What's New
Week 3
5/6/2011
Hi all,
We started week three by continuing our route across the Nullabor along the Old Eyre Hwy. It was a track with grass growing down the middle, it didn’t look like it was used much. If people stopped using it for a year it would probably disappear. When we got off it and back onto a proper road, we went to another part of the Great Australian Bight. There was no fence at the edge, so you had to be careful that you didn’t fall off. After some more traveling, we stopped at Mandurah for the night.
The next day we continued our journey stopping only for food breaks, or to take pictures of wild flowers on the side of the road. The weather was cold, wet and windy. On our way into Norseman the police were stopping all traffic and doing drug, alcohol and road worthy tests. We reached Norseman we had a quick look through the town and found a path leading out to the bush. It turned out to be a golf course but we went past that and kept going. There were a few natural cracks in the lightly worn dirt path, one of them crumbled when the front tyres went over it and we got stuck. Dad had to dig some irt out and when we got the car out, put some dirt back in so that we would be able to cross the crack. In the end, we camped about a hundred metres from the crack. We had a big fire that night.
The next morning, we went back over the crack, this time, without any trouble. I was very relieved when we drove over it. We went back past the golf course and out of Norseman. We drove all the way to Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Most of the country side was burn’t a couple of years back and the bush was growing back from nothing.
At Kalgoorlie-Boulder we booked in to a caravan park just off the main street, Hannan st, and set up the tents for the night. The next morning we headed off into town to have breakfast. We ended up at Montey’s which was a nice historic shop on the corner of Hannan st where they used to make linen. It was eggs and bacon for all of us except mum, who had toasted cheese sandwiches. We saw a tall head frame with the words ‘Western Australian Museum’ on a billboard. A head frame called a ‘poppet head’ is on top of mine shafts that go straight down, they help with getting things up and down the mine. Later that day, we took a visit to the museum. We went through an animal section, then we went halfway up the head frame, there was a great view from there. The next part we went to was called the vault. The vault had a gold display in it explaining how they first found gold in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and what has happened since then.
This is the story about how gold was first found in Kalgoorlie-Boulder:
In the late 1870’s a group of around 100 men traveling awaiting supplies before continuing to a possible new ‘strike’, stopped for the night on mount Charlotte, a mountain next to Kalgoorlie. One of the men was called Paddy Hannan, he went for a short walk around the area that night. He was lucky enough to find a rare ‘sunbaker.’ A sunbaker is a gold nugget that is just sitting on the ground, perhaps uncovered by a heavy rain event. He hid the nugget a mile away with his horse on the same night. In the morning, he told everyone that he had lost his horse, so all the others continued on without him. That day, he retrieved his horse and the nugget, and then traveled back and claimed the land on which he found the gold nugget. Back then there was heaps of land and you could lay claim to almost any amount of it for a small fee. In two days Paddy collected 300 ounces lying on the ground. This original claim is still being dug today and has delivered 800,000,000 ounces of gold. It was this strike that started a gold rush. The gold in Kalgoorlie is special. It is one of the five places on earth where the gold is locked in a very hard rock that has prohibited other minerals being absorbed by the gold. This means the gold being mined is the original yellow gold, not rose or white due to minerals being absorbs over the eons.
And here’s a bit more about Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Kalgoorlie-Boulder was richer in gold than Ballarat by a mile. There were fourteen main towns around the area back then, a few are still used but Kalgoorlie and Boulder,(the two biggest towns,) actually combined together to make Kalgoorlie-Boulder. There was a problem though. Kalgoorlie was nowhere near any water supplies, so many people had to go and get water from the coast. The water carters were wealthier than the miners themselves. In fact, many people were miners so that they could get enough money to go into the water business. Miners got paid for how far they dug. So they would work all day, and stay down the mine for as long as possible, of course they had to have a toilet then. Their toilets were big tin cans that after you were finished you put sawdust over the top to stop the smell a bit. People would fight over the job of taking the full bucket up a ladder, empty it, and clean it. It was a highly respected job as it was one of the easiest around. Although, the people who usually go the job were miners who were injured, (Broken miners). Some of the miners would make sneaky deals with these people. The miner would find a gold nugget, and instead of handing over to their boss, they would go to the toilet, and drop it in. Then the injured miner, would take it up the ladder. and put the nugget somewhere safe until the end of the shift. Then, they would split the money that they got for it and be rich. Unfortunately for them, they would usually get caught when found to be spending large amounts of money.
After visiting the museum we went to the information centre in the old town hall to see what else there was to do in Kalgoorlie boulder. We found two tours that we wanted to go on, one, we could all go but the other Mum had to stay behind because James couldn’t come. After that, we went back to camp for the night. The next morning we headed off into town to get onto the tour bus. We were going on the Super Pit tour. The giant open cut mine, commonly known as the Super Pit, was and still is being mined by KCGM,(Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines.) They make an average of 3,000,000 dollars a day from the gold they mine, and an average truckload of dirt has a piece of gold about the size of a pea. We saw the giant trucks, each costing 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 dollars each Road trains would then take the concentrated crushed gold/rock to another place about 30km away. There, they extract the gold from the dirt.
The next day, Dad, Ali and I, went on a tour called ‘pitch black.’ We dressed up in fluorescent orange mining suit, put helmets on with lights, put glasses and gloves on, and off we went. The tour started by going down a spiral staircase that took us only 36 metres deep. There, we saw the miners old toilets, and the giant gap (stope) where they had dug out mass amounts of gold. We then climbed down seven old rusty ladders, each one taking us deeper, and deeper. You could see that the ground got harder and therefore harder to mine out. We were showed the ‘widow maker,’ an old mining drill. It was called the widow maker because it would create lots of dust with silica that the miners would breathe in, causing silicosis, a lung disease. Most people didn’t notice the increase in deaths. It wasn’t till much later when a man came along and modified the drill so that it wouldn’t create as much dust. He made it spurt out water while it was drilling. This modification saved hundreds of lives.
We then saw some steel carts that used to be pushed around by strong men. The carts would carry one and a half tonnes of rock. I struggled to pull it when it was empty. Then we climbed down another ladder with rocks that we had collected earlier. The tour guide explained how there were thirteen levels on the mine that we were in, and eleven of them were flooded. He then threw his rock, we heard about three bounces but then it stopped. He said that it was an unlucky throw. I went next and mine went all the way to the bottom, there was about fifteen bounces and them we heard a giant splash. I think a felt it more than I heard it. On the last bit of the tour, we took an old mine shaft lift up to the surface in the dark. It was a cage that rubbed against the sides of the shaft as we went up. When we surfaced the fresh air was nice to breathe again.
The next thing that we did was go to the gold pouring, it was just like the one at Sovereign Hill at Ballarat. We could feel the heat coming off the gold when he pulled it out of the hot furnace. On the gold pourers suit you could see that it had caught fire a couple of times. The suit was made of special material, similar to that on the space shuttle. After that, we went back to the caravan park for the day, and that was what we did on week three on our journey around Australia.
Cameron
