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Debbie
Ward has spent more than 15 years
as a journalist, several as Features
Editor of Travel Trade Gazette.
She now works freelance.
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Gormley
strikes gold in outback
Travel Trade Gazette
The tiny nuggets of gold spread out on the bar of the Grand
Hotel in Kookynie looked like broken cornflakes. "Do the prospectors
pay their bar bills with gold?" I joked to landlord Kevin Pusey,
"Oh yeah, and buy some tucker," he nodded.
Kevin sells most of the nuggets he buys from customers on to
passing tourists. He told us a common chip of one cm square
was worth around $30 Australian dollars or £14, a larger
nugget, destined for a necklace for his wife, about $600. So
why, I wondered, if it was just lying around, wasn't everyone
out looking for gold. "It's hard," explained Kevin. "Especially
in this heat, walking around with a metal detector with your
head up your arse."
He certainly had a point. A guide to poisonous snakes was pinned
to the bar wall. Outside was little but burning sun, the classic
dusty red earth of the Outback and flies that kept me and my
fellow travellers doing the so-called 'Aussie wave'.
The Grand Hotel, once one of seven such establishments, is about
all that's left of Kookynie. The other hotels, plus banks, and
houses are now piles of bricks sitting next to rusty old fashioned
cars. The gold rush here came and went.
Kookynie is one of the several atmospheric ghost towns in outback
Western Australia but gold is still big business elsewhere in
the state.
Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Outback WA's biggest city and a great base
for exploring the region, has a mining past, present and future.
The main streets have a Wild West look with attractive turn
of the century buildings with ornate balconies. Along with a
seedier side (several bars advertise that their barmaids wear
'skimpies') there are florists and baby wear shops, and
you're as likely to get sushi on hotel menus here as in Perth.
The key to the area's prosperity is the Super Pit, Australia's
largest open cut gold mine. A viewing platform allows you to
peer into the pit's 350 metre depth, watch blasts and see trucks
taking ore away for the gold to be extracted.
You can learn more about Australia's quest for mineral wealth
at Kalgoorlie's huge Mining Hall of Fame. Besides browsing the
exhibitions you can watch a gold pouring demonstration and descend
into a disused mine shaft.
Jim Black, a miner for 25 years, showed us around the underground
passages where he used to earn a living and described some of
the hair-raising practical jokes that went on in the decades
before health and safety breaches were a sackable offence.
"You'd drop a small charge through a hole when you saw
one of your mates going past - just to give him a bit of shell
shock," he laughed. With large belt-worn torch batteries leaking
acid down your backside and your lungs being corroded by dust,
danger in those days, it seems, was relative.
A man-made treasure of the Western Australia Outback can be
discovered on a day trip from Kalgoorlie. British sculptor Anthony
Gormley, best known for the Angel of the North, has erected
51 statues across Lake Ballard, a mostly dry salt bed. The metal
stick figures represent people from the nearby town of Menzies
who allowed the artist to laser scan their bodies.
We stopped at Menzies en route. Once a thriving outback community
of 10,000 its population has shrunk back to a few hundred. Posters
in the window of the petrol station-cum-general store announced
a visit from the flying doctor clinic and a crew making a film
called The Road To Hell and Back.
Gormley's Inside Australia installation lies 55km beyond Menzies
off an unsurfaced track. The final approach is on foot and involves
donning a hat with a fly net and trekking across salt encrusted
sand that creaks like snow.
Aside from the statues' exaggerated breasts and genitals, what
is most striking about the artwork is its juxtaposition with
its unearthly surroundings.
The environment of Lake Ballard plays tricks with your perception.
Mirages of water appeared and disappeared on the horizon as
I walked. Distances between statues were deceptive and I soon
forgot which of the figures glimmering through the heat haze
I had already visited.
Perhaps Gormley has created the real ghost town of the Goldfields
region.
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