GOLD.........

BIG Gold Nugget, SMALL Brown Dog

As Spandau Ballet once said 'GOLD.....you've got the power to know you're indestructable....(boom boom) GOLD'.

Having completed the Nullarbor we hit a rich seam of Gold; namely the Goldfields Highway. A number of folk had recommended we visit the Goldfield Region due to it's historical significance in Western Australia.

The Western Australians would have you believe that they prop up the economy of Australia single handedly, and I guess to some extent they make a good point. The majority of the huge mines are over this way and bring in huge swathes of money...mainly for the share holders and owners. It is no coincidence that the top two richest Australians for 2021 are in the Mining Industry. Despite the pandemic, Gina Rinehart increased her personal wealth by 123% to a mere $36.28 Billion making her the richest, closely followed by the 2nd richest Australian, Andrew Forrest, who increased his wealth by126% to $29.61 Billion!

The current gold price is fluctuating around $2,400 an ounce, but as neither of us wears gold or owns any bullion, this is irrelevant!

So, back to the road-trip...

Travelling partway along the Goldfields Highway didn't really affect the overall route as it was only a couple of hours inland, so doable. I had also realised that one of my 'must-sees' was further along this route; more of that later.

After our long drive along the Nullarbor the first main town we reached was Norseman. The town started as a gold-mining settlement as prospectors truly believed it would become as rich as the Kalgoorlie-Boulder fields just up the road. It has yielded over 100 tonnes of the stuff since the early 19th Century and is now dominated by a massive 'tailings' dump on the edge of town. Tailings are the left overs and we could see that they are in the process of trying to rehabilitate the land as this tailing storage facility closed in 1986. It created a bizarre feature , almost pyramid like and what little rain they have there has created some interesting run-off.

Norseman is a sprawling town and promotes itself as not just a mining town, but a service town for the many tourists finishing their Nullarbor excursions. It was named after a horse who allegedly scuffed up the ground and discovered a gold nugget in 1894. They even have a statue in its honour which obviously Dennis had to pose with!

Not just humans discover gold!

Like many towns we've visited this is a town that is trying to lure the unsuspecting tourist, and they succeeded with us! On arrival one is greeted by corrugated iron camels riding around the roundabout which are a tribute to the camel trains that used to pass by here back in the day. The very wide streets are as result of the camel trains needing a large turning circle! They also have a brand new visitor centre coupled with a superb photography studio, and as you know we do like good art.

A first for us was the realisation that, in this part of the world, they have a 'Rock Drilling' competition. We had to google it. They reintroduced the competition in 2014 to mark the towns 120th anniversary. It involves a tube of concrete inside a plastic shield, and a drill which was used in underground gold-mining. The winner is whoever manages to drill right through the concrete. If you manage to see it online you would see the length of the drill bit! Maybe an Olympic sport next time Australia host it?

concrete tubes......READY!

Having rested up for 24hrs and replenished/refuelled we headed off up the highway but not before Von put together a suitable playlist. We like to theme some of our road tripping playlists and by simply typing in various appropriate words it is amazing what songs pop up from our library. Most entertaining! We had a Mining Mix theme for this one which meant words typed included Gold, Mine, Silver, Gold-rush, Golden. You get the idea....

One aspect of our travels has been the 'golden nuggets' we happen upon and this stretch of road was no exception. We stopped for a cuppa at a roadhouse in Widgiemooltha, yes I kid you not! Not much there except the roadhouse and our second BIG Gold nugget. It is a famous (in Australia) gold nugget named the Golden Eagle Nugget discovered in 1931. WA was in the midst of the Great Depression of the 30's and this was seen as a symbol of hope. A 16yr old lad Jim Larcombe was working on his fathers gold lease and hit the 1135oz nugget with his pick. It sparked a huge gold-rush to the area and is believed to have been the one singular event that lead to the continuance of gold mining and prosperity in Western Australia.

Gold nugget (replica) and Van (real)

We've met fossickers as we've travelled around Australia, and have fossicked with small picks ourselves, albeit for 'thunder eggs', and I can see the romance in finding those small treasures based on hands on digging in the soil. Whilst I'm sure the conditions in the 1800s weren't at all romantic, it is hard to compare the scrabbling around over small nuggets with what we were about to witness in Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Enter the Super Pit......

Kalgoorlie's KCGM Super Pit is one of the largest open cast Gold mines in Australia in terms of size and produces around 500,000 ounces of Gold each year. That's around 14,000kgs. For every million tonnes of extracted ore there are between 250/300kgs of Gold.....hence the large tailings mountains around the area. The left over stuff has to go somewhere.

