km wide. It's right on the edge of town. The scale is enormous; in fact photographing this was a challenge to find a scale. The trucks used to haul out the rock are big, so big that each tire is about 2 meters in diameter, taller than a person. Yet in the pit, it's hard to tell. Down there, way down there you can see a couple of people. Then you see a car next to the truck, and the car looks miniature. Then you realize that the car is itself a sizable 4WD pick-up truck. The pit is big, bigger, biggest. On that same day we also toured one of the older obsolete underground mines. We went down a mine shaft 30 m in a tiny elevator, and from there we were shown around underground.

Kalgoorlie is a mining town, and millions of dollars comes from this mine. But amazingly, only 1 truck in 6 that each haul 200 tonnes of rock out of the pit contains any gold, and when it's all extracted and melted down it's the size of a golf ball. That tells you something about the price of gold. The super pit is actually only a recent venture, since the late 1980's when all the gold mines in the area were consolidated. 800 000 ounces of gold are produced each year. Obviously enough to still make a profit, after buying millions of litres of fuel, paying 500 + employees, each truck is $3 million and the list goes on. But that's what mining is all about, a profitable extraction of ore. Indeed, this area of Western Australia is a major part of the economy.

---

Comments

[Shelley]

Great portrait
Like the portrait of James!