The people of the Goldfields

The Goldfields of Western Australia was and still is made up of many people, from poets to politicians, from saints and sinners and everything in between. I hope to tell you the stories of some of these people either famous or infamous or just the ordinary folks. Sometime the most ordinary people do the most extraordinry things

The Schmidt Family of St Albans

The infomation in the following stories was kindly supplied by Gary Cowans, and is re produced with his permission. In 1876 at the age of 19, Gustave Schmidt moved from Victoria where he was born to NSW and purchased land 8 miles SW of Moulamein. He married Emma Rebecca BICKFORD in 1884 and his first […]

Auralia ‘A Brave New Colony’

“Auralia” and the goldfields separation movement A map printed in 1900, to accompany a petition to Queen Victoria, showing the boundaries of the proposed “Colony of ‘Auralia’. Auralia The move to separate the Western Australian goldfields from the colony of Western Australia, resulted in a petition which contained the signatures of more than 28,000 residents. […]

Black Range Pioneers – Where is ”Frenchy?

Sunday Times 28 June 1908, page 3 BLACK RANGE PIONEERS       “Where is ”Frenchy ?” There appeared in a recent issue of the Sunday Times, a paragraph relating to the original discoverers of Black Range, fourteen years ago in 1892. It was founded on the statement of one of them, McIntyre, as was published […]

A Broken Tale with a Happy End:

Gone but not Forgotten – Annie Bell. An interesting tale about a grave in the Boulder cemetery. I was contacted last by Peter Huntly, a relative of Annie Bell, who died at the Kalgoorlie Hospital on the 24th Oct 1909, and was subsequently buried in the Boulder Cemetery on the 29th October 1909. Peter had […]

Gabanintha Cemetery – Star of the East

Gabanintha Western Australia Latitude : 26 55 S Longitude : 118 39 E A townsite 40 km south east of Meekatharra in the Murchison goldfields, Gabanintha derives its name from the mine located here. Mining leases were taken out here in 1895, 1895-1910 were the peak years for the Gabanintha Mine. In 1897 the Gabanintha […]