Discover the rich and diverse history of the Goldfields with the WA Museum Goldfields Main Exhibition Audio Experience. Journey through the stories of the region’s Indigenous peoples, the dramatic gold rush era, and the innovations that shaped the community. Listen to captivating tales of resilience, discovery, and transformation, as told through immersive audio that brings the past to life. From the ancient landscapes and cultural connections to the boom of the gold rush and beyond, this guide offers a compelling exploration of the people, places, and events that define the Goldfields.

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Welcome and Furry Friends

Welcome to the museum, I&#39;m Geoff and I&#39;ll be your guide for the next half an hour or so. I guess the number one thing I can tell you about myself is I was actually born in Kalgoorlie and I&#39;ve lived here all my life. So if I don&#39;t know anything by now There&#39;s something really seriously wrong.Okay, over here, this is the usual crew. That very friendly furry chap there. That&#39;s how big the echidnas were tens of thousands of years ago. And that dates back to the age when the kangaroos were this high and the wombats were almost as big as Volkswagens, which must have been a hell of a sight, I think.But you can see the climate was different back then because they even had fur. And then the climate changed and to survive they had to shrink up to the size they are nowadays. Which, let&#39;s face it, is a lot cuter.

Meterorite

This, I know it just looks like we&#39;ve stuck a rock over here, but that&#39;s actually a genuine meteorite and it&#39;s from the Nullabor plains, and it&#39;s around about 4.6 billion years old. So if you ever feel old some days, just think of that and put it in perspective, I reckon. But it&#39;s mainly made up of iron and nickel. It must have a lot of iron, and if you get a magnet, the magnet will actually stick to it.And sometimes if you get a compass, the compass near it, the compass will swing towards it as, as well. So it must have a lot of iron in it. Okay, just over here, we&#39;ll go down where all the good stuff is. I mean, it&#39;s all good, but this is ex this is extra good.

Bars and Hotels of the Goldfields

You walk up the main street and it&#39;s actually like doing a bit of time travelling. But a lot of these old hotels, they were, old buildings were actually ex hotels. Because in the early days they built 93 of them here. Nowadays we&#39;ve only got about 23 or but a lot of these old hotels, they still exist. This one here for example, the Mount Lyell. I can remember that.In 1995, and it was owned by some businessmen who used to own a great racehorse called Doremus. And it actually won the Melbourne Cup in that year. And I remember standing out in the front there with about three or four hundred people in the Melbourne Cup. It was a beautiful day. It&#39;s still going nowadays, but now it&#39;s used as Nando&#39;s chickens.This one here, this is the Duke of Cornwall. And that&#39;s just over the other side of the road there. And that was quite an active pub in its time, to such an extent. Apparently a world drinking record was set there in 1952 by a guy called Tiny and I don&#39;t think he was too tiny when you read what he drunk.But then after that it then became Sylvester&#39;s Nightclub and that was as wild as the wind. But nowadays it&#39;s almost in retirement. It&#39;s like a kid&#39;s electronic gaming place. To me the most beautiful pub in Kalgoorlie is this one here and this is the York Hotel.And that&#39;s back down the main street there. It&#39;s got that beautiful Asian, Indian facade. Beautiful stairs in there. It&#39;s just lovely to go and have a drink up here and sit on the balcony. And overlook Hannon Street there. This pub here, this is actually the British Arms. And this is actually our pub. And that&#39;s actually straight through those doors there.And I&#39;ll tell you more about that in a minute or so. But another pub I mention, should mention, which doesn&#39;t exist today. It&#39;s called the Boulder Block, or it had a nickname, the Dirty Acre. And that&#39;s gone down the super pit there now. But that was quite a renowned pub because the mine shaft used to come up into the cellar of the hotel.So the miners used to go to work, get a bit thirsty as you do working away, come up in the cellar, have a few beers, and then go back to work. Okay, let&#39;s go down here and see how people survive.

Aboriginal People

The area around Kalgoorlie is quite harsh, the environment, there&#39;s no doubt about that. And you&#39;ve got to be very skilful to survive here. During the summer it can reach 46 degrees, in winter it can get down to minus 3. I remember last winter I came out to water my garden and I grabbed hold of the hose, and the hose snapped in half, so yes it can get cold here.The rain, one moment you can be in drought, and the next moment you&#39;ve got 200 millimetres just in a few hours. So you&#39;ve got to be very skilful, people around here than the Aboriginal people. They survived here for thousands of years in these conditions, and then when the prospectors came here, they had to survive them as well, and they&#39;ve done it, and they&#39;re still thriving around here today.

Wheelbarrow

But when I was brought up here as a kid, the main sentence was, Make do with whatever you&#39;ve got. And you can see it with these very special items here. You can see this wheelbarrow here. Prospect was there, he obviously wanted a wheelbarrow, so he just made it out of bits and pieces of wood from the bush, bits of wire, bits of bolt, and away he went.

Bicycle

But the ultimate make do with whatever you&#39;ve got is this little beauty here. So this is a wooden bike, and you can see he just put it together, it was made by Prospect in 1899, you can see he just put it together with bits of packing crate, bits of wire, bits of, nails, bits of wood from the bush and away he went. And apparently it actually did work, because there was actually a leather strap that went along the bottom there.And the story is he rode it from, Southern Cross to Mount Barker, which is quite a few hundred kilometres away. I reckon he would have had a sore backside at the end of it, at least a, at least a few splinters in it. But my goodness, they were tough, tough people. And you can see it in this photo up here, this old fella here.You can see he&#39;s probably well into his 80s. He&#39;s got everything he owns on the wheelbarrow. It&#39;s probably 100 degrees and away he goes. There weren&#39;t too many pensions around those days. So they were very, very tough people.

