History of Kalgoorlie-Boulder W.A

These days slick mining companies have replaced the gold diggers, but a real sense of the history of this town remains and its legacy can found everywhere from the pubs and old buildings such the Kalgoorlie Town Hall to the smaller townships that surround Kalgoorlie. You will also find the outback spirit to be alive and well in the people and you can almost imagine, as you stroll the streets of Kalgoorlie, what it must have been like to be a part of the Gold Rush days of the late 1890’s and 1900’s.

Kalgoorlie is traditional land, owned by the Maduwangka people.  European settlement of this land began in 1893 when three Irish gold prospectors discovered gold deposits near Mount Charlotte in Western Australia.  The trio were Paddy Hannan, Dan Shea and Tom Flannagan and their legend lives on in Kalgoorlie today. 

Within days of their discovery of 8 pounds of gold nuggets, 700 gold diggers began pegging out mining claims in and around Kalgoorlie.  The area was originally known as ‘Hannans Find’ but was later changed to Kalgoorlie  which means ‘Silky Pear Bush’ in aboriginal language.  This was a frenzied time and Kalgoorlie became the centre of the Goldfields of Eastern Western Australia. 

During this time news was spread by a ‘bush telegraph’ where basically one person tells another and they tell another and so on and this was how the news of the discovery of Gold in Kalgoorlie was spread. At first this bought a steady trickle of people to the area, but as the news travelled further and the finds grew bigger more and more people started to flood into the area prompting what is now known as the Gold Rush. 

The isolated camps became gold rush townships with hotels, schools, shops and churches and many of these building remain today to tell the story of the grandeur of the times.  But the rapid growth also bought problems such as lawlessness and disease in those early days.

By 1903 the population of Kalgoorlie has swelled to a mind boggling 30,000 people.  To put this number into perspective consider how rugged this land must have been in those times.  Today Kalgoorlie  is a bustling township with amenities and attractions, but it is still considered to be outback Australia.  Living and working in Kalgoorlie in those days was extremely tough with even basic essentials such as flour and water being scarce and terribly over-priced.  However, the men who worked the fields in those days believed that they could change their fortune there and some did however many others died of typhoid due to contamination of water supplies and more still became disillusioned by the small amounts of gold to be found in quartz. 

By the late 1890’s miners began to move South of Kalgoorlie to explore the deep reefs on the Boulder fault and this would become known as part of the Golden Mile which is still mined today.  It had become clear to the miners of that time that the gold was lying further underground and this has been proven to be true with mining for gold in Kalgoorlie now centred on open pit type mining. 

Kalgoorlie WA,remains proud of its heritage and it welcomes visitors with an interest in discovering more about the past, present and future of Gold Mining in Western Australia.