While travelling south through the Pilbara we passed through many small towns which have seen better days. Beautiful old buildings have fallen into disrepair – peeling paint, rust and wood rot. Small heritage/preservation societies usually run the visitor information centre and maintain a link to preserving the history of these small towns.

Mining has had a huge effect on the fortunes of these towns – both positive and negative. The government takes royalties from the mining companies and the mining companies provide employment. This means the small towns tend to lose their younger generation to the mines and these same workers tend not to return.

Besides creating ghost towns it also creates a very dysfunctional workforce, not only on the mines, but also throughout most of the state with most workers on limited contracts and therefore having no security of tenure. The royalties are used to build great sporting and community facilities including some very nice caravan parks.

Gwalia – just outside Leonora is a well preserved unique heritage site and interesting ghost town. It was home to around 1,000 people in the late 1890s who came for the gold. They abandoned the town when the ‘Sons of Gwalia’ mine closed in 1963 after producing more than 2 million ounces of gold.

The open cast gold mine in Gwalia opened in the late 1890s when a young American mining engineer, 23 year old Herbert Hoover (later to be 31st president of the USA) was sent out to evaluate it’s prospects. He stayed on to build the mine manager’s house (Hoover House) for himself and his family, the Mine Office and the Assay Office. These three beautiful stone buildings have been carefully preserved and now are open to the public – Hoover House operates as a Bed and Breakfast with a nice cafe. The houses, museum and much ancillary mining machinery is perched on top of the hill on the edge of the open cast mine pit (which is currently a working mine again called St Barbara) and overlooks the abandoned town of Gwalia where the workers lived.

The heritage society has restored several of the corrugated iron cottages which are all open for the public to just walk through allowing you to appreciate the hardships and conditions these people endured right up until the mine closed in 1963. The town was abandoned in just over 2 weeks when the workers were offered jobs in Kalgoorlie on a first come basis. Families took only what they could carry and jumped on the next train out of town leaving furniture and chattels behind.

Salt Lakes

South of Gwalia there is a series of salt lakes – caused by rising salinity as the natural vegetation was harvested to fuel the furnaces in the many mining operations, including Gwalia. A special train and rail line was built for the sole purpose of carting timber cut from the surrounding plains.

One of these salt lakes, Lake Ballard, has become quite an attraction and renowned for the 51 sculptures installed here over the 10 sq km lake by British artist Antony Gormley in 2003. Fashioned out of carbonized steel using materials that are found in the Achaean rock of Western Australia they don’t seem to rust and are a popular tourist attraction.

We were able to camp on the lake shore and walk out at sunset and sunrise to see these amazing humanoid shapes. The salt lake can be a bit mushy after rain and was rather scuffed up looking more like a red dust pan than a salt lake, but still very impressive. Nearby, Lake Koorkoordine demonstrated how pristine a salt lake can be, beauty but at a terrible environmental price.