Into the WA Goldfields

For some reason, we were awake early today and left Balladonia before our normal departure time. The long straight stretches of road continued.

We had a 400 kilometre trip today that was mostly devoid of any highlights. It was just a long drive through the Southern Woodlands. These were quite different from the more arid vegetation of the last few days.

We have now completed our travels across the Nullabor Plain – a distance of around 1,380 kilometres over the last three days. The hour of the day over this part of  our drive has been somewhat confusing. Between Ceduna and Balladonia, there is an informal time zone that is 45 minutes ahead of Western Australia’s offical time. We set our watches to this time as it was used by the roadhouses and restaurants along the way. However, we occasionallly got a brief telephone connection and our phones showed the official time for part of the day and the unoffical time at other times.  We had to remember to ignore the time on our phones and just rely on the time on our watches.

At one point our map showed a lake coming up but it was just a very large salt pan. As dry as it was, it was still an interesting sight.

Well before lunch we had reached the town of Norseman where we turned north towards  Kalgoorlie. This was the first real town that we come across in three days. 

Norseman started as a mining town by prospectors convinced that the area was as rich in gold as Kalgoorlie-Coolgardie. When gold was discovered in 1892 it was known simply as the ‘Dundas Field’ and the town which sprang up was simply called ‘Dundas’. By 1894 it was known as ‘Norseman’ and had, reputedly, been named after a horse, ‘Hardy Norseman”, owned by one of the prospectors.  It has been claimed that ‘Norseman’ kicked at a large nugget and discovered a substantial reef.

I had been concerned that the sat-nav feature on our car had stopped working but it suddenly came to life when we reached Norseman. I found a shady spot to reset all the settings. I’m very happy that it is working again. I’m assuming that it needs some constant, or at least frequent, phone contact which is not possible on the Nullabor.

There’s not much to see in this town other than the sculpture of some camels on the roundabout at the main highway intersection. Camels were used for transport to open up this area in the late 1880s.

We picked up some sandwiches at a cafe run by some lovely Thai women and carried them with us to eat later in the day. 

On one of the street corners, we found that the road verge was covered in colorful Gazania flowers. The plants originated from South Africa and whilst they have become weeds in Australia, their colours are still vibrant and attractive.

The landscape continued as drove north. We passed around ten mining sites along the one hundred kilometre final stretch, all of them mining Nickel. One of these was the twin towns of Kambalda which was developed around 1970, and as such, is one of the newer mining towns. We found a shady spot where we could eat our sandwiches at the side of the sports ground on this hot day . It was a very grand facility and shows the wealth of a succesful mining community. The temperature was 35C today but is expected to settle back into the high 20s over the next few days.

We reached Kalgoorlie in the early afternoon. I should use its correct name of Kalgoorlie-Boulder as these once seperate towns have merged into a much larger city. We will explore it tomorrow.

We had two tasks once we arrived. The first was to get the car washed. It was not only dusty but the front and grill were plastered with dead insects and grasshoppers. Secondly, we needed to find an outdoor / camping shop to replace our little fridge that stopped working a few days ago. We need to keep some food items cold.