Tuesday 27th January 2026
Distinctly cooler today. We only managed 30 degrees. But that was good because we had a fair bit of trailing around places and the lower temperatures are good.
Our first stop was Mount Charlotte. On a flat landscape such as here, a mere pimple might be considered a mount. Charlotte is a blip, but an important one as it contains a storage tank the size of four and a half Olympic swimming pools. This is the end of the line for CY O'Connor's Pipeline. As an engineer, this man was second to none. The design for a 350 mile water pipeline was possibly the HS2 of its day. Taking 5 years to complete, CY came under immense pressure and criticism. Costing over two million pounds, was the equivalent of the State's annual budget. This was a massive amount of money and no doubt people in the rest of the State might question why so much was being spent to benefit just 31,000 people out there in Kalgoorlie, wherever that was! Well, it was built, but before CY would see it completed, he committed suicide. The huge tank contains all the water those good folk of Kalgoorlie, then and now, would need. Production water, needed for the process of separating minerals in rocks was separate, and salty, being pumped from deep in the ground through salt beds. Despite some deeply felt disagreement, the pipeline now serves 100,000 people, of which just 30,000 being in Kalgoorlie. The rest are all along its route.
Our next port of call was back to the town museum to complete our fact finding from yesterday, and discovering just how tough life was in a frontier gold town. It was rather noticeable that while the aborigines were still concerned about availability of wood for boomerangs, their contemporaries on the next block were getting rich digging gold. Before the pipe arrived, water was the main concern. The Europeans had already forced the indigenous tribes to tell them where their water holes were. Once the Europeans got control of them, they began to run dry, or became contaminated. Life was tough. Interesting museum also containing, incidentally, an intact dental surgery of its time. Not for the faint hearted.
We had been reliably informed by the Tourist Information people, that today's dynamite in the 'hole' was to be ignited at 1 pm. Hoping for an explosion closer to the viewing platform, we popped up there to see. It wasn't to be, clearly a shortage of matches! Today, in different light, the big pit looked even more vast and ominous. Since yesterday, we could see away there in the distance, the series of drilling made to prepare for dynamite. But, sadly, no big bang today.
Time to move on then, and next stop, Boulder; a rival town just a mile or two away. The main high street, Burt Street, was fantastic, having preserved so much of its late 19th century architecture. And here in 1899, in the Courthouse, an important referendum took place. The other States in Australia were voting for federation. WA did not wish it, but the gold rich region here proposed they would create a new smaller State and call it Auralia and subsequently join the federation. London, in the form of Joseph Chamberlain, father of Neville of the same name, ordered WA to hold a referendum, so this is what happened, and the votes went in favour afterall of the proposed Federation. From January 1 1901, Australia was united and Auralia did not happen.
Gold fever runs high whenever gold is found. With absolutely no exception in these gold towns. One rather sad story we investigated this afternoon was that of the gold town of Kanowna. Founded in 1893, on discovery of gold, its population grew almost overnight to 12,500. A proper town was built; a school, hospital, banks, stores, cricket club, a railway station, and a cemetery. But disputes happened. Such was the insatiable lust for gold, that they even demanded permission to dig for gold in the new cemetery. There are two areas, one for Catholics, and one for Protestants. The dispute settled, townsfolk were permitted to bid for a stake in the strip of land between the two cemetery plots! Over the following half century, the gold supply, both alluvial and deep mines began decreasing, and other mines in nearby Kalgoorlie grew in importance. Eventually, in 1953, Kanowna shut. Staggeringly for them, this meant everyone moved out, including dismantling all of the buildings. Everything went, and today and is now a ghost town. There is little to see; just roads eerily in the scrubland, marked but long gone businesses just a sign marker, and a few graves. So sad, but with a one purpose town, remove the reason for it being there, and it goes, dust returning to dust. A footnote must record that following gold price rises in the 1970s, making extraction more economic, interest was renewed in the Kanowna gold once again, and a new mine close to the old site is in operation. Regrettably Kanowna will not rise again from the ashes it leaves behind. Perhaps the lesson had been learnt years ago when they named one of its roads, Nemesis.
