Coolgardie

We did some historical research on the town of Coolgardie this morning. It was not difficult to do because the town has conveniently placed plaques at strategic locations that give visitors like us a glimpse into the hey-day of this now sleepy town. Coolgardie was the site of the original gold discovery that eventually gave rise to the mining operation at Kalgoorlie (25 miles away) which today is the largest open cut gold mine in the world. But initially the gold rush was sited in Coolgardie. At its peak the town sported two stock exchanges, 25 stock brokers, 26 hotels, 3 breweries, 7 news papers and 14 churches. Today Coolgardie is a sleepy town of 1200.

The Pharmacuetical Museum had all the things one would expect, old bottles and containers of patent medicines promising to cure every possible disease and all kinds of implements from the pre-electric age. The more interesting exhibit however was related to a mine rescue that took place in 1907 when an Italian miner (Modesto Varischetti, know as Charlie) was trapped in a local mine by flood waters and was eventually rescued by hard hat divers after being trapped for 10 days. The somewhat mind blowing thing about this event is that water is incredibly scarce in the Coolgardie/Kalgoolie area and even today there is no reliable local water supply, and water is piped in from Perth.

On the way out of Coolgardie I noticed a local garage/workshop that had two old OKA trucks in the front yard. Unfortunately I did not get a picture. These are 4x4 work vehicles that were made by a Western Australian company for a number of years. Here is a link to a wiki page about OKAs