24 September 2024
After leaving Lucky Bay we spent three nights in Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is pretty remote, pretty dry and dusty and, I imagine in Summer, very hot.
Boulder
On our first day we went for a walk from our caravan park to the township of Boulder. Boulder is a sister town of Kalgoorlie and very, very close. So close in fact that they seem to be the same small town. The only giveaway is that there are two town centres and two City Halls.
Boulder town centre was pretty run down and not appealing at all, so our walk was a pretty quick one. However, Boulder does have some beautiful historic buildings.
Super Pit
The next day we went on a tour of the Kalgoorlie Super Pit.
The 1893 gold rush resulted in the discovery of the Golden Mile, one of the richest gold deposits in the world. In 1903 there were 49 operating mines, 100 headframes and more than 3,000 kilometres of underground workings on the Golden Mile.
In the 1980’s, WA businessman Alan Bond started to buy up the individual leases along the Golden Mile with the aim to consolidate them into a single company. While Bond’s company failed to complete the takeover, the entire area was combined in 1989. Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines Pty Ltd (KCGM) was formed to manage the KCGM Operations owned by joint venture parties Normandy Australia Limited and Homestake Gold of Australia Limited.
Existing smaller pits were amalgamated into the Super Pit. All underground operations were phased out except for the Mt Charlotte Underground Mine, and the Fimiston and Gidji processing plants were constructed. (KCGM)
It’s a pretty impressive operation, and the pit just keeps getting bigger. In fact, the lookout we went to was to disappear in the next week as the pit grows.
Some interesting facts I picked up on the tour:
- The operation uses 30 million litres of diesel a month.
- A haul truck drivers’ salary starts at $80K per year — for 6 months’ work, one month of which is leave.
- One haul truck will use $3M worth of tyres in a lifetime.
- It takes a digger 2.5 days to drive to the bottom of the pit.
- There is no FIFO whatsoever at the mine — a good thing in my mind.
- It currently costs $1,800 an ounce to extract the gold, which governs which stockpiles they use to process. The areas of the stockpile with the lowest concentration of gold are accessed as the price of gold lowers, and vice versa.
Museum of the Goldfields
A visit to the Museum of the Goldfields taught us a lot about the history of how the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme delivered water from Perth to Kalgoorlie — around 600km away! It’s a really interesting story, with C. Y. O’Connor at the centre. Here’s some photos of the actual pipeline we took heading back to Perth.
We also got to see some pretty impressive gold nuggets.
A visit to a brothel with your wife, as you do …
We had heard about a brothel tour you could do, so we did. And it was at Nicole’s suggestion, Scout’s honour!
Questa Casa is one of the original Kalgoorlie brothels (of which there were once many) and the tour held a lot of promise. However, in actuality it was very dull. We spent the first hour and a half crowded into a front room in uncomfortable chairs being spoken to by the brothel owner, who was essentially a senior citizen and as much unlike a brothel owner as you could expect. And she bought the brothel originally with her mother!
Then we had a visit to three of the rooms, the last of which was a speciality room for domination. Apparently, all of the tools etc on the bed were found at various stages under the bed while cleaning the room.
And that was the end of our short but interesting visit to Kalgoorlie.
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