Day 62 – Esperance to Kalgoorlie

A big day today (is there any other kind on this trip?). We left Esperance about 8.00am this morning, and headed north up to the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie. To be honest Esperance has lots of nice beaches, but not much else to look at for families, and with the weather being too cool and windy for the beach, we headed north searching for the sunshine.

We stopped at the town of Norseman for morning tea. I was expecting just a roadside stop, but Norseman is quite a large town, with beautiful wildflowers everywhere you look – on the footpath verges, in paddocks, on sidings. They are mostly Cape Daisies in a big variety of colors and patterns.

We arrived in Kalgoorlie at about 1pm and settled ourselves into the Discovery Caravan Park in Burt Street. It is the only caravan park in town that isn’t on a main road (we are hoping to avoid the road noise).  The sites are a bit squishy, but it has a decent pool and is quite central to town.

After settling in (we can do this in about 10 mins – plugging in power, switching the fridge, popping out the van ends & top, attaching the water), we headed off to the North Hannan’s tourist mine.

In 1893 an Irishman named Paddy Hannan discovered gold right here, and it sparked a huge gold rush to the area. At one time this was known as the golden mile, and was the richest gold deposit area in the world. In 1903 there were 49 operating gold mines, and more than 3000kms of underground working gold mining areas.
The Hannan’s North Tourist Mine is a good place for the kids to explore, and the first thing they did was to climb up and in a massive 793C haul truck, and stand in the shovel of a 994F loader. It is really hard to see the scale of this huge machinery in the photos, but trust me, they are big!

Sam’s favourite activity of the day was panning for gold. He loves it, but unfortunately all we found was a bit of quartz today. We then wandered around many of the old buildings and mining site. Unfortunately the mine tour & gold pour wasn’t happening today (due to maintenance issues).

 

We had a wander down the main street (Hannan St) taking in the spectacular architecture of all the old turn of the century buildings. Kalgoorlie has a very modern shopping centre, hidden behind all the old facades. It is a very, very long and wide main street.

Next up, we headed up to the Super Pit, a huge open cut gold mine, which keeps the town going. There is a fantastic lookout which you can stand and watch the massive haul trucks carting the dirt and ore (containing lots of gold!) up and down the huge dirt streets. The pit is managed by the huge Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines P/L (KCGM). It is the largest gold mine in Australia, and produces about 20,000 kgs of gold each year. This equates to 1 in 7 huge haul trucks carrying a golf ball size piece of gold (.5 kg) out. Doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up! They have plans to keep removing gold out of this open cut until 2029.

 

We watched the blasting take place which was interesting (and loud!).  They blast nearly every day, and post the time that they will be blasting around the town, so everyone knows. They drill core holes 11metres underground, then fill them with a mix of diesel and nitrapril and then remotely set them off, creating a big bang, a lot of dust, and a rock fall that they can then easily pick up, and truck out to the crushing plant. Lots of fun!