Kalgoolie

Day 2
Visited the Town Hall which has pictures, displays and stories of Kalgoolie's early days. Also has a theatre with pressed metal ceilings and red velvet seats typical of the day.
Went on a tour of the Big Pit , the huge opencut gold mine. It is owned by KCGM , a joint USA & Canadian venture.The super pit produces 22,000kg per year/60kgs a day ,of gold and works 24hours a day 365 days of the year. Some of the machinery used comes at great expense for example the haul trucks, trucks that look like Tonka toy trucks, 40 on site cost 4.4 million each . A face shovel , photo attached , 4 on site cost 18.5 million each ,and two wheel fixers on site cost 2.6 million each.
We later took a look at St Mary's Catholic Church and Angela was very impressed to know that this Church was built using locally sourced stone. It was later discovered that this stone was laced with gold. The Church is under the protection of national trust listing and therefore protects it from demolition in order to retrieve the gold from its walls. It is said the early streets of Kalgoolie were paved in gold -in fact this is true as the initial rock used to build the streets of Kalgoolie also contained gold , unlike the St Mary's Church these streets didn't survive, as when this gold in the streets was discovered they were ripped up the gold removed and the roads rebuilt.

As evening approached we drove a short distance to the look out on Mount Charlotte and watched the sunset over Kalgoolie .Read more