Tagged Gwalia

Welcome to Gwalia.

After leaving Laverton, we relocated 90 miles back to Leonora, back to the sealed road. There was no nickel find in Leonora, but the town was a hub for rail and road traffic to the north and east. The railway stopped at Leonora, from Kalgoorlie in the south. Nickel from Mt. Windarra to the east was trucked to a railway siding in Malcolm, a dot on the map between Leonora and Laverton that was once a thriving gold-mining town. Nickel was also trucked to Leonora from Leinster to the north. Leonora existed as a Shire seat and hub for the sheep and cattle industry around it. Nothing grew out there. Leonora’s population during the 1970s was somewhere about 1,000. Someone might even look at that number and consider it overly generous. It was, though, the biggest town around; the next largest was Kalgoorlie 150 miles south.

Leonora_1899

Leonora, 1899. On the horizon is Mt. Leonora, named in 1869 by explorer (and Western Australia’s first Premier) John Forrest after a relative. Gwalia is to the right of the hill.

Two miles south of Leonora, off the main road, sits the ghost town of Gwalia. The name “Gwalia” is, as far as I can tell, an old Welsh word for Wales. The town emerged from the desert mostly as a shanty town, home to miners working the Sons of Gwalia gold mine. The “Gwalia” was a major find in the area, established in 1897, and grew to become the largest gold mine in the state outside Kalgoorlie. Leonora was established up the road from the mine, into a normal looking town with regular streets and commerce, while Gwalia started out as a mix of shanties and huts arranged in no particular order. There was a rivalry between the two towns, such that Leonora wouldn’t recognize Gwalia as a “town,” but finally had to gazette it as such in an effort to control a rampant growth of unregulated saloons (called “sly-grogs”). The state’s first government-run hotel was opened in Gwalia in 1903, and still stands today as a popular photo subject.

pink house gwalia 2
The “Pink House,” a miner’s shanty typical of the sort built in Gwalia, mostly from corrugated metal, wood and hessian for walls. The house is small; most people have to crouch down when walking inside.

state hotel gwalia
The Gwalia State Hotel, built 1902; a popular tourist attraction today from the outside only  (the building is closed to the public).

Back in 1897, when Kalgoorlie and the surrounding Great Victoria Desert was abuzz with gold-seeking activity, there were a few larger companies looking to stake a claim. One of them was a British company, Bewick, Moreing & Co. They hired a young American geologist by the name of Herbert Hoover to travel into the West Australian scrub and represent their interests. He made a few moves around Kalgoorlie and eventually took management of the Sons of Gwalia mine. Part of his strategy was to hire mostly cheaper European workers; the town of Gwalia became a melting pot of Poles, Italians, Czechs and Slavs, among others. Hoover built a house here which still stands and operates today as a bed & breakfast and museum. Hoover was soon called away by his company to explore interests in China, and of course eventually went on to do a few other things around the world, including become President of the United States.

hoover house ext gwalia

Hoover’s house in Gwalia, currently a bed and breakfast.
http://www.gwalia.org.au/hoover-house/accommodation/

The Sons of Gwalia mine operated almost continuously until December 31, 1963. Practically overnight the town emptied, dropping from several hundred to a few dozen. Buildings and shanties were abandoned, and for almost a decade most stood silent, succumbing to the heat and dust of the desert. During the early 1970s and on into present day, restoration efforts got under way to preserve the few significant structures left behind.

When we arrived in Leonora, we somehow ended up taking residence in one of the abandoned houses on Manning Street, Gwalia. It wasn’t a shanty, but a more substantial structure built to normal scale, but it was still in need of considerable reconstruction. The way I understood it, Dad purchased the house from the Shire for $50, on the proviso that he bring the house up to code. When we moved in, there was no running water, no electricity, and the toilet was the standard Aussie dunny (outhouse) up in the corner of the back yard. This was 1971 (give or take), so there was also no television. The only telephone available to us was a public phonebooth up on the main street, Tower Street, outside the old Mazza store building (long closed and boarded up).

gwalia historical site pic

A standard old house in Gwalia, an upgrade from the shanty. Our house was this style, albeit in somewhat better shape. I don’t have a photo of it, as it is still occupied today. The road in front is Tower Street, the main drag through town. To the left (quarter mile) is the mine, and to the right (two miles) is Leonora.

