There seem to be three options for naming the regions of WA. The purely geographical – South West, Mid West. Then there is the more lyrical – Pilbara, Kimberley. And then there is the Wheatbelt and the Goldfields – two very descriptive names for the dominant industries in those regions. Just what they say on the tin.
I’d been to the southern Goldfields before, but not to Kalgoorlie or north. And the scale of the mining was a shock. Driving north on the Goldfields Highway we passed mine after mine. And the remnants of old mines, the ghost towns of which nothing but clearings and the echoes of old roads remain, all buildings having been packed up or deconstructed and moved to the next goldrush location.
Close to Kookynie, we stopped for lunch at an area of old diggings and small mines. There were long trenches abandoned in the search for gold, as well as very small mine shafts, with bush timber supports, that looked a century old.
The rubbish left around the mines looked a century old too. Bully beef tins, tobacco tins and pudding tins, as well as glass whiskey bottles.
It seems that a pattern was created long ago for gold mining and exploration. Come in, dig up a heap of earth, make a mess, extract the gold, and leave all the mess behind. There’s not a whole lot of evidence of any clean-up, let alone ecological rehabilitation.
The human impact was evident too when we visited Leonora and Gwalia. Migrants from Italy and Slovakia working the Sons of Gwalia mine for minimal wages (it cost a third of their wages apparently just to get a week’s worth of meals at the boarding house) and living in humpies made of old tin and hessian. (A bunch of the old huts and buildings of the original mining town have been kept in an open air museum that you can wander in and out of, and I could have taken hundreds of photos there).
Tim and I were talking about what a weird product gold is – only a fraction of it is used in any tangible, practical way. As Tim said, it is dug out and melted into bars and then most of it is stored back underground again.
In the dimly lit basement of the WA Museum in Kalgoorlie is the ‘Gold Vault’ – the part of the exhibition focusing on the prospecting and mining in the region, with some impressively bulky and nobbly gold nuggets on display. I loved watching the reactions of the other visitors. The hushed but excited voices. ‘Can you imagine finding THAT prospecting.’ ‘Did you see how much that nugget is worth?’ The exclamations, the awe. The evidence of the little bit of gold fever in all of us?
The relief is that the Great Western Woodlands appear solid and resilient in spite of the ravages of gold mining – which are intense and deep, but perhaps not as all pervasive as the pastoral industry? This is the largest temperate woodland system in the world, belonging to the Ngadju and Wongi and other Traditional Owners, and stunning country to have the privilege of visiting.
