William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

Flies and dust were the first plagues of Coolgardie. Living conditions were primitive; men slept in makeshift shacks and tents made from boughs and poles draped with hessian or canvas; some slept in packing cases. They lived on tea brewed in their billy-cans, and ate johnny cakes or 'damper1 (campfire bread made from flour, baking powder, salt and water). Canned food was commonplace, especially tinned meat known as 'tinned dog'. Tin cans, and later empty beer bottles, littered every gold-field for miles around.

As trees were cut down and the earth scoured, dust blew everywhere, especially on a windy day when 'winnowing' was best. This was the simplest way in waterless country to find gold: pouring earth from one pan to another, and letting the wind blow the lighter soil away, leaving pieces of gravel and stone and maybe a golden nugget. An alternative method was 'dry-blowing', when dirt was slid down a tilted sieve and the loose soil blown away by a bellows. When both methods were employed by hundreds of men daily, the result was a semi-permanent dust haze. Men's eyes suffered from this and from a disease spread by flies called sandy-blight. Their bodies suffered from boils, scurvy and dysentery. No-one ever washed.

Among these diggers were two middle-aged Irishmen, Paddy Hannan and Tom Flanagan. They had recently walked to Southern Cross from Parker's Range, a distance of 140 miles.

The first women to arrive at Coolgardie, the wife and daughter of Felix Murphy, appeared on the gold-field in November. The arrival of other women prompted the authorities to urge the naked aborigines to cover themselves and

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In December, Lord Percy Douglas and the Hon David Carnegie, en route for Sydney, left their ship at Albany to try their luck at Coolgardie. Another young man, a Quaker, who arrived on the scene a few years later as a mining engineer - he managed the long used and famous Sons of Gwalia mine at Leonora for a time - was Herbert Hoover, who became President of the United States in 1928.

At the end of 1892 typhoid struck at the Coolgardie diggings, the waterholes dried up and there was a general retreat to Southern Cross - until thunderstorms sent some determined diggers rushing back. Temporarily, as the waterholes gave out again. But in March 1893, there was heavy and consistent rain, and a permanent water supply was established when a bore-hole was drilled and water found northwest of Coolgardie. Some wells were also sunk, and made money for their owners. Norma King reports that a certain Martin Walsh 'charged ten cents for a horse and 15 cents for a camel to drink at his trough.' Water was also sold in Hannan St from a condenser at a shilling a gallon.

The tented township became a more settled community as tradesmen set up store-huts and supply lines improved. There were butchers, blacksmiths, bakers and hotels, and a place to get a wash (2/6) and a shower (7/6).

In March, Bayley and Ford sold the lease on Bayley's Reward for £6,000 and a one-sixth interest. By this time they had acquired over 2,000 ounces of gold from their claim, worth now about $1 million. Arthur Bayley never lived long enough to enjoy his fortune: he died four years later, when he was 31. Ford lived on for another 40 years.

Meanwhile, gold-fever at Coolgardie was unabating, and any rumour of other finds inflamed the afflicted with new excitement and sent ever-optimistic diggers into the wilds again.

There was the Billy-Can rush. Some searchers, looking for a missing man, had paused for a rest at mid-day. One put his billy-can down by a log. In picking it up he caught a flash of gold, and filled his billy with 167 ounces of gold gathered in that area. He was lucky: there was little left afterwards for anyone else. Then, in April 1893, there was the rush to Roaring Gimlet, renamed Goongarrie, a hundred miles north of Coolgardie, where several prospectors struck lucky. Another exodus was initiated in June by a reportedly rich find (bogus as it turned out) at Mount Youle, 50 miles to the north-east.

About 90 men set off on the trail of this supposed bonanza. Two of the veterans, Paddy Hannan and Tom Flanagan, delayed to equip themselves properly, and purchased some horses: Hannan had bad feet. The horses proved to be similarly afflicted, and one threw a shoe halfway along the track to Mount Youle. Flanagan set about reshoeing the beast, and Hannan idly scouted around for any colour.

Hannan was 50. Born in County Clare (like Mary Honeycombe), at the start of the potato famine, he had come to Australia when he was 20 and worked as a

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He was probably 'specking' - walking into the sun and looking for the glitter of gold (best done after heavy rain) - when he found a small nugget. An Irish mate of his, Dan Shea, chanced to pass by on his way to Mount Youle, and joined Flanagan and Hannan in a general search of the slopes and gullies of several low hills in the area. Shea and Flanagan later told different versions of the day's events. But they found more nuggets, decided to peg out a claim, and Paddy Hannan returned to Coolgardie on Saturday, 17 June, to report the find and lodge a reward claim with the solid proof of 100 ounces of gold.

At 9.00pm his claim application was posted on a board outside the registrar's tent, and another rush began. Within three days, some 700 men were beavering away on the new find - which would turn out to be the most golden of them all.

