Last of the Goldfields; III

G'day Mates,

It's nearly Christmas and with my stories I'm still in the goldfields somewhere in September, I hardly have any time isn't that a shame. So much has happened in the mean time. Anyhow, here is my next story, the last one of the goldfields.

This last one is about Gwalia; a ghost town close to Leonora, and Kalgoorlie. We start with Gwalia. We had a lovely time with our friends in Leonora, went out in the bush a few times together and because of the corrugated roads and the situation of our car, they invited us to go with their car. Unfortunately we all didn't had much luck so on one day we did a tour to Gwalia the ghost town, this tour was certainly worth while;

You can see why there was a town in the past, there was a huge mine; some info; (source; Wikipedia)

Gwalia is a former gold-mining town located 233 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 828 kilometres east of Perth in Western Australia's Great Victoria Desert. Today, Gwalia is essentially a ghost town, having been largely deserted since the main source of employment, the Sons of Gwalia gold mine, closed in 1963. Just four kilometres north is the town of Leonora, which remains the hub for the area's mining and pastoral industries.

The restoration of Gwalia's 118-year-old timber headframe, designed by former US president Herbert Hoover, is at the centre of efforts to preserve the outback ghost town.

The little settlement that grew up around the Sons of Gwalia Mine in the late 1890s thrived until the final whistle blew on 28 December 1963, closing the mine and putting 250 men out of work. Gwalia’s 1200-strong population fell to just 40 in less than three weeks.

The garden is fenced with bed frames.... 

The abandoned homes and businesses of Gwalia create a tangible snapshot of a vanished era and way of life.

It looked like this was a hotel with a bar.....

I wonder if it still works 

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.....

Spiders, snakes, other creepy crawlers could be around when you're at the loo.....

wouldn't be my cup of tea...

An air conditioned room

Patroni's Guest House; a corrugated iron building (how hot must it have become in summer), which was a popular eating and living quarters for miners particularly those who had emigrated from Italy and Yugoslavia

This must have been the kitchen.....

Mazza's Store; for most of the town's life, the all-purpose General Store.

That was Gwalia, I hope you liked it, it definitely is worth a visit.

After Leonora we also spent a week in Laverton. Our friends also planned to come to Laverton but unfortunately they decided to go home earlier and so they went back to Victoria. We're very glad still to be in contact with them and are sure we have new friends for life and meet them soon.

The caravan park was nice but already very quiet....

Lets go to Kalgoorlie now......

My God, what a trip we had, it was on Friday the 13th of October. Normally 13 is our lucky number but this time Murphy decided to interfere. Its quite a trip from Laverton to Kalgoorlie and we started with heavy rain and thunder storms and because it doesn't rain that often over there, the streets became very slippery so we drove very slowly.

After a while it cleared and it became very very warm. 

Just 20 k's before Kalgoorlie I suddenly got a splash of water on the window screen on my side and Fred saw that the temperature went right into the red zone so we had to stop immediately. When opening the bonnet, a little tube burst outside and sprayed bloody hot, boiling water into the air. 

We had to wait in the bleeding heat for the water what was left, to cool down before we could go any further.

Finely we came at the caravan park en just after we had settled the caravan, in the mean time it was way over Beer O'clock so we longed for a nice cool beer, I did something stupid coming out of the caravan which caused the door got locked on the inside so we couldn't get into the caravan anymore.

Not even with the keys we could get the door open. Trying every thing, nearly damaged the fly wire and the lock, we nearly were in a state of breaking open the door, when Fred thought of cutting a window out.

You can guess what happens next....

The beer we had after I opened the door from the inside, tasted very good I can tell you!! Fred put the window back with some patches of tape with the idea to seal it the next day. Normally is it very dry in Kalgoorlie but of course Murphy still wasn't finished with us so I started to hear thunder at 5 o'clock in the morning and we had to go outside to put some more proper tape around the window.

What the car concerned, yes, you guessed right; we needed a new radiator. 

But we also did nice things, one of them was the Super Pit Tour; We did the 2,5 hours tour and although I found it overpriced, it was quite interesting.

I started this blog with the picture of the open pit of Gwalia, here you see the Super Pit of Kalgoorlie...

Kalgoorlie Gold Mine produces around 700,000 ounces of gold a year (22,000 kg a year or 60 kg a day). It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The current plans are processing until 2029.

The final dimensions in 2029 will the the Super Pit at 3.9 km long, 1.6 km wide and 700 meter deep. 

Our guide, he was very good and the and the stuff was interesting although sometimes a bit technical which made it hard for us to understand everything.....

Compare the Haul Trucks with the cars then you can see how big they are....

225 tonne payload....

They have 40 of these trucks on site and costs 4.4 million $ each, they weigh 166 tonne and have a fuel tank of 3,790 litres.

Maximum speed is 55 km/ph

The Kalgoorlie Gold Mine has a fuel farm on site with a capacity of 700,000 litres, each month they use about 5 to 6 million litres of diesel!

Enjoy this Movie, especially seeing the haul trucks driving in the pit is amazing....

