Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Kalgoorlie and Boulder were gold rush towns founded in the 1890's, only a few kilometres apart. They finally succumbed to the obvious and merged into one town but kept both names, however most people do the easy thing and know the place just as Kalgoorlie. The individual underground mine workings have now been swallowed by 'the superpit' - a giant hole in the ground that is growing deeper and larger by the hour. Kalgoorlie still has all the swagger of its frontier town roots, with lots of pubs advertising scantily clad barmaids and imposing civic buildings. Because of the history of the town, there are actually two town centres, each with a town hall, post office and court house. We spent a pleasant half day wandering around each main street, admiring all the imposing buildings. We also did a free tour of the old Kalgoorlie town hall, going behind the scenes to the council chamber, theatre backstage and various offices and dressing rooms.

The main problem for the early miners out here was a lack of water, but this was solved by the building of a new dam in Perth and a pipeline nearly 600km long. This massive engineering feat was completed in 1903, and Kalgoorlie is now as green and leafy as anyone would wish. There is a really nice lookout over town at the site of the reservoir built to store the water once it arrives after its long journey.

About 35 km south of Kalgoorlie is the town of Coolgardie. This was also founded on gold, a couple of years before the first strike at Kalgoorlie. The first gold strike at Coolgardie was at a place they originally called 'Fly Flat', which gives a fair idea of what it's like. Like Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie has lots of pubs and very impressive public buildings, however the gold started to run out in Coolgardie after about 20 years, and it is now a mere shadow of its former self. All but one of the pubs has closed down, and only small corners of the public buildings are still in use. The hugely wide main street (built to allow camel trains to turn around) has more empty lots than buildings standing, and the whole place is quietly sinking back into the scrub. Its a salutary lesson for Kalgoorlie, the citizens of which don't appear to be giving too much thought to the fact that the superpit is estimated to run out of gold in less than 10 years.

The other thing we did here is visit Kalgoorlie's Miner's Hall of Fame. As well as the usual recreations of miners' huts and such like, they had reasonably interesting displays explaining the history of the exploitation of various minerals in Australia (who'd have guessed how many different things we dig up and ship overseas - we'd never even heard of wolfram before!) plus tales of various mining pioneers and characters. The $2 entry fee was a definite bargain given the couple of hours of entertainment we got.