If there be a romance in Paddy Hannan’s story, there is romance and success of a vastly different kind in pegging the leases on the “Golden Mile,” some three or four miles to the South-East. Those who had followed where the doughty old miner had led the way were South Australian men, George and W.G. Brookman, their brother-in-law Charles Rose, and Sam Pearce, a mining man of practical geology.
They disembarked in the Southern Port of Albany, West Australia, bought horses, dray, provisions and a book of West Australian mining regulations, then walked the long distance to Bailey’s Reward Claim in Coolgardie. Like Hannan, they were late on the scene, and dismayed at the crowded spectacle which faced them. Like Hannan, they moved on to the North-East, to again be horrified at more than a thousand men camped around the leases Paddy Hannan had so recently pegged. Looking the area over, Sam Pearce was attracted to the apparently iron stone ridges and slight hills several miles further on, and to that spot the party moved and struck camp.
From that point onwards it was high drama, a slow-unwinding drama, as they pegged first one mining lease, which they named “Great Boulder,” then additional leases as opportunity offered with money supplied by a mining syndicate in Adelaide. Beyond a rich leader spied by Sam Pearce, there was little tangible evidence to sustain their high hopes. Then, a laboring shaft-digger on wages sunk a shaft on a nearby parcel of land. In that man’s own words, “There was no quartz reef as I had expected, but strange lode formations, composed of ironstone, small quartz veins, decomposed greenstone and porphyry, all mixed together.”
It was soon revealed that the contract shaft-sinker had discovered a lode of immeasurable worth. The Brookman party commenced operations immediately on their Great Boulder lease, and unearthed the famous Great Boulder Lode. “Whether by luck or good management, this very ordinary party of prospectors had pegged out the richest mines ever located by one crowd of lucky leaseholders.”
It is a fascinating story; a story to titillate the ears of every seeker of gold; a story to be repeated again and again during the years of my immediate forbearers, as the wide area of land some five hundred miles long by two hundred miles wide opened up its secrets to thousands of people from the earth’s ends. To me, at no time was it a “twice-told-tale, vexing the dull ears of a drowsy man,” for those who were the main characters in the story still held center stage. Their names were written on City streets, on public buildings. It was a living story all the days of my early childhood.
The spot where the Irishman had first camped was no longer known as Hannan’s Find. In its place now stood a flourishing City known far and wide as “Kalgoorlie”, a name believed to originate from the word “Kalgooluh,” the native name of a twining plant which grows throughout the region. Commonly known as Silky Pear, the aborigines eat its oval-shaped fruit, raw or roasted, and suck nectar from its flowers. Every school-child of my day risked a sample bite of the fruit – but only once! It is the most astringent, saliva-spitting mouthful I ever tasted.
Within the space of three or four years since Hannan’s horse had cast its shoe, tremendous changes had taken place. The twin cities of Kalgoorlie and Boulder had been declared, and remote areas of gold had been discovered and developed. The railway extension for Perth had reached Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in 1896, bringing tens of thousands of hopeful miners, business men, and specialists from the Eastern Colonies and overseas. Alluvial or near-surface gold was almost exhausted, and the old timers, the Fossickers, the dry‑blowers, were moving out to the thud of noisy batteries, as wealthy mining companies, with reservoirs of capital, moved in.
To tell the complete story of the first development of Kalgoorlie belongs to my parents and grandparents, who lived through some of these hectic times. This I know, Uncle Wilfred, who had followed the gold trail for many years, was ultimately squeezed out with the fast progress of the years. He had married a charming wife, and decided to settle down in work of his own choosing, which fitted into the needs of the community. He brought or established a well‑equipped Livery Stables on a larger corner selection of land in a direct line with the new Railway terminal, its marshalling yards, goods sheds and passenger station. When it was a functioning unit he invited his parents and the remaining members of the Everett family to join in his work program. They came, and settled in a home almost adjoining that of their son and his wife. Son Victor were soon assisting his older brother in his new venture, while the girls, Louisa Mary and Alice Maude, were readily snapped up in their profession of dress designing and sewing. Of the two younger girls Ida and May, I can only hazard a guess but without doubt they were soon part of a throbbing community, forever teetering on the brink of the unexpected!
