Kalgoorlie, WA to Lake Ballard, WA - 201km (5,318km / 383km dirt)
If one thing never ceases to amaze me it's the impact that we humans have had, and continue to have, on the environment. If you want to see this first hand, in very dramatic ways, visit the goldfields area of Western Australia, starting with Kalgoorlie.
With a day of only 200 kilometres planned we spent the morning looking around the famous 'wild west' town. Truth is, it is nothing like what I expected.
Kalgoorlie, for me, always had a reputation of being a town of brawling miners and prostitutes. It really is nothing like that. Yes, there's miners and no doubt prostitutes, there's plenty of 'scimpy' bars which, I guess is one of the attractions of the town.
I found Kalgoorlie to be quite safe, it's certainly one of the cleanest towns / cities I have ever been to, so much so that first thing in the morning the council were pressure washing the footpaths, collecting rubbish, and mustering shopping trolleys. It's an approach that I think every other council in Australia could learn from.
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| Breakfast on The Palace Hotel balcony |
Eating a takeaway breakfast from Relish Kalgoorlie on the balcony of The Palace Hotel was a perfect start to the day. The sun was rising and it was great watching Kalgoorlie come to life.
The Palace Hotel is right in the middle Kalgoorlie, and although the room rates were a little high, the service and standard was fantastic, a great way to spend the last night of 'civiliation' for a while.
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| Entrance to The Palace Hotel ... impressive |
In it's day The Palace was the epitome of the gold rush in Western Australia. Built in 1897 it was built from stone quarried in the area, was the first building to have electricity using it's own generator, and also the first to have running fresh water piped to all of its bathrooms. To this day it has a special presence and even has a link to America's past, as former president Herbert Hoover resided there when he was working in the Australian goldfields.
This one building is the prime example of the architecture you see everywhere in this town, if you're into Australia's history through buildings it is a must visit place. As far as towns go I would put it right up there with Broken Hill and Cooper Pedy as being some of my favourite towns. No matter where you look there's something interesting in Kalgoorlie and the people seem to take pride in it, I know it's had its problems and probably still does but it looks like it is doing something to overcome these issues and start tapping into a market (tourism) that will sustain it well beyond the mining.
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| Another example of the architecture in Kalgoorlie |
The next stop was what they call the 'Super Pit' the first indication as to the affect that humans are having on the landscape around here.
The 'Super Pit' is a hole, a very big hole and it is actually quite impressive to look at. I found myself wanting to watch the goings on for hours, it was like watching an automated toy belonging to a giant child. At the same time I kept thinking, "what the hell are they going to do with it once it's spent and can no longer provide the gold that comes from it".
The Super Pit and Kalgoorlie itself, for that matter, sits on what is known as the Golden Mile, one of the richest gold deposits in the world.
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| Super Pit ... one hell of a big hole |
Originally the Super Pit was a collection of smaller ones until they were combined in the late 1980's under the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines company was formed and turned the smaller pits into one gigantic one.
They tell you mind blowing facts about what comes out of the pit each year, 800,000 ounces of gold from a total of 8.8million ounces. It sounds impressive until you hear that they only take 2 grams of gold from every tonne of rock dug from the ground. I can't get my head around the fact that despite the value of gold it just doesn't really seem economically sound ... maybe I'm just a bit thick.
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| Words can't explain how big these trucks are ... |
It's said that the mine will only remain operating for another 13 years, and quite possibly close up much sooner, and when it does close it will be 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and almost 1 kilometre deep. That really is a big hole, but what happens after that?
Besides the size of the hole and the machines that work the mine the other thing that really amazed me was the holes in the walls of the pit. These are old mines when the miners worked in the traditional way, tunnelling. In fact they say there's over 3,500 kilometres of tunnels underneath Kalgoorlie.
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| ... the thing that fills the trucks |
This then led us to the Kalgoorlie Mining Museum where it gave a great idea to the life that the early miners in the area had. In many ways it was the same as what you'd expect in Ballarat or Bendigo, a bloody hard life for very little reward.
