LOVELY LEONORA AND GHOSTLY GWALIA

Sunday 14 July 2013

It was a lovely sunny day for riding into Leonora, the north eastern goldfields town that has seen much bigger days. Now Leonora is a tiny town with a row of closed down little shops, 2 roadhouses, a pub, a surprisingly large and well stocked supermarket, a post office and a tourist office. And a caravan park for Mighty Intrepids! The town relies on some mining contractors, along with hopeful gold prospectors with their metal detectors, and a lot of grey nomads coming through in the winter months with their four wheel drives and caravans.

Last night Dave and I shared the caravan park camp kitchen with several gold fossickers, men chatting around a campfire about their metal detectors and their dreams of finding gold nuggets.

And there were also "The Wombles" who entertained us without realising it! These were a group of 4 English grey nomads travelling together in 2 huge caravans. They had the same accents as the TV show Wombles, (little mole-like creatures) and they were just as unwittingly cute, with their funny comments. The 2 blokes were sent to the camp kitchen by their wives to do the evening cooking while the wives did their own tippling inside their vans, which made them weave strangely when they came to check the cooking progress. Both the male Wombles were armed with large glasses of whisky, which meant they got tipsier and tipsier as they tried to cook the evening meals. The shorter Womble, a little old guy with white hair and bushy white eyebrows brought the camp kitchen to life the first night when he turned on all the k*** on a big barbeque stove he did not understand, then he leant down to check out why it wasn't alight, then he pressed a Start button and whoosh! He singed his bushy eyebrows with a shout of "Eee by Goom!" Funny! You had to be there!

The next day we rode 3km into the "suburb" of Leonora, a ghost town called Gwalia, which once used to have the big Sons of Gwalia goldmine operating in the 1900s. A young American mining engineer, Herbert Hoover who ended up being an American President, was the Mine Manager at Gwalia at these times. We spent some time at the Gwalia Museum, poring over lots of interesting old goldfields exhibits housed in different buildings, including a tour through Hoover House, which was the Mine Manager's home, overlooking the mine site of course, like the King of the Castle. This museum was worth the $10 entry fee per person, as it was informative and had an outdoor section with mine equipment as well. The old Sons of Gwalia goldmine has now turned into a huge open cut mine which is in operation today, though on a much smaller scale than the Super pit in Kalgoorlie.

We then walked down the hill to see what was left of the little town of Gwalia, where all the peasants…oops, mine workers lived. (The Mine Manager's residence overlooking them all made me think of a feudal English system.)

Now all that is left of the township of Gwalia are a few tattered old tin and hessian shacks still tottering in the windy spinifex paddocks. In the early 1970s I knew an elderly couple who lived in Gwalia, Josef Zorzut who was from Yugoslavia, and his wife Louisa Brown who was part Aboriginal. They lived in a tiny tin and hessian house, which was really comfortable and ingeniously set up with homemade objects. They were the most hospitable old couple and they were typical of the residents who stayed behind in Gwalia when the mine closed down in the 1960s. Now all that's left are the ghosts of old timers' shacks with their homemade household implements still lying around inside and outside. Dave and I found the grounds of Gwalia a photographer's paradise, as we were able to gingerly make our way inside some of the shacks and take many photos. We had to be careful as the shacks were really condemned buildings with broken floorboards and flapping walls. Ghosts!

Even the grand double storey State Hotel looked ghostly and neglected, as it has been vacant and boarded up for years.

Ah, such is progress!