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Published: December 30th 2005
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The next stop on our tour of the South of Western Australia was the Goldfields area. Which actually doesn’t have that many hills - in fact it was pretty flat, but as we all know, that is what you exclaim when you find gold. We were booked into the YHA in Kalgourlie-Boulder which is a mining town with pretty much nothing else around it. Our drive from Esperance to Kal. (as us locals know it) took us through a great deal of dusty scrub - very remote, hot and dry with long, straight roads lasting many miles. These are to allow you to fall asleep at the wheel with ease. We kept ourselves awake with a classic game of ‘I Spy’. There’s a few things we’ve noticed about driving through Western Australia. You can drive for a long, long time without seeing another vehicle and because the roads are so straight and the sun is so strong you can see the reflection of a bottle or crisp packet lying on the road from miles away. There’s always a lot of wild animals ready to run in front of you and consequently, there’s lots of dead things (‘roos, emus, rabbits etc.) lying
at the side of the road. The heat haze on the roads is very reflective and displays car headlights (or windscreen reflections) like water - you can understand how people in deserts see mirages. Road Trains are enormous cabins with up to 3 truck-sized trailers attached making their overall length enormous - these are particularly tricky to overtake in an automatic Toyota Corolla and you need miles fr road ahead to do so safely.
Apparently Western Australia was pretty hard up until Gold was discovered at Southern Cross in 1887. This sparked a gold-rush and about 50 new towns sprung up within a matter of months. The gold-rush was short-lived though and the only real surviving town in the area is Kalgourlie-Boulder which is an amalgamation of 2 towns that grew together. Kal. is a man’s town. For men. Real men who work down mines and wouldn’t be seen dead eating salad or buying a bottle of balsamic vinegar in Tescos. There are a number of pubs/hotels and a few brothels and that’s about it. The pubs have ‘Skimpies’ behind the bar - these are barmaids that serve you in their pants and little else. Many of the pubs
have their resident Skimpy and advertise this outside by way of a large sign with names like ‘Alyssa!’ or ‘Kylie!’ plastered over them. There weren’t many familys in buying Chicken Nuggets & Chips for the kids on a Sunday afternoon. The brothels are somewhat less glamorous than Amsterdam - they’re basically units in an industrial-estate type pre-fab building with screens for those who like to window-shop before undertaking a purchase. They’re painted pink to add that essential feminine touch. As a sideline, the brothels do tours. The tours were $35 which we felt was a bit excessive given that you didn’t get as much as a free sample and we’re not sure what exactly they intend to explain throughout the commentary. But we had to admire these businesswomen - they certainly knew how to part you from your money one way or another!
When we arrived at the YHA we went to the kitchen to park our food bag in the fridge and immediately met 2 guys who had emigrated from Scotland and who were painters employed there temporarily to paint a local school. We got talking and one of the guys asked what we did. When we told
Shaz at the Superpit viewing platform.
We've been referring to our stomachs as the 'Superpits' ever since we visited here, such is our greed for Aussie food. him which bank we worked for before we started travelling he got a bit uncomfortable and then promptly disappeared “…to erm…make some phone calls and that”. We didn’t think any more about it until Alan met him in the kitchen the next night. The guy apologized for his hasty exit the night before and explained that when he’d left Scotland he’d taken out a loan with our former employers that he was unable to pay back. He thought that we had been sent to collect the debt! You can imagine how we almost wet ourselves laughing at this. Firstly at the thought that a bank would send 2 people round the other side of the world to chase a $5000 debt. And also that if they did send someone it would be us!! Can you imagine??? Anyway the guy told us that after he’d found out who we worked, for he’d left the table, packed his bags and jumped in his car to escape. He was about 40 minutes down the road before he phoned his mate and realized how mental he’d been! Poor guy!! Best laff we’ve had in ages though - our jaws and belly’s were aching.
Big wheels
Typical vehicle size. Shaz has been fantasizing about a Mini Cooper with wheels this size - imagine the speed on the M8!!! One of the reasons we went to Kal. was to see The Superpit. This is basically a very large open gold mine. The people who own it blast away enormous chunks of earth and then process the blasted earth to extract gold ore from it. It’s difficult to describe the impressive scale of this place so just take a look at the pictures below. The pit is about 4km long, 2km wide and half a kilometer deep. The machines they have there to move the earth cost up to $10M per vehicle and are enormous. The pit is so large though that much of the machinery appears as small dots on our pictures. A bit like tonka trucks. We happened to get there just before 1pm when they were blasting another chunk of earth away and so we got to see the explosion which was rather impressive. There are numerous areas around the site primed with explosives for detonation but fortunately a local arrived to let us know which direction to look at the appropriate point in time.
Other weird and wonderful sights included the shop that will buy/sell gold nuggets - if you’ve been lucky enough to find
Superpit blast
It was really excting. We've never seen a live explosion before - it was so loud. one lying around in the dirt as Paddy Hannon did in the 1800s. Also the Exchange hotel was at one point one of the 5 or so Stock Exchanges that were here - in a town of around 50,000 people. They still show current mineral prices on a rolling display outside the hotel itself. While we were there the world price of gold rose to over $500USD per ounce - its highest since the 1980’s. Not sure this was entirely to do with our being there but we must take some credit!
Around Kal. there are now a load of ghost towns - this being the result of the goldrush ending and people abandoning the towns that had sprung up so dramatically. We visited one of these towns - Coolgardie - which actually touts itself as a Ghost Town so we’re not sure if it really is. It looked a bit like some of the less salubrious towns of darkest Lanarkshire. But with 37-degree heat! Nice. There is a museum there which gave us the history of the goldfields area and includes the Coolgardie courtroom which still retains its original fixtures. There are various exhibits designed to show the
harsh life of the inhabitants and the techniques used for prospecting. However no Aussie museum would be complete without a random selection of exhibits and we got that in spades. There’s a collection of bottles which apparently an old couple had collected from rubbish bins over the years and had cleaned up with the intention of setting up their own museum - nothing if not entrepreneurial these Aussies. However when they opened their museum the council shut them down on account of the lack of sufficient parking spaces at the front of their house. They did the only reasonable thing - they moved to Coolgardie and donated their bottles to the museum there. “That’ll show those bureaucratic bludgers at the council!” they exclaimed.
Yee-ha Dudes!
Love, A&S. xxx
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