The house was a standard structure with typical layout: across the front was a verandah. You would step in to a hallway that ran the length of the house. The first room on the left was the living room, and on the right, a bedroom (which became Mum and Dad’s). Further down on the left was the kitchen, and on the right, another bedroom (which became mine and siblings that came later). You would step out from the kitchen into the back “patio” area; on the left was the bathroom and beyond that, the laundry. Next to the bathroom was an open room which became one catch-all for Dad’s crap (he had more than one). Once outside the laundry, you were in the backyard, with not a scrap of green grass anywhere, just dirt. Out here clothes were hung out to dry.

The main four rooms of the house were done up first to make habitable; Dad did up the main bedroom in plaster, which kept it relatively cool in the 100°+ heat. The living room and kitchen were opened up to become one large room. My bedroom was largely untouched. The floors throughout were wood, and walls were flat sheets of fibro cement, except my room, which had the original hessian wall coverings. This was a standard material used in the early days, painted over to stiffen the material and make it look half presentable. I had a window out to the side, which I made a habit of climbing out of to scurry away somewhere, until it got nailed shut.

The kitchen had a wood stove with cast-iron top, standard for the old days. The living room had a fireplace, topped with a tin tube chimney. Once we got water supply to the house, it would have to be heated on the stove or fireplace for a hot water bath, laundry or dishes. For lighting at night, we had carbide lamps, the same kind the miners used in the depths below. The smell is fresh in my mind to this day. We also had kerosene lamps, and the refrigerator was an old kerosene-powered kind.

Dad was quite handy with things mechanical, and managed to get an old Crosley engine to work. The thing was an ancient cast-iron block with the top open for fuel, and large flywheels on both sides. To start it, a crank handle was inserted into the hub of the flywheel and turned with all might and strength, in hopes that a single POP would cause the engine to catch and fire up. A belt ran from the engine to a generator to bring in a meager supply of power. There was a certain comfort lying in bed at night listening to the random POP and chug of the old engine. Eventually power from the town supply was fitted to the house.

Water still had to be heated the old fashioned way, on the stove or fireplace. The bathroom was a ramshackle room with little privacy and too much ventilation to the outside, with holes in the walls and roof. The bathtub was a leaky old tin kind with feet, similar in look to the old-style ones that seem to be all the rage these days, but not near as charming. Dad had to try to seal up the leaks on a regular basis, which left little beads of tin along the seams, poking your behind and making the experience very uncomfortable.

Eventually Dad built a boiler alongside the house near the back, encased in brick. We would scour the old building sites around the town collecting bricks, chipping off the old mortar. The kind of mortar they used in the old days was flimsy at best, breaking away from the brick with little effort. It was one of my chores to set a fire inside the boiler and get the hot water going. The water wasn’t connected to the house supply, so if you wanted hot water, you had to go to the boiler to get it.

The toilet was the old outhouse kind, the dunny as it is known in Australia. The weatherboard structure with corrugated iron door was not a comfortable commode, the inside reaching well above the 100° temperatures outside. You would simply get in, do your business, and get out. I could sit there and watch the redback spiders in the corners. Dad would spend forever in there, reading, despite the heat.

Below the bench was the collection bucket, accessible from behind the dunny. Once a week the town outhouse collection service would be by to remove the full bucket, load that up onto the back of the truck, and put an empty one in its place. Dad referred to him as the “turd burglar.” It must have been a thankless job.

Eu de toilet 3.21

I draw from time to time. More on that later.

