Boulder started as a separate mining town from Kalgoorlie. Now both townships are part of a unified municipality but some people in Boulder don’t feel that way. Chunky (Kin Gent) is a local character and woodworker in Boulder. His workshop was a stop on our “Curious Kalgoorlie” tour. Chunky takes waste wood and makes stuff. Some of the hardest woods he puts into a tumbler with oils to make Nullarbor Nuggets that are used for jewelry and to make little figures. We each got a little sac of them along with some leather to make them into “little buddies.” He also makes trays, plaques and solid body electric guitars. He takes wood with parts rotten or worn away and fills them with epoxy and polishes them with oils.
Chunky is a storyteller, his dog is a dingo half breed, and he will tell you that Boulder is superior to Kalgoorlie because it has no stoplights and no McDonalds, both signs of municipal decay. Downtown Boulder is distinct from downtown Kalgoorlie. We drove from Chunky’s to the Town hall through residential streets with typical “outback” awnings, not for rain but to allow you to sit out in the shade in the late afternoon.
Downtown has its hotels and emporia but they are not as grand or as ornate as those in its twin township.
That changes when you get to town hall. It is a civic building that housed the library, now a museum, and a main hall. The main feature is a hand painted curtain by Philip Goatcher in 1908, depicting the Bay of Naples, honoring Italian immigrants who came to work the gold mines. The curtain still rises and falls on its original mechanism more than a century old. The curtain complements the tin ceiling and the wrought iron balustrades. The hall has seen performances by a range of artists including Dame Joan Sutherland to AC/DC. Members of the local historical society served tea and, what they called, nibbles to hold us over until we could have brunch on the train.
The train dropped us off at Kalgoorlie station but because we were there for three hours it could not stay at the platform so it moved on beyond town to a siding where they could load some of us, move the train forward and load another tranche of the 200 or so passengers. To get to the train we traveled the Kalgoorlie Bypass Road. The road started as a massive, community wide act of civil disobedience. The town wanted a bypass road because of truckloads of both cyanide and Liquified Natural Gas rolling through both downtowns to get to the mines. Officials dragged their feet and put up roadblocks. One weekend in 1992 a local suggested that officials take a three day vacation.
Mining towns have a lot of heavy equipment lying around. With the bigwigs taking a short holiday the town got into their D9 Cats and 16G Graders and in three days the “rebel roadbuilders” built the bypass road. Both communities turned out in mass to either work, provide food and refreshment, or just to cheer them on.
Officials were incensed and closed the road saying it didn’t meet highway standards. Truckers used it anyway, running the barriers at the risk of losing their commercial licences. The townspeople threatened to blockade the official highway if the State would not open the rebel road. So, the officials inspected the road and found that it DID meet all the standards for a state highway. They sealed the road and now it’s an official state highway that we can, and did, drive on.