Perhaps one of the most startling developments occurred when the miners of the Golden Mile sank deeper into the hard earth, and through underlying rock, where they struck a blind lode. The new matrix in which the gold lay was a battling bluish rock, at times indistinguishable from mullock. Continuous sampling and essaying were the only guides to values. The richest rock carried black blotches or vein, telluride of gold, often mistaken for pyrites, a sulfide of iron. This development opened up a new era for gold mining in Kalgoorlie and Boulder, with gold so encased that the finest grinding was necessary to free it. It called for more refined treatment techniques, for nowhere else to that time had telluride of gold been found in such continuing concentrations.
When the nature of the ore was known it drew to the gold-fields a rush of mining experts seeking information and offering suggestions. With new machinery in place, there was amazing progress in the production of gold. Within a year or two miners underground moving ore to the surface and the engineers and metal metallurgists treating in the plants, were accountable for an upsurge in gold production. In the words of the mining fraternity, “With their methods of ore‑breaking, and milling, roasting and fine grinding processes; the agitation and filtering of the residue in cyanide solutions, and the dismissal of tailings and slimes, they advanced mining practice all over the world.”
Amongst those who came to the gold fields of the west was a young mining specialist from the firm of Berrick, Moreing and Company, mining consultants of London, Herbert Hoover. A graduate of Stanford University in California, he became his firm’s Man‑on‑location for several years traveling extensively, studying new methods, offering advice as he saw fit. He was partially responsible for his firm purchasing a remarkable gold mine at Leonora, some two hundred miles north of the Golden Mile. Called the “Sons of Gwalia,” (or Sons of Wales) it was known for many innovations in mining processes, eventually becoming the richest mining complex apart from the celebrated Great Boulder and its accompanying group of leases. Typical of the reports which follow in the wake of any notable person is the existence an Ode of Love, addressed to Hoover’s Kalgoorlie sweetheart. It was doubtless disavowed before he reached the Presidential Chair in Washington, D.C. in l928!
Each new development added its quota to the name and fame of the Kalgoorlie Gold fields, bringing in more miners and interested people to swell the population. They were vivid years of engineering triumphs, of financial splendors – boom times, when British and Continental capital flooded into the fields. Into such an exciting world came two young men originally from Liverpool, Lancashire, who migrated to Perth under a contract of service to the West Australian Government Railways. Their term of contract completed, they threw in their lot where all the action appeared to be, arriving in Kalgoorlie before the turn of the century. James Eastwood, aware of the burgeoning promotion of mining companies, option agreements and the massive business undertakings associated with a new gold field, became involved in that area of work, while his friend, Harry Bennett, elected to remain in the employee of the Government Railways in its Kalgoorlie offices.
It is unbelievable to now contemplate that during this period of the greatest development, the inland gold fields of West Australia had a constant shortage of water! Apart from the occasional winter rainstorms, every drop of water used by the increasing multiple, and the greedy mine furnaces, had been provided by water carried on the backs of animals, or processed for water drawn from artesian bores, soaks or flat salt pans scattered here and there throughout the wide area. Every home, business and mining complex had water tanks for rain catchment. Elaborate pipes bringing water from immense water condensers made a gallant effort to supply the mines. Without doubt, water accounted for the high cost of gold production throughout the gold fields in the West.
Naturally, the problem had exercised the Government and concerned citizens from the first gold strike of any consequence, and after heated discussions and innumerable schemes offered for consideration, late in 1895, the Chief Government Engineer, C.Y. O’Conner, was instructed to “report and recommend a practical plan to supply water to the gold-fields by means of a pumping scheme.”
It resulted in thirty-one proposals being drawn up, and finally three of these considered. In each case, the source of water was to be a reservoir in the Darling Ranges near Perth from which the water was to be pumped in successive lifts to the Eastern Gold Fields. The accepted plan demanded twenty-eight‑foot lengths of thirty‑inch pipe to be clamped and pressure squeezed together to make a long, water-tight cylinder, the joints leaded and caulked by special machines invented for the purpose.
