This story was originally presented to the Eastern Goldfields Historical Soc in 2018. It is now reproduced here with the permission of the author, Doug Daws.
When Paddy Hannan and his partners, Flanagan and Shea, discovered gold at Kalgoorlie in June 1893, they were quickly surrounded by literally thousands of other gold prospectors who, too, were seeking their fortune from the last great gold rush of the Nineteenth Century.
It was chaotic with the prospectors camping wherever they could find a ‘spot’. The leaders amongst them quickly organised a Progress Association to plan the locations of the essential community facilities – a place for the nightsoil, the cemetery, and the commercial area. This was all necessary to try to avoid the deadly pitfalls experienced at other early WA mining camps. For instance, typhoid that had swept through early Coolgardie and, later, Menzies from using contaminated water supplies. The Hannans Progress Association applied to the government for a new townsite, which was quickly granted, and surveyed, as Hannans, a four-block village capable of providing what was needed for an explosive situation.
Original Townsite of Kalgoorlie (Hannans Find) street map 1894 – Image SLWA
The boundaries of the townsite were quickly enlarged, several times, and the early sites for the facilities had to be changed time and again and moved further away from the central area. Hannan Street quickly became the main street and the hub of the commence such as it was, plus the essential government offices for the postal services, the police and the Mines Departments. The competition for title to commercial and residential land was intense, and never enough to meet the incredible demand.
The heavy traffic of carts, horses, camels and people turned the heavy local clay soils into either a dust bowl of pervasive, nose-clogging dust or bogging, cart-stopping mud depending on whether it had rained or not. Generally the latter. The dust hung in heavy clouds over the young town and made life a misery. The Progress Association had morphed into a Municipal Council – The Kalgoorlie Municipal Council – as the popular name of Hannans was dropped.
The Council acted quickly to reduce the dust, and occasional mud problem, by arranging to pave the road surfaces with harder material such as gravel. Somehow, in all the chaos and pressure to secure mining leases close to the “Hannans” find, they managed to secure the title to a small outcropping ironstone hill at the eastern end of MacDonald Street close to the current Union Club Hotel. This was mined, and crushed, to provide the aggregate needed to lay the dust and to work into the mud to, as far as was possible, provide a more benign environment.
Street Scene Hannans 1894 – Photo SLWA
What they didn’t know was that this ironstone hill, of which several were eventually identified along the low range of hills heading southward to the famous discoveries on what became known as the “Golden Mile”, was associated with what are known as ‘deep leads’. Some of the prospectors with experience on the Victorian Goldfields were able to identify them from their experience over there but, such was the pressure of humanity, animals and carts on the environment immediately adjacent to ‘Hannans’, the subtle signs were scrubbed out. The deep leads sometimes had high-grade gold associated with them and were successfully exploited. Famous among the local deep-leads were the Adeline, Ivanhoe Venture, Foundry and Great Boulder leads.
Monte Cristo never acquired the same fame or fortune as the gold in the ironstone rock and gravel from there was overlooked in the Council’s haste to provide relief from the dust and mud. Years later the lumps of ironstone, sometimes with specks and occasional small lumps of gold, became visible in the more settled street scene that Hannan Street had become. People with keen eyes spotted the gold glinting in the sunlight, leading to the claim that
Hannan Street was paved with gold.
North Western Courier NSW 26 March 1953, page 5
GOLD IN FOOTPATH
A slug of almost pure gold was dug out of the footpath, in Hanbury Street, opposite Mt. Lyell Hotel, Kalgoorlle, by Mr P Dimer, of Cassidy Street, Kalgoorlie. Mr Dimer, who noticed something gleaming in the sun, found the slug embedded in gravel. It is worth about £30. Gravel from Monte Christo quarry, which contained patches of alluvial gold, was used when the footpaths were first built up about fifty years ago.
The Quarry seems to have ceased to be used in the mid-1940s. Long after quarrying at the quarrying finished, the small pit became notorious as a place for suicide with the depressed sitting on a box of fracture (dynamite) and lighting the fuse, and generally a cigarette to smoke, before being blown to pieces. The Kalgoorlie Municipal Council realised this wasn’t a good look so they arranged to backfill the quarry with domestic waste – the first of the landfills. When finished, they topped the area off with new gravel intending to create a public park which, of course, never eventuated. The area now hosts a modern building providing dialysis services for the WA Country Health Department.
The site of the Monti Christo Quarry today – 2023. Kalgoorlie Renal Hospital – Photo WA Health Services.
Moya Sharp
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