We arrived in Kalgoorlie – Boulder around midday with the sun burning hot. The town has a population just under 30,000 and is Australia’s largest outback city. It is most known for the abundance of gold in the region, first discovered here in the 1890’s causing a goldrush to the area and resulting in a permanent population residing in the outback city. The main industries beside gold mining were pubs (at one point there being a pub for every 130 people, with beer and whisky being cheaper and more available than drinking water) and prostitution (the town still has the oldest operating brothel in Australia). Our first stop was the “Super Pit”, Australia’s largest open cut gold mine. You can drive to a lookout to get a good view, and the sheer size of it is absolutely astonishing. The Super Pit is 4 km wide and 600 m deep and still being mined. From the lookout, you can see the giant and expensive earth moving vehicles transport tonnes of rock up to the processing plants where they extract the gold. A blade for a bulldozer costs around $18 million each. Insane!
The money from the gold mining has been well spent on the town, with some beautiful buildings on the main strip of Hannan Street making it one of the best looking outback towns we’ve seen on our trip so far. They have everything you would get from a city, including great pubs and nightlife, as well as some amazing Thai restaurants. We stopped by at the Goldfields Museum and were pleasantly surprised by how entertaining it was. A temporary exhibition on survival preppers was very interesting. The permanent features include “The Vault” – a bank vault with displays full of over 4 million dollars in real gold as well as an upstairs history of Kalgoorlie. We learnt about the Wangkatha people – the traditional owners of the land, the goldrush and the lack of (and making of) potable water, as well as the future of the Super Pit (actually, we read they expect it to ‘expire’ in 2021). The museum is connected to the old pub next door and leads out to an old miners cottage which gives you a taste of what accommodation would be like back in the day (there was no air-conditioning in the brutal heat).
We decided to take a look at Hay Street next, a notorious red light area and home to Australia’s oldest (and still working) brothel. This used to be the adult entertainment quarter back in the day, but the industry has died down since then, with this brothel being one of the only ones remaining in town. In the evening, we visited a couple of the towns famous pubs (there is a TV reality show called Kalgoorlie Cops showing what the nightlife is like). First, we enjoyed some live music at the Kalgoorlie Hotel, then made our way up to the Exchange hotel, where the bartenders are known as ‘skimpies’, an old tradition in Kalgoorlie where the female bartenders wear lingerie. Overall, we had a great time in Kalgoorlie learning about the history of this very unique outback town.
We arrived in Kalgoorlie – Boulder around midday with the sun burning hot. The town has a population just under 30,000 and is Australia’s largest outback city. It is most known for the abundance of gold in the region, first discovered here in the 1890’s causing a goldrush to the area and resulting in a permanent population residing in the outback city. The main industries beside gold mining were pubs (at one point there being a pub for every 130 people, with beer and whisky being cheaper and more available than drinking water) and prostitution (the town still has the oldest operating brothel in Australia). Our first stop was the “Super Pit”, Australia’s largest open cut gold mine. You can drive to a lookout to get a good view, and the sheer size of it is absolutely astonishing. The Super Pit is 4 km wide and 600 m deep and still being mined. From the lookout, you can see the giant and expensive earth moving vehicles transport tonnes of rock up to the processing plants where they extract the gold. A blade for a bulldozer costs around $18 million each. Insane!
The money from the gold mining has been well spent on the town, with some beautiful buildings on the main strip of Hannan Street making it one of the best looking outback towns we’ve seen on our trip so far. They have everything you would get from a city, including great pubs and nightlife, as well as some amazing Thai restaurants. We stopped by at the Goldfields Museum and were pleasantly surprised by how entertaining it was. A temporary exhibition on survival preppers was very interesting. The permanent features include “The Vault” – a bank vault with displays full of over 4 million dollars in real gold as well as an upstairs history of Kalgoorlie. We learnt about the Wangkatha people – the traditional owners of the land, the goldrush and the lack of (and making of) potable water, as well as the future of the Super Pit (actually, we read they expect it to ‘expire’ in 2021). The museum is connected to the old pub next door and leads out to an old miners cottage which gives you a taste of what accommodation would be like back in the day (there was no air-conditioning in the brutal heat).
We decided to take a look at Hay Street next, a notorious red light area and home to Australia’s oldest (and still working) brothel. This used to be the adult entertainment quarter back in the day, but the industry has died down since then, with this brothel being one of the only ones remaining in town. In the evening, we visited a couple of the towns famous pubs (there is a TV reality show called Kalgoorlie Cops showing what the nightlife is like). First, we enjoyed some live music at the Kalgoorlie Hotel, then made our way up to the Exchange hotel, where the bartenders are known as ‘skimpies’, an old tradition in Kalgoorlie where the female bartenders wear lingerie. Overall, we had a great time in Kalgoorlie learning about the history of this very unique outback town.
