The need for water on the goldfields - Perth to Kalgoorlie Pipeline Project - Western Australia

Welcome back. 
Last week we continued our tour north from Cave Hill along the Woodlines to Coolgardie and I told you a little about the goldrushes and the Perth to Kalgoorlie Pipeline. 
Click here if you missed it - Coolgardie - Gold Fever

Most Australians have probably heard of the Perth to Kalgoorlie pipeline in Western Australia. It is a feature of the Great Eastern Highway as you travel between Perth and Kalgoorlie. You can follow the Golden Pipeline Heritage Trail and stop at interpretive sites along the way where you can learn more about this huge engineering project.

When gold was discovered at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, thousands of prospectors flocked to the goldfields. In the arid and hot dry conditions of the goldfields, water was scarce and was sold by the can and became more expensive than whiskey. Water supplies from artesian bores, wells (such as Hunt's well at Gnarlbine - see previous post) and condensing plants, provided some water, but not enough for the thousands of people and livestock at the goldfields The lack of fresh water led to poor sanitation and diseases such as typhoid. 

John Aspinall in 1895 described condensed water as "inspid, resembling boiled water with a dash of galvanized iron and several other unrecognizable substances including smoke".

In 1895 the first plans were prepared by Engineer-in-Chief CY O'Connor, for an engineering feat that would stagger the world — an attempt to pump fresh water uphill 560 kilometres from Mundaring Weir in the Darling Ranges near Perth to the goldfields of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie.

The story of the CY O'Connor and the pipeline is revered in WA history. Built between 1898 and 1903, the pipeline has delivered water to Kagloorlie for over 100 years.

What I didn't know was that sections of the pipe were replaced with wooden pipes wrapped in wire in the 1930s.  As we travelled along the Golden Pipeline Heritage Trail, just east of Yellowdine we found coils of wire laying by the old pipeline and wondered what they had been used for. 

The original pipes were constructed from steel but over the years corrosion and leakage occurred. During the 1930s the pipes were lifted, repaired or replaced, lined with concrete, re-laid above ground on concrete blocks and the lead-packed joints were replaced with welded joints. 

 

 Unemployment was very high during the Depression. The Goldfields Water Supply Department was put under political pressure to replace damaged sections with wooden pipes, providing jobs, boosting the timber industry and saving costs. 

 

The wooden pipes were made of karri planks bound together with galvanised wire, and then coated with tar and bitumen. 64 kilometres of wooden pipes were used in low pressure sections. However they were plagued with leakage problems, termite damage and dry rot, and were all replaced in 1971.

Where possible the pipeline was built alongside the route of the existing railway line to enable the pipes to be easily transported. Interestingly, the length of the train carriages determined the length of the pipes (28 feet or 8.5 metres). Eight pump stations were built along the length of the pipeline to push the water along the pipe. Below you can see the old Merredin Pumping station. 

 CY O'Connor was a great visionary and is much revered in Western Australian history.  He was responsible for planning and building major public works during the 1890s that stimulated the development of Western Australia including the Fremantle Harbour.  

The pipeline project was one of Australia's greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. Sadly he never lived to see the pipeline operating. Funding delays, political resistance and extreme criticism took a toll on O’Connor and he tragically took his life in the ocean near Fremantle on 10 March 1902, ten months before the pipeline’s completion. 

CY O'Connor

Lord and Lady Forrest officially opened the scheme ten months after O'Connor's death, in three separate ceremonies at Mundaring, Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie on 22 and 24 January 1903. The scheme cost £2 655 220, only slightly more than O'Connor's estimate made seven years earlier (which did not include the extension to Kalgoorlie). 

Today the Goldfields and Agricultural Areas Water Supply Scheme supplies water for domestic, stock and mining purposes to 33,000 rural and town services, to over 100 000 people throughout the goldfields and surrounding agricultural areas, through 8,000 km of pipe over an area covering 44 000 square kilometres. An average of 90 million litres of water is pumped daily taking 5-11 days to reach Kalgoorlie. The pipe network holds 300 million litres of water.

Below you can see the end of the pipe at the Mt Charlotte Reservoir in Kalgoorlie and a view of Kalgoorlie from Mt Charlotte. Today, Mount Charlotte Reservoir is used as a reserve tank. A new main holding tank is located on Mt Percy to the north.

 To learn more, please go to: Golden Pipeline
Valuing Heritage - the Pipeline 

The boys enjoyed exploring the pipeline too!
Thank you for stopping by - I hope you have enjoyed the continuation of our tour. 

 I look forward to hearing from you.

My story about the Perth to Kalgoorlie pipeline was published in "Curious Australis" - January 2014 edition of On The Road magazine. 

I am linking up to Mosaic Monday, Our World Tuesday and Travel Photo Thursday.  Please click on the links to see other contributions from around the world - Mosaic Monday -  Our World Tuesday   Travel Photo Thursday

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Hi everyone, we are back to the goldfields today and continuing our tour up from the Holland Track, Cave Hill, Burra Rock and the Woodlines. If you missed the previous posts you can click on the links here - 
The Holland Track
Cave Hill, Burra Rock and the Woodlines

From Burra Rock it is an easy drive via the gravel Burra Rock and Napean Roads to Coolgardie. 

