Today we drove 200km south to Norseman via Coolgardie and get ready for the first leg of our return Nullarbor traverse tomorrow.

While my lovely wife was at the physiotherapist for an hour in the morning, I passed this pink building……

…a Bavarian castle….

…and a duck pond. Talk about variety. Kalgoorlie has it all!

Mallard – an introduced duck into Australia.

Mother Grey teal looks so sweet…

…until the coot got too close.

Pacific duckling

The Museum of the Goldfields is worth a visit. The vault houses specimens of value…

…like these sovereigns minted from Kalgoorlie gold in the early part of the 1900s.

There is information of the Wangkatja people. The trade routes and paths across WA with commodities such as desert spears, shells, ochre and shields was well presented.

The life of the early miners who moved into Wangkatja lands was displayed.

The miners basic toolkit.

Everything they owned could be carried on a home-made wheelbarrow.

Home made bicycle from 1899 of the real “Mulga Bill”, a dryblower from Leonora who travelled across the goldfields. Dryblowers were miners who crushed the gold ore and extracted the gold without water.

Image:WA Museum

Those who made some money could invest in a bellows driven dryblower to extract the gold from the crushed ore.

Life in the wild west – a man trap used on claims to deter claim jumpers moving in.

Early form of PPR for underground miners.

Back to Kalkurla do do another trail in this bushland park.

Eucalyptus kruseana

Currawong

Woodland beside the Great Eastern Highway on the way to Coolgardie.

The long haul to the goldfields.

Gold of a different nature growing beside the highway.

Dried out paper daisies

Grevillea

Pink verticordia

Yellow verticordia

Calytrix

Melaleuca

Regular readers will remember from a previous post that Norseman was named after the prospector’s horse. You could call it a one horse town…..

…but there are camels too! Afghan Cameleers provided transport services from Esperance to Kalgoorlie in the early days of settlement. The artist managed to iron out most of their cantankerous traits.