It was a bit of a detour, about 190km’s each way, to go north and visit Kalgoorlie-Boulder before heading east across the Nullabour. We weren’t really sure what there was to see, and the drive up did little to inspire! Aside from quite a few turn-offs to mines (gold mines), there was pretty well nothing but rather boring bush.

Arriving in town early Sunday arvo, the place was quiet and closed up. We’d wondered if we should have bothered as there wasn’t anything immediately obvious to do, but don’t worry, we ended up having a good time. Sun arvo we had a look around Kalgoorlie township, with lots of old historic buildings. We found the Mount Charlotte Reservoir nearby and had a look at the info there. This was interesting, as the whole Kalgoorlie-Boulder township wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for a bold plan, back in late 1800’s, to install a large water pipeline from near Perth to this area. It began operation in 1903, was an engineering feat in its day, and still now the town and surrounding gold mines are dependent on this 560km long pipeline that rises 390m (up to 45 million litres per day!). This is a dry arid area, and prior to this pipeline, water was more valuable than whiskey!

We went to the public lookout for the KCGM Super Pit. This huge hole in the ground is right next to the town, in what is known as the magic mile (because of all the gold found there). It is pretty cool, being the biggest Gold pit in Australia! You get a good view looking out over the whole pit (though you can’t quite see the bottom), but the sheer size of it means you have difficulty seeing what is going on so far away. The huge haulage dump trucks look like little ants, and a standard ute is almost too small to see!

This place runs round the clock, with 31 of those dump trucks going continuously. We came back Mon at 1pm to watch a blast – pretty cool to see, but all a long way away. Pics are from a mixture of both days, and here’s a vid of it (camera is zoomed in on blast area – better view than what we could actually see!).

Monday morning we visited Hannans North Tourist Mine. Here you look around and learn about what mining used to be like (extremely tough/hard life, with many perishing young). They also have an old dump truck and front loader there, and you can actually climb into the cab of the dump truck! These trucks carry 220-250 tons of rock each load!!!

Just a few pics from other areas of the mine.

They had some jewelery for sale, and Nicole found this gold leaf. Its an actual eucalyptus leaf, that has has been aged so only the veins remain, then coated in copper to give it some strength, and then a layer of 22 carat gold! Beautiful, and priced OK, so that’s more jewelery to lug home…! Then later on in the day she saw a watch she liked in town, so bought that too (birthday money this one)!

After lunch at the superpit lookout (whilst waiting for the blast), it was off the the Museum in town. More gold mining history amoungst other things.

A couple of other things in town:

So our detour into Kalgoorlie-Boulder was well worth it. Not sure why anyone would want to live here, unless they are a miner, but the history and current activities are interesting for a visit.

Now all we have to do is drive through about 2,000km’s of barren land – back to civilisation on the eastern side of Aus…! (I think you’d call Adelaide civilised…? 😉 )