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

An Eerie Premonition – Michael Madden

I had been researching the accidental death of this miner because of an entry I found in the Annual Report from the Department of Mines for 1897 which stated, that a miner called ‘John Madden’ had been killed in an accident on the Goongarrie GM. As this name was not one I had listed I […]

Tragedy at the Vale of Coolgardie

THE FUNERAL  –   An Impressive Ceremony – Kalgoorlie Miner 11th Jan 1906 As anticipated, the funeral was the largest seen here for many years. The procession left the Government Hospital at 4 o’clock, and, headed by the Federal A.M. A. Band — 24 strong — was a most impressive sight when passing up Bayley […]

The Darkest 10 years –

From 1894 to the present day, in Western Australia the ‘Department of Mines and Petroleum’ merged with the Department of Minerals and Energy in 2001, AKA The Department of Mines, have produced an annual report on all aspects of mining. These not only provide a current valuable record for future planning but also provide an […]

The Exchange Hotel Broad Arrow:

Following on from the recent article on the hotels of Broad Arrow I received an email from an OFH reader, John Hanley. His Gt Grandfather James Hanley owned and ran the Exchange Hotel and his family is fortunate in that the original cash book from the hotel has been preserved and passed down through the […]

A Strange Coincidence

Just goes to show that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the paper (sorry TROVE its not your fault). I was going through a pile of archived newspaper cuttings, collected many years ago, before TROVE existed, and of course I read and checked all the ‘Mine Accidents’. There have in the past only been […]