Leonora

The only caravan park in Leonora is busy at this time of year because of prospectors who come looking for gold. These are mostly retirees but I met a French couple travelling the country who stopped here for a couple of weeks to try their luck.

Yesterday we visited the Sons of Gwalia Mine Precinct which is only a couple of kilometres out of town. There is a large open cut gold mine which is no longer active as the mining is now limited to underground.  The workforce is fly-in-fly-out so there are dozens of dongas around town to accommodate them.

There is also an airstrip where 747s can land and was used to bring in "boat people" when an immigration detention centre was located here.

The mine at Gwalia was closed in the 1960s and the miners just abandoned their corrugated iron homes leaving many of their personal items behind, including a piano. I walked around this historic site and looked inside some of these buildings. They must have been freezing cold in winter and wickedly hot in summer as the only internal lining was hessian and newspapers. 

Up the top of the hill is Hoover House which was designed by Herbert Hoover who was the 24 year old mine manager at the time. It cost 600 pounds to construct when the average house only cost 100 pounds to build. Hoover went to the goldfields in China and eventually became the 31st President of the United States.