To the Gold Fields

We enjoy camping all by ourselves, in the middle of nowhere.  This morning we fiddled around, posting blogs and tidying up.

We were camped beside the road just north of the towns of Salmon Gums and Grass Patch.  Very cute names!  The train line runs straight up from Esperance to Kalgoorlie, carrying long loads of rock and dirt to the port, and the road runs beside it.  We heard a few big trains go past in the night, but otherwise all was quiet.

We are back in the red dirt and rock campsites, with scrubby bushes and dry grass.  Grant tried to dig about 10 pit toilets before he got one deep enough to bury anything!  It's a bit uncomfortable in the rain to squat over a hole.  I think we should invest in a seat!

One of the things we talked about this morning was fabric.  How different inventions have changed what we wear.  Initially Adam and Eve wore skin clothes, or maybe lap laps.  George of the Jungle yesterday gave them an idea of what that would be like!  To make fabrics, man had to work out how to spin, weave and knit.  And man-made fabrics like nylon are another invention that has changed what we wear.  We talked about zips, Velcro, and how the pearling industry used to also be big for button manufacturing.  How buttons at one time were in great demand, hence the development of towns like Broome from the Pearling industry.  'why were buttons so wanted?' asked Dom.  'To do up their clothes' I explained.  Dom still looked puzzled, 'didn't they have elastic?'....

We finally set off north again, driving the 270 km or so to Kalgoorlie.  We passed through Widgiemooltha, which had one roadhouse, and a tumbledown cottage behind it which was for sale, old rusted car bodies and all.  That was it.  In front of the roadhouse was a greatly oversized model of the gold nugget, the golden eagle, which was found by 16 year old Jack Larcombe in Larkinville, near here, in 1931.  It weighed 35.3 kg.  Jack hit it with his pick while working on his Dad's lease.  It was only 45 cm below the surface.

This story motivated our little treasure hunters, and just outside town when we stopped for lunch, they dragged out the shovel and tried digging up their own gold nugget.  It's amazing, though, how discouraging mud and hard dirt can be.  We are no richer this evening than we were this morning!

A truckie pulled in to the rest area and Grant had a chat.  He was doing a short trip from Perth with his wife, and they showed us the inside of his truck, with the bed and the little oven, fridge and freezer he has inside.  Joseph thought it was truly awesome!

After setting our van up at the Lake Douglas Recreation Reserve, 12km South West of Kalgoorlie, we drove in to look at the town and the Super Pit. 

The super pit is the most enormous open cut gold mine, at least three times larger than the mine we saw in Mt Isa.  It is so big it can be seen from space.  Alan Bond, an Australian business man with a mottled history, was behind the idea of buying up all the mining leases in the 'golden mile', an area of Kalgoorlie and Boulder that was very gold rich, and just digging it all out in one great big mine, to save money on the  process and also to gain access to all the gold that was being missed in between the mines.  He wasn't ultimately successful, but the company that runs this huge open cut was,  and they've now been digging it for nearly 30 years.  Grant said he could have watched the trucks all day, and I think Dom was the same.

We headed back to our campsite for dinner and a campfire.  It was drizzly this morning, but by this evening the stars had come out and the sky was clear.  Hopefully it will be good weather tomorrow.

 

-----

Vicki