Movie Time;

1 in 7 trucks carries ore, about a golf ball size of gold (about 500 grams). The remaining 6 trucks will go to the waste dumps. 

They use a dispatch system to track all the shovels and trucks via GPS, this means; they know where the machinery is at all times; they can determine how long it will take a truck to get to each of the shovels; and which shovel needs truck to load, allowing the dispatchers to direct trucks efficiently!

I hope you found this interesting!

 I also had my birthday in Kalgoorlie as we had so much trouble with the car (the new radiator wasn't fitted properly, tubes were leaking every time we decided to leave and had to go back). Anyhow I had a nice birthday...

First I was spoiled (during detecting of course, didn't had luck on my birthday) with a lovely "champagne" lunch in the bush;

No, we didn't left it there!

And at night we had a great, but very very hot (of course we choose that ourselves) dinner at an Indian Restaurant....

Well, this were our Gold Fields adventures and I hope you liked it.

For now I wish my fans;

Till next year, stay safe and for the people in Holland I say; please be careful with Fireworks!

Cheers!

Goldfields II

G'day mates,

Well?? Did you found out? Amazing isn't it? When you see the pictures of that vast country, it gives such a special feeling, being in the middle of nowhere and then somewhere in the ground you find this little speck of gold, three in a row.

Outback, red dust, don't try to fight it, a sky full of stars (at night of course), a lady (which I try to be) turns out being half a man, well you have seen me....

Gold digging can be dangerous too. I was swinging around also under trees as the experts say that's the place the nuggets hide, and without looking I sway my arm towards the trunk of the tree and suddenly I felt a pain saw that a branch, which was pointing firmly forwards was sticking into my arm. I pulled back but saw there were several splinters in my arm and it was not bleeding enough to clean the wound. I went to the car to get some first aid from Fred and he had to cut the splinters out of my arm with a Stanley knife. When we thought everything was clean, he nursed the wound with Betadine and just hoped it wouldn't get infected.

I can tell you, at the end of these 7 weeks I had much physical problems, my hands, my knees and back were pretty sore BUT I wouldn't have wanted to miss it!

Don't think we are rich now because I might have about $ 250.00 worth of gold and been digging for about 7 weeks. It's the excitement and I have the patience to keep on going where as a lot of other people quit when they don't find anything for days.


After the 2 weeks in Cue we went to Mount Magnet and stayed there for 10 days which is too much to prospect every day so we also did some sight seeing.

We went f.i. to the Lennonville Cemetery, which actually is nothing anymore except for a nice gate and one left grave...

Here we are at a natural Amphitheatre. It appears to be an ancient waterfall long long time ago;

Fred is waiting patiently till I finish taking pictures....

The Granites;

For at least 20.000 years local Aboriginals considered the Mount Magnet region as a seasonal home. Very ancient finger paintings were made here. The Granites are an escarpment about 15 meters high. 

Mother and Child Grave. The identity of this mother and child is unknown but they died in the "plague" (typhoid) in 1908. People passed away suddenly and were often buried where they died.

During this trip we passed so many gold mines, it's just incredible!
Of course I did some prospecting; This really was a hard time, it was so hot, I had to wear my hat and at the same time there was so much wind I couldn't hear my detector so I had to put the headset on, it simply didn't work ...

We also made some new lovely friends. They were our neighbours and most probably just felt they had to make it up to us as they nearly killed themselves and us because they had a gas leak haha. The leak wasn't to laugh about though.

We went detecting a few times together and had a lovely time...

We left Mount Magnet and headed off to Sandstone....

ready to go

Movie time;

The way to Sandstone was so beautiful and colourful with all the wild flowers.....

with the red soil it gives such a great contrast...

In Sandstone I didn't do any detecting at all, we only stayed for 2 nights and we did the Sandstone Heritage trail; a sign-posted tourist drive along a dusty track that you can do as a loop drive from town or as a one-way detour off the Agnew – Mount Magnet Road......

The Sandstone State Battery was a government-owned and run facility that crushed ore from the gold mines in the Sandstone area. It was in operation from 1904 right through to 1982. The workers live on site in little cottages not far from the battery building.

Old fridge on the veranda....

From the State Battery we continued our way to the London Bridge.....

but before we came there we passed this spot with old mines........

which was very dangerous!!

A few years ago a couple disappeared here near Sandstone and the man was found back in one of these shafts, the woman has never been found. There are hundreds of these shafts so you have to be very careful out there!

London Bridge, a scenic rock formation ;

Here I'm standing on the top but I didn't dare to walk to the other side....

BBQ

Nice picnic spot....

Lets go to the PUB......

Sandstone brewery; don’t expect to find an outback pub serving up craft beers! You will only find a pub with no beer. It’s been a long time since beer was brewed here, this is what’s left of it today:

View from in the cave up......

Looking into the cave......

Cheers!

If you want to see more of Sandstone itself;

http://torn-between-two-lovers.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/exciting-dangerous-must-read-story-gold.html

Till next time.....