The amazing project took about five years to complete. The excavations for the Mundaring Weir were completed in April, 1898 and the laying and jointing of the pipes began in March 1901. Pumping started in April, 1902, amidst rejoicing of the patient multitude. Slowly the work proceeded towards its grand climax, free flowing water in the thirsty land! Only one major tragedy marred the enterprise. The brilliant but super sensitive Chief Engineer, deeply hurt by personal criticisms and accusations, rode his favorite horse into the waters of Fremantle Harbor, which his skill had years before deepened and redesigned, and there shot himself.
Despite so shocking an interlude, the Kalgoorlie Water Scheme moved towards its completion. While the population waited there was a spirit of hope and achievement on every side; an infectious atmosphere of triumph in gold mining in general and in personal endeavor. It was time to be happy; for Youth to meet, to dance, to be merry, to marry.
So it happened on Sunday before Christmas in the year 1901 that Canon E. M. Collick of the Anglican Church in Maritana Street, Kalgoorlie, intoned in slow, deliberate voice:
“I publish the banns of marriage between James Wilkinson Eastwood of Kalgoorlie in the State of Western Australia, and Louisa Mary Everett of the same place, the marriage to be celebrated on the 15th day of January, 1902. If any man show just cause or impediment why these two be not joined together in holy wedlock you do so declare it. This is the first reading.”
On two successive Sunday mornings did the Canon publish the banns of marriage. On the 15th day of January, 1902, James Wilkinson Eastwood took Louisa Mary Everett to be his lawful wedded wife.
It is an exercise in pleasurable imagination to picture the two prancing horses drawing the wedding carriage to the red brick Church, then back to the home of the bride for the nuptial feast. However, one is not left to imagination alone when picturing the bridal couple; they have been made real in a beautifully-preserved photograph of that occasion. The bride stands by her seated bridegroom, after the fashion of the day, regal in her finely-tucked silken gown, designed and sewn by herself. Its swirling hemline flares out in a slight train, and a Maltese lace yoke swoops upwards to form a high neckline fastened with a gold brooch. A gold locket, holding a miniature photo of her new husband, hangs from a short chain around her neck, possibly an engagement token to match the diamond and ruby ring he had offered as a pledge of their love. Isn’t that grand.
Before another year had dawned, on another Sunday morning, the Anglican Canon published the banns of marriage of Harry Bennett and his pretty bride-to-be, Alice Maude Everett, the next in line of the Everett family of girls. She was winsome and demure, a perfect foil for her ebullient bride groom.
On every hand the population was entering in to the festivities of a prospering community. Wilfred’s Livery Stables were supplying a current need, and the future was as whimsically unpredictable as life itself, and as uncertain as the gold of that unknowable land.
In the first week of the year 1903 the long-awaited “Pipeline to the Sun,” as the Gold fields Water Scheme had been affectionately called, reached Mount Charlotte, Kalgoorlie. From the initial turning of the sod in Mundaring near Perth to the completion of the large reservoir on the identical site where Paddy Hannan’s horse had cast a shoe almost ten years earlier, it had been the hottest news of the century. Where that unassuming old miner and his Irish mates had caught the first gleam of alluvial gold there stood Mount Charlotte reservoir, set amidst its massive buttresses.
In a temperature of 108 degrees Fahrenheit, the population of a wide area of gold-bearing land was in festive mood when Sir John Forrest, the Premier of the newly-declared State of Western Australian, stood on the approaches to the towering structure. In the words of an excited reporter of the “Kalgoorlie Miner”:
“The valves turned, and the water gushed forth as a crystal fountain, cascading down to the floor of the big tank . . . .”
At the end of his opening address the Premier repeated words he had spoken before the Parliamentary Assembly in the year 1896, where he had urged the Goldfields Water Scheme be approved by Parliament:
“Future generations, I am certain, will think of us and bless us for our far‑reaching patriotism, and it will be said of us, as Isaiah said of old, ‘they made a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. . .’”
Rivers of water indeed! Sprinklers were turned on in the streets of the main cities, and colored lights played on fountains of water, flooding the dirt gutters of the hitherto thirsty land. Never again!
On the 12th of April of that historic year of 1903 I was born, the first child of James Wilkinson Eastwood and his bride, Louisa Mary Everett. It was the peak year of gold production in the famous gold mines of Kalgoorlie and Boulder, with gold reaching almost two million ounces, then valued at the current price of three pounds ten shillings per troy ounce of twelve ounces to the pound.