The museum contained an interesting history of aboriginal life in the area too, as well as prehistoric fauna and flora including some of remains of Australia's mega-fauna, but a section dedicated to adoption is what struck me.
It wasn't really adoption, more abduction, as many children were removed from their mothers at birth for the most ridiculous of reasons. It tied in with National Sorry Day, and the treatment of Aboriginals during the stolen generations however, this also included white children. The stolen generations did happen, but not only to Australia's indigenous people, it was happening to all Australians.
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| Probably one of Australia's narrowest pubs |
Reading the stories of mothers who never knew their children for no reason of their own made me tear up a little, it still does. Not that long ago we were a pretty barbaric people.
It was now time to leave Kalgoorlie and start heading in a northerly direction towards the start of the Great Central Road.
The 150 kilometres or so to the small town of Menzies was a pretty uninspiring one. The occasional open cut mine blotted the landscape, mining all sorts of things from gold to nickel and tin, there's even a uranium mine out here. In some place there was evidence that nature was starting to reclaim what man had taken from it by way of the outer
walls of the mines being covered with the plants that grow in this harsh environment. It was sort of an encouraging site.
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| Menzies' tribute to the war dead |
Reaching Menzies, I was surprised to see just how small the town is, in fact only 150 people live here, yet like Kalgoorlie, they seem to have a great pride in the town. A small team of workers, including stonemasons, were busy readying a memorial for ANZAC day. The mural adorning the wall of the town hall was a perfect tribute to the mateship and bravery of the men from the region who volunteered to fight a war they knew nothing about. The town hall itself was a tribute to the former wealth in towns like this, it's a shame that many of the buildings no longer exist.
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| Menzies waited 100 years to get a town hall clock |
Menzies, in its heyday, was as important as Kalgoorlie and had a population of over 10,000 people, staggering when you consider what remains of it.
An amazing story is that the town hall didn''t have a clock fitted until 100 years after it was constructed. The building was finished in 1901 however, the ship carrying the clock (in 1905) sank leaving the building without its centrepiece. This brought an air of bad luck to the town and almost immediately the population started to dwindle. To commemorate the significance of this, the towns people had a clock fitted in 2000.
Walking around Menzies you get a feel for the significance of the place as well as the pride that the current population has in it. In many ways it reminds me of the town of Steiglitz on the outskirts of Geelong, it too boomed for a very short period due to gold fever.
These day Menzies is becoming famous for another reason, and another example of how man is changing the environment, and this time for the better.
A road at the edge of town takes you to an unremarkable dirt road. The road leads into nowhere, past a few old mines and grazing land. Fifty three kilometres later you reach a turn off to a place called Lake Ballard.
Like so many of the 'lakes' out this way, it isn't a lake that contains water like a normal lake, it's a salt flat. Having said that, the area had received significant rain in recent weeks and there was some surface water in places towards the middle of the huge expanse of salt.
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| Inside Australia ... Lake Ballard |
Like the road leading to this place, the lake itself is quite unremarkable until you look closer. There's people out there, many, many people. Amazingly, there's 51 people out on the salt pan and although they are all stationary, they seem to have life, movement, energy.
These are the work of renowned British artist Antony Gormley and were installed in 2003. They were set to only be there for a short period of time however, thankfully, they have been left in place and now
form an important tourist attraction to the area.
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| It's not just the art, that's the art |
Scattered amongst 10 square kilometres, the 'people' represent the local indigenous community and although they have an alien like appearance, they offer something magical. I ended up walking amongst many of them until nightfall. There's no doubt that there's something magical about this place, and although I would hate to see it destroyed by hoards of tourists, I think everyone should see it.
That night, as we sat around the fire and discussed the stark beauty of Lake Ballard, a strange thing happened. In the quiet a whistle sound buzzed above our heads, as if something had flown past at high speed. It was a sound much like an aircraft or racing machine flying past without the sound of the engine, just the wind noise. Three of us heard it, but what was it? We had no idea, but I'd like to think it was part of the mystery of Lake Ballard.
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