I didn’t seem to mind chatting to the guy until he had to move on. I was quite a chatty kid in the beginning, talking up a storm to anyone who dared listen, without much mind to whether they were keen or not. I got that from Dad, without question. He could talk paint off a wall. He was opinionated and knowledgeable, never wrong about anything, an expert on everything, and he would talk away at some poor sop until either both got hungry, wives were fed up, or the sun had disappeared. I might have been a talker as a young kid, but having to sit around and wait for the old man while he yammered on was torture. Funny though that if I chatted up the turd burglar, I’d be scolded and told to leave the man alone.

Eventually the day would come when the dunny would be retired and an actual flushing toilet had to be installed. It probably came about as a result of a few coinciding factors: the retirement of the turd burglar service, constant pressure from Mum to quit making her use the dunny, and code upgrade requirements. A septic system had to be put in as there was no sewer service out there. The new outhouse, a modern, slightly-larger kind, was built at the back of the house. It was large enough to accommodate a shower, which was essential since everyone was tired of getting their butts punctured in the bathtub.

The shower was set up before the toilet was functional. It was a pull-chain kind, basically a filled bucket hoisted up to the ceiling, used sparingly by pulling a chain to release a dose of water. Along with firing up the boiler, it was my job to fill the shower bucket before use. If Mum or Dad were in the shower, I’d have to stay close by in order to pass a full bucket of warm water through the partially opened door. The shower would be filled, then hoisted up and tied off.

Putting in a septic tank turned out to be harder than anticipated. The ground out there in the desert is rock hard with little to no topsoil. Dynamite was required to loosen the rock. It took weeks for Dad to finish digging the hole and putting the tank in.

One of the strangest things we ever encountered happened when Dad was digging the septic tank. Buried a few inches underground was a seemingly perfectly preserved fruit cake, the Christmas kind that traditionally gets passed around but no one wants. It was a mystery as to how the cake got there, and for how long. The house had been vacant for years before we came along, so it had to be there for at least seven or eight years. Plus, it was under some inches of rock, still in its plastic wrapping. While everyone pondered its existence and origin, the dog gladly wolfed it down, with apparently no ill effects.

The day came when finally the septic was in and the toilet was ready for use. Behind the toilet, standing high above, was the vent pipe. On top of the vent pipe was supposed to be some sort of cap, and there it was sitting on the ground. The toilet was incomplete without that cap inserted into the top of the vent pipe, and the pipe was firmly installed and not coming out. The answer was to have me climb up on Dad’s shoulders while he stood on the roof of the toilet, and I would reach up and slip the cap into place. The procedure went without a hitch, but I can recall every moment of it, panicked as I held on to the pipe with nothing between me and the ground, which I was reminded not to look down at (I did).

The last little tidbit about the toilet involves pumpkins, which began growing behind the toilet, evidently fueled by nutrients from the septic tank. We had no problem chowing down on these pumpkins, but there was one night when Dad took a bite into a slice of pumpkin and immediately spewed it out in disgust. Either he suddenly realized where it had grown, or perhaps there was more nutrient in it than normal. It’s hard to say, since I had no trouble with it. From that day forward, Dad never touched pumpkin again, of any sort, from any location, on any plate.

Next: An in-depth look at the town of Gwalia (my playground), and its inhabitants.

Bouncing around the State.

I experienced my first earthquake when I was about two years old. Of course I have no recollection of it myself, but I heard all about it later. It was October 14, 1968, in Meckering, a small town about 130 km east of Perth. The 40-second quake measured 6.9 on the Richter Scale and basically destroyed the town. We were there then, in a caravan in town. Dad was off working somewhere. I was with my mother in the van; she recalls that the van started rocking back and forth, and at first she thought it was a few goons playing some kind of joke. She got irritated, ran outside to confront the goons, but was instead shocked to find the ground moving about in waves, buildings swaying back and forth. Photographs of the aftermath show considerable damage, including railway lines offset several feet and vertical faulting as much as 9 feet. I was apparently unaffected by the whole thing. I’d have to wait another 20-odd years before I’d feel another earthquake — in California — and remember the experience.

meckering_rails

Railway tracks after the Meckering quake. (1)