Whatever the politics of the mining industry you can not fail to stand open-mouthed at the MASSIVE gaping wound right on the edge of the city. No chipping away with a hand drill or pick here. They even have an App you can access to find out when they are blasting. The trucks that you see beavering around the pit look tiny but when you read the information boards at the public lookout and realise they weigh 166 tonne, and the shovel trucks are a whopping 750 tonne, it makes Cilla at 4 tonne seem feather-like!

It's big business ; one truck costing $5.7million dollars, and the shovel truck $18M each and there were a fair few in evidence.

One Bucket - $1.1million dollars, One Von - Priceless!

Super Pit - Kalgoorlie

It's a Gold Industry that is not going away any time soon. The $$$$ involved, the huge employment it creates, and the amount of infrastructure they build in the towns is difficult to ignore. We saw a lot of new landscaping, walking paths, playgrounds, visitor centres. Most vehicles driving around the city were either mine workers, easily identified by the I.D numbers on their Utes, or Caravan/campervanners! Yet we have also seen evidence of what happens when they finish mining certain pits, or use FIFO (fly-in,fly-out) workers and those towns slowly and surely die. That said, would I like to drive one of their monster trucks just once?.....er YES!

With that amount of mining in the area, and being on the fringes of the Great Victoria Desert, it comes as no surprise that water is a vital asset, and not much of that falls from the sky. This lead to a significant International Historic Engineering Landmark - The longest freshwater pipeline in the world in 1903 and WA's recognition as a leader in pipeline technology. The pipe is still functioning today, pumping water from Perth to Kalgoorlie (566km). It was the first to be fabricated from steel, and during the 1930's was raised aboveground and made into a continuously welded conduit. They now use robotic technology to monitor and service it. We followed quite a lot of it on our drive to Perth later in the trip....

Last bit of pipe coming in to the Reservoir

We love finding out things we didn't know before, and the Pipeline was definitely a long 'golden nugget'.

About an hour up the road from Kalgoorlie, and passing a number of other mines, was another 'golden' nugget in the form of a little town called Menzies. Population, at the last census, of 108. Hard to believe that in the early 1900s there were over 10,000 people living here. It had 13 hotels(pub), 3 banks, a school with 205 pupils, 4 churches and a railway line. All due to the gold rush.

Now it has 1 pub/general store, 1 council office which was the original town hall, a visitors centre, a caravan park, and a cafe. Unlike many other small towns it does still have a very significant indigenous population. Whilst the mining boom didn't stick around, Menzies has really worked as a community to encourage tourism.

As they say in their brochures "We now 'mine' our heritage in order to build on the growing tourism in the Northern Goldfields".

For a tiny town they punch above their weight with a great little campground, together with two walking trails around the town. Explaining both indigenous and early settlers history; these were both supported by well presented brochures and sculpted metal information boards. Menzies is one of very few towns we have visited that has openly acknowledged that the expectations of white settlers were not perhaps realistic or reasonable when dealing with the aboriginal way of life.

The historic buildings that remain have been beautifully preserved and the evening sunsets really exaggerated the sandstone colours.

Yet it is not just the town itself that has catapulted it into the international tourism market. In 2003, as a result of the 50th Perth International Arts Festival celebrations, they became the participants in an Art project by Antony Gormley. Him of the 'Angel of the North' sculpture in Newcastle-on-Tyne and 'Another Place' on Crosby Beach, Merseyside.

For us this was, ironically, the 'BIGGEST GOLD' Nugget in the Goldfields area! Other than two passers-by, Gormley persuaded 49 local people, mostly indigenous, to strip naked and be scanned digitally in 3D. He then reduced the images by 66%, keeping their height and creating an 'insider'. He made sand moulds and cast them in stainless steel alloy made from locally sourced alloys into 51 figures. These were all placed on Lake Ballard, a huge salt lake, 51km from Menzies.

The exhibition is called 'Inside Australia' and is supposed to represent the connections we have with each other, and our internal space.

It wasn't until we walked on to Lake Ballard that we saw what he meant. Each figure was subtly different in height, some had little pot bellies, and the obvious differences in male and female. But it was also the sight of the interwoven human footprints between each figure that really resonated. The further you managed to stroll out on to the lake the less the footprints, and admittedly, the less muddy it became. It was a magical moment amongst the significant mining destruction. We were also blessed with the most perfect blue clear skies as though they knew we were coming.