Yesterday I left Perth with a full tank, a carefully weighed load, and the quiet conviction that I had forgotten something vital. Six hundred and fifty kilometres later I was in Kalgoorlie and still hadn’t worked out what it was, so I have decided it can’t have mattered.
Today was the good bit: north from Kalgoorlie to Leonora. The last leg before the learning starts.
First stop, the Broad Arrow Tavern. Men came up this road more than a century ago, leaving homes and families behind to go looking for gold, and standing in that gravel car park you can still feel the traffic of them. I parked the Prado out front and took the photo in black and white, because some places have already decided what era they’re in.
Then the highway did what this highway does. A sky with no clouds in it, a road with no bends in it, the odd road train, the odd caravan, and nothing else for hours. You top a rise, see out over the bush, and it simply keeps going — in every direction, forever. It could not look less like New Zealand, and it is beautiful in a completely different language.
Mid-morning I pulled over, dropped the tailgate, and cooked a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea beside the road. Food tastes better cooked outside. This is not an opinion; it is physics. I have spent a working life in remote places, and a two-burner stove on a tailgate can still make me absurdly happy. Everything needed for the moment, on board and working.
Next, Niagara Dam. Call me old-fashioned, but I was raised to believe a dam’s entire job is stopping water. This one is guarding a puddle. I’m sure it serves a purpose; it just isn’t obviously that one. Down below the wall there was a campsite with a single caravan in it, and for a moment I completely understood the appeal — proper space, proper quiet, none of those coastal “campsites” that are really car parks with canvas. Too cold this week for the swag, which is why the swag is at home. I’m told this makes me soft. I can live with soft. Soft is warm.
Then Gwalia. I drove in and thought, honestly, that the neighbourhood looked a bit rough. Then I realised I was driving through the museum. The houses are exhibits. They are supposed to look like that. I would like to formally apologise to the town of Gwalia for judging it.
The old timber headframe still stands over it all, and next to everything is a mine pit you could lose a suburb in. I was always taught to fill my holes back in. Apparently the rule scales poorly.
Up the hill is Hoover House, where I’m staying, and I will be honest with you: wow. This was the mine manager’s residence, commissioned by a young Herbert Hoover when he ran the Sons of Gwalia mine — some years before he took a different management job, running the United States. The Goldfields have always been a reasonable place to build a CV.
My room has a brass bed, a fireplace, and about four metres of ceiling. I am aware that “hardened prospector” and “heritage bed and breakfast” sit oddly in the same sentence. I’m choosing to acclimatise gradually.
Dinner at the pub. The best photograph of the day is the one I didn’t take: a bloke walked in wearing an Akubra and a stockman’s vest, everything on him the colour of the dirt, red dog at his heel. He collected a case of twenty-four beers and a bottle of Jim Beam and walked back out into the night. Sunday. Taking it easy.
I finished my evening with a cup of tea, which tells you how the hardening is going.
Tomorrow at 8:30 I meet Lisa and Tony of Goldtalk Leonora for my first day of instruction, out on real ground with a real detector. Which makes tonight a small landmark: my last night of never having swung a metal detector. Whatever else happens out here, that sentence stops being true at half past eight tomorrow morning.
If you’re new here and wondering why a 61-year-old is doing this at all, the why is here.