Norseman to Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie

Norseman – Kalgoorlie

Sun. Feb 13^th

Not only were we near a busy road, but the ore train from Kalgoorlie to Esperance ran all night. Needless to say, we didn’t sleep well. We also found that the time difference was taking a while to adjust to, as WA doesn’t have daylight saving so we were now 2 ½ hours earlier than SA and sunrise began around 5am. This trip requires many different adjustments to be made.

Our room with a view. Just a
pity about the noise.

Coolgardie in summer! What a
crazy weather pattern this year.



Coolgardie's 1890's goldrush paid
for some beautiful buildings.



Our 6am breakfast meant that we were really hungry by the time we had arrived to tour the fantastic museum in Coolgardie. This town was fascinating as the streets were extremely wide, like those in Ballarat and other gold rush towns, but there wasn’t a single person out and about. The occasional B-double or road train swept down the main street but there was nothing else happening.  When tourist information opened at 10, we gratefully rushed in and spent a couple of hours enjoying learning about the history of mining in the area through a series of excellent original photos and some brief paragraphs of information. They also had a wonderful collection of miners’ gear and dioramas of aspects of life in a gold rush town. The story of the rescue of a miner from a flooded mine in 1907 was also of interest and from this we discovered that March can be a wet month in this region as the tails of the cyclones often sweep down this far. Our present weather was the result of one such February event.

Coolgardie on a Sunday morning

The story of C Y O’Connor and his amazing engineering feat in bringing water to the gold towns and the courage of Premier Forrest in committing an amount of money the size of the state’s annual budget to a single project was quite astounding.

On the road again, the ‘dusty red-soil plains’ were beautiful, as were the salmon eucalypts that seemed to have absorbed the pigments of the red earth. There were some woodlands as well as plains and the colour, as always, was astounding. The nature strips in all of these towns are just the dry red dust and soil, the fences made from corrugated iron or wire and the plant life sparse.

Rain in Kalgoorlie



Kalgoorlie, while much larger and grander than Coolgardie in terms of the number of pubs, civic buildings, emporiums and the like from the boom days, was just as empty! With no Sunday trading in WA, we really noticed that the business areas are eerie after shops close at lunchtime on Saturday. The tourist information centre was excellent so we spent the afternoon sheltering from the rain and very cold wind at the WA Museum, another excellent display of the history of mining and its impact on the area – the wealth, the dispossession, the environmental degradation. As the ‘superpit’ is due to close in 2021, the issue of the future of Kalgoorlie is at the forefront of people’s minds and thankfully there seems to be some discussion taking place about some kind of restitution of the natural environment as well as the need to do something to reduce the loss of amenities in the town when the money from mining runs out. Quite a challenge to federal, state and local governments.

We found a caravan park and a supermarket in the suburbs and enjoyed fresh vegetables with our meal. The managers of the park put on a bbq for the visitors each Sunday, but we needed our vegies so we ate early and just enjoyed chatting to fellow travellers.

Mon. Feb 14^th

A cloudy sky but a little warmer than yesterday, so tracksuit pants and long-sleeved T-shirt without the jumper and scarf today. As the pit tour was booked out, we decided to take our time, catch up on emails etc and eventually headed to the suburb of Boulder. What a shock!  


Boulder scaffolding

 
This was obviously the poor end of town with many buildings boarded up and others enclosed by scaffolding, Aboriginal people drinking in the streets at 10:30am and poor whites dragging on their cigarettes as they shuffled down the street. Many of the small businesses were for sale and the theatre that we had mainly come to see was closed. Later, we discovered that there had been a substantial earthquake in Boulder last year, hence the supports and scaffolding needed to prop up buildings until something better could be done, if indeed any restoration was to be done at all.
 

Miners' Tribute

 Back into Kalgoorlie the centre to discover a vibrant and busy town, with many people out and about and with a sense of purpose. We once again walked up and down Hannan Street, visited a couple of art galleries of no particular importance in the development of regional art, then headed off to the Dept. of Minerals where Graeme paid for his mining licence, valid for the rest of his life!!, and discussed the location of unclaimed sites for some simple fossicking and metal detecting. Oh happy man!

The prospecting trip took us out the back of town, beyond the tip and the radio transmission towers, to a site shown on a mining map. The sun came out just as we arrived and guaranteed a hot walk for GVS as he searched for the elusive metal without success.

On the way back to the caravan park we stopped and walked through the Arboretum and saw the unimaginative but informative linear planting of a number of eucalypt species and we visited the incredible Graham Marsh designed golf course. It is new and a most difficult course, to judge by the number of 500+metre par 5 holes and the slopes and layout of the greens. To see the contrast of the lush green grass with the red-soil bunkers and salmon eucalyptus was truly beautiful and the kangaroos seemed to be enjoying the juicy grass. The shark in the dam was a bit of a worry, though!

Tues. Feb.15^th

Where is daylight saving???? We were awake at 5am and exhausted by 1pm. The morning was spent on a
2 ^1/2 hour tour of the Fimiston Open Pit Gold Mine, known locally as the KCGM Super Pit. 

Whose long-sleeved shirt Graeme?





How deep can you go?




Can you find the truck?

The enormity of this is too difficult to describe as mere statistics cannot convey the depth, width, length and impact of this pit on the environment. It has been carved out of the earth by consuming at least 200 shaft mines and leases. It seems that the infamous Alan Bond tried to do this just before he found himself in some financial and legal difficulties. 