As mentioned earlier, Dad followed construction work wherever it could be found, and there was plenty of it in the wake of mineral exploration in the state. In addition to iron in the Kimberly’s, there was nickel to the south around Kalgoorlie, a town built on gold discovered there in the late 1800s. Nickel mining brought a much-needed infusion of life to the economy of the area. Gold was the original source of prosperity for the Eastern Goldfields. There are a few significant finds that weathered drops in the availability or the price of gold, notably Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Alluvial gold petered out quickly and men went underground for more. Literally thousands of gold mines didn’t survive their initial jackpot, and the various small towns that popped up around them faded into obscurity, dissolved back into the desert. Nickel discoveries around Kambalda, Leinster and Mt. Windarra (near Laverton) brought hope of prosperity back. We were in Kambalda for a time, then eventually found ourselves north to Laverton.

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Lancefield, a few miles out of Laverton, taken 1910. One of many mining towns emerging during the Gold Rush of the 1890s. The town no longer exists. You might be lucky to find a brick or an old glass bottle nowadays, but nothing else. (2)

Laverton started out as a gold mining town, and old closed mines could be seen as you drove the road from Leonora into Laverton. After the gold and before nickel, Laverton barely survived beyond being the Shire seat. The area supported a pastoral industry, mostly sheep. Getting to Laverton meant driving the sealed road north of Kalgoorlie 150 miles to Leonora, then turning east for another 90 or so miles. The sealed road at the time, around 1971, stopped just outside Leonora, so the rest of the way was gravel. Beyond Laverton is very little but desert. The Outback Highway begins here, a route made up of several highways which are a essentially dirt tracks and gravel roads, extending out across the middle of the continent to Winton, Queensland. The first leg beyond Laverton is the Great Central Road, the main thoroughfare from Perth to Uluru (Ayer’s Rock), about 700 miles. In that distance there are only a handful of fueling stops, and permits are required (for traveling through Aboriginal lands).

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Great Central Road near Tjukayirla Roadhouse, about 4.5 hrs drive east of Laverton. The road is passable by most vehicles. Traveling in the Outback involves long distances requiring patience, plenty of water, fuel and supplies, and occasionally permits to access Aboriginal lands. (3)  

The way I understood it, Dad was going only as far as the sealed road would take us, and since there wasn’t anything in Leonora at the moment, headed east, and stubbornly continued on to Laverton. Since there wasn’t anything beyond Laverton that involved work, this was as far as we’d go.

My uninterrupted memory timeline began about the time we arrived in Laverton. I was about 5 by then. We still had the little caravan, with bunk beds up the front and the double bed in the back, separated by a tiny kitchen. I mostly slept on the bottom bunk, although I preferred the top bunk, but I wasn’t allowed to sleep up there after I rolled off to the floor below a couple of times. The caravan was parked inside a huge shed that had once been a maintenance facility for nearby gold mines. The outside walls were mostly open, with just the roof providing some protection. Inside the shed were remnants of the old mining days, steam-driven cast-iron pieces of equipment the size of cars. There was also a maintenance pit in the ground, which Dad often used to get under the car to fix it, and which I was reminded many times to stay clear of.

Across the street from the shed was the Laverton Hotel which still stands today, first built around the early 1900s. We became friends of the proprietors. While Dad was off working somewhere, Mum spent time chatting with the lady of the hotel. In the rear was the kitchen, where we spent most of our time. I wanted to explore the hotel but wasn’t allowed beyond the kitchen and the adjoining dining area.

Laverton Hotel

Laverton Hotel, since renamed the Desert Inn Hotel. (4)

It should be noted, and perhaps it’s already obvious, that I was a bit of a terror as a kid. I was always in trouble for something. I was precocious, always fiddling with something I wasn’t supposed to be, and constantly in Dad’s line of fire. With my non-stop tantrums and Dad’s red hot temper, home life was a tinder box, ready to erupt at any given moment. I would seek solace from Mum, but she had a bit of a temper as well, and it wasn’t always a guarantee that I’d find an ally.

