Kalgoorlie, WA,  Australia

We’re getting to the pointy end of it now, there’s only a few days left and we’re all beginning to feel a little despondent. Today we’ve got about 400k’s ahead of us driving from Esperance to Kalgoorlie via Coolgardie.

Coolgardie is where the Western Australian gold rush began and the town once boasted 15,000 people and 23 hotels but was soon overshadowed by Kalgoorlie. Today the town has one operating hotel and only 900 residents and it appears that although there’s some mining activity nearby, tourism is becoming a bigger affair. I wanted to go via Coolgardie as mum’s family had come from there way, way back. In fact, they once owned the Railway Hotel so I was keen to snap a couple of pics on our way through. The pub is now closed, in fact, it was a coffee shop when mum and dad were last there in 1996

Who’d have imagined that whilst taking some pics of the outside, a guy sitting on the wide upstairs verandah would holler down and say, “would you like to take a look around?” Rodney (as he introduced himself) was living in the pub which is now a private residence and is a pretty poor condition. There have been some heritage grants to complete some of the restorations but it all seems pretty hotchpotch to me and I wonder if it will ever be finished. The outside is in great condition and inside not so much but it was great to be able to walk through the ladies dining room, the main bar and some of the 14 rooms upstairs as well as a peek at the enormous cellar.

A walk around the remainder of the main street showed that there’s not much happening in Coolgardie at present and I can only imagine what it would have been like in the gold rush days.

Kalgoorlie, by contrast, is a city of 30,000 people and very affluent. They say the KCGM (Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mine) super pit is the richest square mile of land in the world. 3km’s long, 1.6km’s wide and over 600mtrs deep, it is huge. We stopped at the super pit lookout for a while to marvel at how big it is, there was a dozen ore truck climbing up the haul road when we were there and at over 300 tonnes each, that’s a lot of dirt and rock.

Tomorrow we’ll do the super pit tour and maybe shoot out for a bit of two-up before Patrick & I pop into the Exchange for a couple of drinks in the Skimpies Bar.