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

Too Late to Say Goodbye – grave tales

Fri 17th Jul 1942 Kalgoorlie Miner BOY SERIOUSLY INJURED On Warburton Ranges Track  – LAVERTON AMBULANCE LONG TRIP About noon yesterday the Laverton ambulance commenced a 200 miles trip each way along Warburton Ranges to attend a boy seriously injured when run over by a tractor trailer. The boy is John Wade, a 13 year old […]

Bulong’s Battery, boom to bust  – by David Whiteford

The following article is re produced with the kind permission of the author David Whiteford and the Light Railway Research Society of Australia Inc . The article first appeared in the publication, ‘Light Railways’ April 2010.   Contemporary map, showing the route of the tramway as surveyed. To aid legibility, the route has been overlaid […]

Darcy Uhr’s Bell Bird – by John Drayton

Smith’s Weekly, Sydney, Saturday 19 February 1927, page 21 WEST AUSTRALIAN pioneers who remember Norman Sligo and Harry Swincer, will be glad to know that Norman is doing well in New Zealand. He is general manager of the Anderson’s Bay quarries at Dunedin. He and Swincer were early on at Mt Magnet and with the […]

The Back Country Honors its Dead

Sunday Times – Sunday 29 September 1912, page 11 THE GRAVE OF A PIONEER Walter B (S) Williams –  the Prospector of Mt Ida Wandering about the goldfields of this State, away from the beaten paths, it may be, one sometimes unexpectedly happens across a lonely grave. Sometimes, but very rarely, it’s merely a mound […]

A clock on the wall – Lindell Jewellers

In 2008 I was contacted by Kirsti Hiekka Langbein who lives in Finland, and who was seeking information on her Grandfather who was a jeweller in early Kalgoorlie. We corresponded for some time and I was able to tell her that the clock in the Kalgoorlie town hall chambers was made by Lindell’s Jewellers, as was […]