Bayley and Ford discovered gold at Fly Flat, near Coolgardie, in June 1892 - a year before Hannan, Flanagan and Shea found gold in Kalgoorlie. The discoveries lead to a gold rush which rivaled the Californian and the Klondike gold rushes, and said to be the greatest movement of people in Australia's history. 

Prospectors piled their possessions onto wooden carts, horse-drawn wagons, on horseback, or even walked pushing wheelbarrows to travel overland from Fremantle, Perth, Esperance and Albany to the goldfields. (I told you a bit more about this in my Holland Track post). 

On the goldfields they lived in tents or rough bush shelters, like the one you see below on display at the Kalgoorlie Mining Hall of Fame. (That is a mine head you can see in the background).

My grandfather and great-grandfather came to the goldfields from Victoria, before working on the pipeline and Mundaring Weir projects, and then finally settling at Narrogin and Bilbarin.

It was a tough life and many died in the attempt to strike it rich. There are many unnamed graves in the Coolgardie cemetery, but you can look through the register in the Coolgardie museum if you are looking for the resting place your ancestor - as we did!

A couple of years ago we discovered that my husband's Grandfather was buried at the Coolgardie cemetery in a plot only marked by a number. Since then we have had a headstone erected, and on this trip we went to see it. Now his life and his final resting place have been marked.  You can see the Coolgardie Cemetery in the photos below. Located on the western side of town on the Great Eastern Highway, it is an interesting place to visit as there is a lot of history recorded on its headstones.

Coolgardie was declared a townsite on 24 August 1893 and at its peak had a population of 16,000, with another 10,000 in the surrounding area, 7 newspapers, 2 stock exchanges, 6 banks, 23 hotels, and 3 breweries. Today its heritage precinct is a 'living museum' where you can learn about the history of the gold rush.  It really is worth stopping to look at the magnificent architecture and building.

Below you can see the Coolgardie Town Hall, government offices and Court House, which houses an excellent museum. Completed in 1898, this building is one of the finest examples of early Australian architecture.

A lot of the original buildings were probably built of wood boughs or corrugated tin. However the Government buildings were often built from local stone quarried in the area, and reflected solidarity, the wealth of the goldfields, and their prospects for the future. Now, in Coolgardie, as in other similar early mining towns, the solid stone buildings and a couple of hotels are all that remain. (Cue in the Western Australian mid west is another good example).
 

The area is dotted with mine shafts, so you need to be careful if you go walking. Here is a photo of a minehead located on a look out hill overlooking the town.






Today the Coolgardie only has a small population mostly involved in gold and nickel mining and pastoralism. Below you can see the main street of Coolgardie (the Great Eastern Highway), now very quiet and very different to what it was during the gold rush era. The road is very wide to allow camel and bullock trains to turn in the street.

From Western Australia

Here is another photo of the government buildings in Coolgardie. You could easily spend an hour or two in the museum and strolling around the town.


A prospector's cart displayed in the museum. The museum is a fascinating place to visit.


 
In the hot dry conditions of the goldfields, water was scarce, and was distilled and sold by the can. In 1895 the first plans were prepared by Engineer-in-Chief CY O'Connor, for an engineering feat that would stagger the world — an attempt to pump fresh water uphill 560 km, from Mundaring Weir in the hills near Perth to the goldfields of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie.

The pipeline was completed in 1903, and is still in use today supplying water through 8000 kilometres of pipe to over 100,000 people and six million sheep throughout the goldfields and surrounding agricultural areas, over an area covering 44 000 square kilometres. 
(I will be back to tell you about that another day).

The pipeline is a major feature of the Great Eastern Highway on the way to Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie.



From Coolgardie we decided to go south along the gravel Victoria Rock Road to Gnarlbine Rock - 29km to the south. Explorer Henry Maxwell Lefroy camped here and discovered water on 8 June 1863, followed by Charles Cooke Hunt on 16 August 1864. Hunt improved the well and recorded its indigenous name, Mullinquirt. The rock, soak and well were one of the principal water supplies for the Coolgardie goldrush before the building of the pipeline.  John Holland and his party arrived at Gnarlbine on 16 June 1893, and reached Coolgardie on 18 June 1893.

As you can see in the images below, the well is now disused, but you can see the dry- stone wall construction, typical of hand built wells of that era. The rock is a great place to take a break, go for a walk or have lunch.  Our children enjoyed looking for tadpoles in the gnamma water holes on the rock.

My exploration of both Charles Cooke Hunt and John Holland with started a few years before when we found a "H" blazed on a tree near Cave Hill, intersected at Gnarlbine.

In the Coolgardie Pioneer cemetery is Agnes and John Holland's headstone - Agnes, died on 7 May 1894 at the age of 25, and John on 10 November 1936 at the age of 80.

Thanks for stopping by. I look forward to hearing from you and hope you have enjoyed the next part of our tour, but it is not over yet. We still have more granite rocks to explore, history to discover, and camps to camp.  

Do you like deliving into your ancestor's and country's history? I think the older I get the more interested I become. How about you?

I am linking up with Mosaic Monday, Our World Tuesday and Travel Photo Thursday. Please click on the links to see contributions from around the world.  
Mosaic Monday
Our World Tuesday 
Travel Photo Thursday

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