I had an early penchant for running away, sometimes after one of these outbursts. The furthest I ever made it away from the caravan was the kitchen of the hotel. There was one night I’d made it that far, and the hotel lady took me in and made me something to eat, something that included raw onions which I didn’t care for. I wanted to sit in the dining room so I wouldn’t be seen from the side window, but the dining room was closed and I had to sit in the kitchen. It was only a matter of time before I saw Mum walking by the window and I was blown. I was glad it wasn’t Dad, but I knew I was still in a heap of trouble. I didn’t get to eat anything before being dragged back to the van.

Beyond the hotel was the Laverton Primary School, grades 1 through 7, population less than 50. There were two main buildings, an older one in front and a newer one behind, next to the playground. The older building catered to the younger grades, 1 through 4, and the newer one had the older kids and the staff room. I think I was still too young to be in 1st grade, so I must have been in some kind of kindergarten class. All of the kids were together in one room; each grade sat in a clump of desks mashed together, so there were four or five islands of desks in the main room. I made work hard for the one teacher managing all four grades (a dozen or so kids in all), never sitting still, always trying to see what the older kids were doing. It looked more interesting than what I was doing, anyway. If my temper flared and got too out of hand, I’d be put into the storeroom off the main room and left to chill for a while. The storeroom was technically another room with a window looking out, so it wasn’t a closet. It was dusty and drab. I was never happy being in there, screaming my lungs out and getting increasingly agitated when kids would come by the window to stare in at me. The more I screamed, the more entertained they seemed to be, and the more they showed up to gawk at me the more I screamed. There were a number of times when Mum or Dad would have to come and get me out of school, mostly Mum. I feared the days Dad would show up, because it meant I was in for it at home. He had no patience for being called away from whatever he was doing, especially to cater to some screaming kid.

I recall vividly one occasion out on the playground, which was a gravel area with a basketball hoop on one end. I was dared by some kids to take a leak against the basketball pole. That was easy, I simply whipped it out and peed happily away, for all to see and cheer. Within seconds I was snatched up by a teacher and sent off to the storeroom to wait until collected. I screamed myself to sleep.

We weren’t in Laverton for very long. I’m not sure why, because a lot of the new construction (including a new school) was yet to happen. Either way, we ended up on the road again, this time back to Leonora. We got there around 1971, and would be there for the next eight years.

When I did some research on family history a couple of years ago (2013), I was surprised to find that there were family members that had lived in Laverton before, way back around 1902, when the town was fresh and new. I’m preparing all this info for a separate post, because it deserves its own, and it’s fascinating.

It might be worth noting (if not already clear) that growing up in the bush with a temperamental father and distant mother, and a temper of my own, wasn’t all fun and games. However I don’t always think back to these days with dread, wishing perhaps that I could forget all this. I had an experience growing up that was quite unique. Not every kid gets to grow up in a ghost town. Maybe for some that doesn’t have a particular appeal, especially the isolation, heat, flies and angry home life. Angry home life aside, I wouldn’t change anything about those days out in the bush. I reminisce more about my time growing up in Leonora (and specifically Gwalia, which I will introduce shortly) than with any other place. Our time in Leonora/Gwalia was relatively short, just the span of time that I was in Primary School, but I believe it defines me more than anywhere else. It’s now 2015, and I was last there in 1979; it’s been 35+ years since we left the town. I’ve not been back because I didn’t want to, it simply wasn’t possible for various reasons. I’d go back in a heartbeat, at least to visit, certainly to look about at what I grew up around, and more than anything to show my family now (wife and kids) what it was like.

Next, I will introduce you to Gwalia, and begin a recounting of life in a ghost town.

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Southwestern Western Australia (click to enlarge) (5)

Photo credits:
1. http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/hazards/earthquake/basics/gallery
2. http://www.maps.bonzle.com/c/a?a=m&m=sp&p=287&sc=p&most=p#&ui-state=dialog
3. Public domain, via Wiki Commons.
4. http://www.panoramio.com/user/631231?with_photo_id=9056082
5. Google maps, edited by me in Illustrator