Australia's Golden Outback 2023 Holiday Planner

were a proud institution, never hidden away — for many a year The Kalgoorlie Miner, a bastion daily newspaper that still trades today after launching in 1895, published ‘Skimpie of the week’, and getting featured was a honour. And as if all this weren’t enough, throw in the odd earthquake — the last big one hit in 2010 — and you can see just how unique this place is. City status arrived in 1989, when Kal and the Shire of Boulder merged to become Kalgoorlie-Boulder, and much has been done to tone down the wild west feel as the world grows up. The annual Diggers and Dealers festival, for instance, the biggest and most influential mining meet-up in Australia, has worked hard to throw off some of the more unsavoury aspects of early settler culture. But the spirit of the wild west, the adventure, the derring-do, the ever-driving dream of a golden future, truly lives on in Kalgoorlie Boulder.

taking centre stage — the gold buried in what was to become known as the Golden Mile , a piece of real estate many consider to be the world’s richest square mile of earth. With the gold rush came development. Railway lines linked Kal with Perth and the rest of the country — the Prospector still whips through the bush from the state capital every day. When nickel was found in large quantities, the expansion continued apace and soon this young town was quite the Australian powerhouse. It was, however, quickly becoming the black sheep of the family, as its reputation for being a southern hemisphere wild west blossomed. Bandits were rife and prostitution flourished. These were puritanical days, of course, and pretty soon Kal found itself as something of a pariah. The perceived government neglect led to calls for the area to secede from the rest of country and become Auralia — a

name taken from the Latin for golden. In the end the plan came to nought, but it was a shot across the bows to the rest of the country — you may not like our way of life, but if you want to share our gold, then you’re stuck with it. From there, then, Kalgoorlie flourished, making itself both famous and infamous across the world. C.Y. O’Connor’s ambitious pipeline, for instance, bringing fresh water from Perth to the desert bound golden oasis, remains a triumph in engineering — and the Super Pit was, for many years, Australia’s largest open cut gold mine. But still, this was Kalgoorlie, and the hard-living excess had no plans to go away. Brothels abounded — one now serves as a museum and is a major tourism draw — and the iconic game of two-up left many a miner destitute when the pennies came down the wrong way up. Skimpies, barmaids who serve drinks and tucker in every state of undress,

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Discovery Trail

Delve into augmented reality games, watch exclusive videos, explore fun widgets and uncover audio stories walking Kalgoorlie’s #heartofgold Discovery Trail.

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