DESTINY KNOWN: 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;