Camels

But of course, the problem here in the early days was the lack of water, and they had different ways of solving this, particularly in the early years, they got a lot of Afghan camel drivers here with their big camel teams.And that&#39;s why Hannon Street is so wide, so these teams could actually turn around. But the Afghans, they definitely left their mark here, and even today I meet people that come in here and say their great grandfather, or there&#39;s a grandfather&#39;s an Afghan camel driver. And the camels themselves, or dromedaries.Hundreds of them let go out the bush and out the desert there today there&#39;s tens of thousands of them. To such an extent, apparently they export them to Saudi Arabia.

Water Pumps

To solve the water supply once and for all They decide to pump up the water from Mundaring Weir, 600 kilometres away, just outside of Perth. It was all the way uphill, in the forefront of technology at the time. A lot of people didn&#39;t think it worked, they were very critical about it. In charge of it was an Irish engineer called C. Y. O&#39;Connor, and the pressure becomes so great on him. He actually suicided 10 months before it was completed. But it did work, and the place it ended up was the Mount Charlotte Reservoir, which is still there today. And you can actually go up there, just go to the end of the street, turn left, and then turn right.It&#39;s a good view up there, as well as being a historical site.

Coolgardie Safe

So this is the famous Coolgardie Safe. This was the fridge of its time. Forget about, You didn&#39;t need electricity, so how it used to work, they used to put the water up here, used to drip over the Hessian bag. And then the wind used to blow up against it and hopefully keep what&#39;s inside of it cool. And apparently it&#39;s quite efficient, they tell me.Now the other thing it would do is keep these fellas away, the flies. I won&#39;t use the word friendly because they&#39;re absolutely ferocious. And I think if you even walk down Hammond Street today, you&#39;ll soon find that out. But that&#39;s the other thing it would do, is keep those away.

Kids Toys

Okay, over here we&#39;ve got some pretty interesting kids toys.You can see they&#39;re just so simple. You&#39;ve got the porcelain dolls. Probably later on in the 50s you&#39;ve got plastic dolls. You&#39;ve got the old knuckles. And it looks like the, marbles here are made out of kwong dong seeds. But just very simple. But you compare it to the toys the kids got nowadays. Almost incomparable.But I think these kids were just as happy because outside they had their mates and I think it was a pretty healthy environment.

Riots

Over the last 130 years of Kalgoorlie&#39;s history, a lot of good things have happened.And a couple of bad things as well. And one of the bad things is actually two big riots here. And amazingly, I actually linked to an American president called Herbert Hoover. So he came in, he was a young man, he was a mining engineer, got his big start in Kalgoorlie. He used to manage the Sunsegolia mine north of here, but he thought the Italians were very good workers, which they are.So they&#39;re responsible for a lot of Italian immigration into the gold fields. And unfortunately that culminated into these two riots. The first riot was in 1919, and that was when the wood line was on strike, mainly staffed by Italians. The soldiers were coming back from the First World War. The two groups collided in a brawl on the corner of Porter and Egan Streets down here.One of the Australians was stabbed to death. The Italians went back to a hotel just still over the road here, the Glen Devon, and then a thousand people attacked the hotel, ransacked it, looted it, tried to push the Italian owner over the balcony. He appears only saved by the intervention of a local policeman.To help to stop the riot, they got Axford, who was a local Victoria Cross winner. He stood up and must have made a really good speech and helped to stop those riots. But they weren&#39;t the biggest riots. The biggest riots were in 1934. And again, it was a fight between an Australian and an Italian in a bar.The Australian fell back and hit his head and died. And that caused the riots, which left half of Hanlon Street on fire, ended out the back of Boulder in a battle where a couple people died, and helped to stop those riots. They actually had to get the army up from Perth, armed with machine guns.

Last Stop

If you go through that orange door there, you&#39;ll end up in this old pub, the British Arms. So that was built in 1899, and apparently it&#39;s claimed to fame as the narrowest two story hotel in the Southern Hemisphere.But when you go through that door there, Some lights will come on. Have faith, they will come on. But it&#39;ll be full of magnificent old trade union banners. Then you go for another two doors and you&#39;ll see a dentist chair and equipment up there. And that used to belong to a Dr. Rout, who was a dentist in Kalgoorlie when he was well into his 80s.I have met people that did actually go to him. And I think a lot of them are still suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. They&#39;ve got some shocking stories. Then after that you&#39;ll go down the old stairs and you&#39;ve got to say hello to Edith McKay. Because she&#39;s actually the ghost of the building.So she was the wife of the owner in 1913. She fell down those stairs and died. And over the years, a lot of people claim to have seen her appear at the top of the stairs there. So, watch out for her. Then you go for the bar area and you&#39;re perfectly safe because the last time it served a beer was 1924. So exactly a hundred years ago.And then you&#39;ll end up in the courtyard there. And the first thing you&#39;ll see is two lovely fruit trees, a lemon tree and an apricot tree and they&#39;re almost 100 years old by themselves. Then further along you&#39;ll see a lot of beautiful buildings.

Main Exhibition Audio Experience

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