Super pit super trucks

The enormous trucks cart their loads up and down the pit roads 24/7 and the tankers spread salt water on patches to try to keep the dust down.  The prevailing winds blow away from the town but at least weekly the wind blows towards town and spreads the dust. We learned about the mine and the milling of the ore and the various jobs at the mine. Our driver had worked at the mine, then moved to the nickel mining nearby, was retrenched, worked at the cemetery and eventually found this job. Not the money – drivers earn $120,000 pa – but he seemed happy to have work. Many of the drivers, staff etc. were women, particularly young women ... although they all sound young to me now ..... and the ratio is apparently 60% men to 40% women.

As the day was hot, 35 degrees, we spent the afternoon at the pool at the caravan park, just swimming, reading and talking. This is the valuable part of having 12 months as a few days of cold or hot weather can easily be accommodated. I met a young woman who teaches at a remote school near the SA border. Kate was travelling with an Aboriginal boy ,about 10, and I learned that she had been to Perth to collect an award for her work on her community and was flying back there from the Boulder Airport tomorrow. The boy was her ‘brother’ and had gone with her for a holiday. Her only alternative was a 10 hour drive over rough tracks and this was not something she wanted!! She talked of the racism in Kalgoorlie, the joy of teaching on a dry community but the tragedy of the loss of 7 members of that community each year to diabetes and alcohol. It seems that the young men, 14 – 40, come into areas with alcohol and end up in trouble. Once again it was the shameful story of communities with nothing and with nothing to offer young people. She told of disgraceful amenities for the people and of course the turnover of whites working there. She was due to leave in July after 3 years and knew that she had exhausted herself but vowed that she would return with her own kids when they came along.

Kalgoorlie to Dundas Rocks and some rain-interrupted play.

Wed. Feb. 16^th

Impressive thunder and lightning overnight and some rain brought a milder day, one that seemed infinitely better for golf. We headed to the course and GVS decided that he would play 18 holes with a cart, rather than 9 without. There were few people around, the women’s comp was just finishing, so we had the course almost to ourselves. It doesn’t replace Atlanta, Georgia as my favourite but almost, as the contrast between red, green and grey wa spectacular.



We had fun and GVS’s game improved over the first few holes.



We saw the building, black clouds and wondered
whether rain would interrupt play.

Did it ever!

On the 11^th the heavens opened and torrential rain fell. We argued about which direction the cart should face to protect us, as it seemed that one of us was always on the rainy side, so in the end we headed up to the driving range to shelter. Not enough protection there either so we just accepted that we were soaked to the skin and quickly went back to the van where we changed, made lunch and watched the runoff pouring down the paths. I did wonder whether we would be flooded in at the course as the carpark was filling with water.

After a couple of hours .... once again our ability to not put a value on time was wonderful .... we decided to head out to the course and try to finish the round. The beauty had intensified as the bunkers, dips and paths were flowing with red water and the colours of trees, greens etc. were brighter. The break and food obviously helped the golfer and he was more than happy with his round of golf. It didn’t take quite as long as the Nullarbor course would have taken us, but it certainly was a long round of golf. We also saw more kangaroos on the course than we’d seen in the whole trip to date.

Back into town to stock up on fuel and a few groceries and we were reminded of the tragedy of alcohol and Aboriginal policies over the past 200+ years. Sheltering from the rain in the supermarket car park, fuelled by alcohol in old soft-drink bottles, noisy arguments were taking place and men and women were ‘sleeping it off’ on the footpaths and roadsides. More of the same in St. Barbara’s Square (patron saint of miners but not others). From the lack of reaction on the part of the locals, this seemed to be a common occurrence. However, there were many families, well-dressed kids and adults who were surprisingly slim and healthy so generalisations cannot be made here.

We headed south on the road towards Esperance with no real destination in mind. There were a couple of bush camps south of Norseman that we thought we might make before darkness settled in – with the rain clouds it seemed that it could be dark by 5pm! Lots of rain, boom gates and lights that didn’t turn off, causing some traffic bank up and making us wonder if they ever fail to turn on!

Some of the cloud had lifted by the time we made it to the Dundas Rocks campsite, about 2km off the main road about 25km south of Norseman. This seemed to be a beautiful spot to spend some time. This had been an old goldmining area in the late 1890s and was obviously now a well-used picnic spot as there were some tables and bbq facilities, although primitive and well worn, at a number of spots along the road.

Thurs. Feb 17^th

Rain during the night meant that our wet golfing clothes and shoes were even wetter than before. The drizzle was more annoying than worrying so we read, set up the awning and brought the wet clothing under cover.

Apart from being a beautiful place, there were things of interest here as we discovered that it was one of the sites on the Norseman Heritage Trail. In an area where water was as precious as gold, the miners had used the rocks to collect their water. They had constructed dam walls from the local rocks at the base of the sloping rock faces, channelled water into dams and used their ingenuity to establish water storage facilities for the dry seasons. We climbed over the rocks, enjoyed the panorama of hills and trees, glimpses of the lake beds and rocky outcrops in the near and far distance. On our walk up the track we discovered quartz, so our gold-prospector headed out to try his luck. There were also interesting small stones that, when split open, revealed a circular formation, something like the rings of a tree trunk. This whole area was interesting from a geological perspective as the boulders and pillars seemed to be granite, like Murphy’s Haystacks in SA, there was a great deal of conglomerate sedimentary rock and the quartz reefs had yielded much gold at some point.

Before heading off towards Esperance in the afternoon, we travelled some km up the Heritage Trail and read interpretive signs relating to the history of this area. It seems that gold was discovered at Dundas but the later Norseman finds were richer and so the town quietly died.

We arrived in Esperance in grey gloomy weather which did not allow us to appreciate the beauty of the bay. A visit to tourist information, a walk up the main street, supermarket shopping and on to the cheapest caravan park - $27 as opposed to $35 – to cook up some casseroles in the camp kitchen for our following days in the Cape Le Grand National Park. Others told us to be sure to go early as the camping areas fill quickly, especially on weekends.