At first known as Hannan's Find, or Hannan's, the site was eventually transformed into a township named after an edible silky pear the natives called Kulgooluh, which became Colgoola and then Kalgurli. Before the end of June several leases had been registered and the red dust enveloping the area by day could be seen from miles away; at night hundreds of camp-fires twinkled on and around the low hills that now had names, Mt Charlotte, Maritana, Hannan's Hill and Cassidy's.

In July, two prospectors, Sam Pearce and Bill Brookman, acting for an Adelaide syndicate, discovered the Ivanhoe and Great Boulder reefs, some three miles south of Hannan's. They eventually pegged 2,000 acres. The mines thereon and the massive lode formation located in November at Brown Hill by a Canadian, Larry Cammillieri became the basis of the Golden Mile, the richest gold-bearing area in the world. It was rich in free gold (initially over 5oz/ton) and even richer below this in gold telluride ore. Without these finds Kalgoorlie would in due course, like Coolgardie, have become another ghost town. Hannan's Find, of alluvial gold, gave out within 2 years.

Men in their hundreds flocked to Hannan's and one or two women, the first being a pregnant Wilhelmina Sloss, who came there in late July with her husband, Joe, and a little daughter. They lived in a tent. She had a second daughter in December.

By Christmas 1893, over one hundred leases had been registered, and gold had been found 13 miles to the north-east at White Feather (Kanowna).

The following year a site for a township, west of Mt Charlotte, was selected and laid out in a grid, six blocks by two, by February 1895. Hannan St was parallelled on the south side by Egan St (named after Diamond Dick who had

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pegged out Maritana Hill, later Mt Gledden). The central north/south street was named Maritana.

On 1 May 1895 the first municipal elections were held in Kalgoorlie, and a handsome young New Zealand lawyer, John Wilson, become the town's first mayor.

A visitor from Coolgardie later described the three-year-old mining town. It was, he said ironically, 'an impressive sight, as the stage coaches rattled up the long and straggling main street, after the hills and dales of 25 miles of rough, rutted and dusty bush track. On the left the post office, a 10' by 12' bag shanty: and in the middle of that apology for a street (holes, ruts and stumps) was the jail, which consisted of an iron chain with rings attached to it, round a big gum-tree. These with a few shanties, shacks, saloons and humpies comprised the structure of the settlement.'

There was no sanitation, and apart from dysentery the chief scourge on the gold-fields was typhoid. Contaminated water killed hundreds in Coolgardie in 1894-95. At the height of the epidemic five or six men were being buried every day in nameless and unmarked graves. Most were in their twenties. Their coffins were generally made of packing cases, which were stamped 'This side up' or 'Keep in a cool place' or 'With care'.

Sister O'Brien was one of two nurses employed by Warden Finnerty to care for the sick. The nurses came by sea from Adelaide to Fremantle, and onwards by train and coach. She said: 'The dirtiest looking objects imaginable, covered in sand and dust, indescribable, met our sight the morning after our arrival... One was a young digger with rheumatic fever who had lain in his clothes, immobile and unwashed, for several weeks... Tents, tents, and still more tents, men everywhere, old singlets and trousers were the order of their dress. The hopeless look of everything would have discouraged the stoutest heart. However, we got hold of a carpenter to put up frames for our tents, and after a week of difficulty, we began our work.'

It was known as the Government Hospital, and for a time it was the only hospital in an area caring for some 20,000 men. For a time it was a place where men were taken to die instead of to be cured.

The railway construction camps were also riddled with fever. Three nurses came from the Methodist Mission in Perth to the railway camp at Woolgangie early in 1896; there was no doctor. Sister Gertrude wrote: 'My first tent-hospital patient was a wee laddie... I found the boy lying on a few old rugs and chaff bags under the counter of a lemon-squash shop. There was no ventilation and

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Another arrival at this time was the daughter of a brewery worker, who, quoted in Nothing to Spare by Jan Carter, recalled her life as a child living at Boulder, where she was taken from Adelaide, via Esperance, in 1897 when she was four.

'When we went to the gold fields, there was no water. We used to have to buy water, condensed water, 2s6d a kerosene tin. And when you bought it, it was hot. We always had water to drink, but I don't remember too many baths. The tub was put in the bedroom and we were all given a bath out of the same water. At school, there was a bucket of water for us to have a drink out of. In the winter time, the rains filled great tanks in the back yard, and mother had a beautiful vegetable garden. My sister and I had to go into the bush to get water from a soak of some kind, and we'd bring the water home in tubs... When I was 14 [in 1907], my sister Ida and Mum left the gold fields and came to Perth. Mum wanted to get away from the mines, so that my brothers didn't go to work in the mines. She was fearful of that - men were getting killed like flies down the mines. Oh, it was crude! All at once there'd be a whistle blown and you'd know there was an accident. A lot of men were killed in the mines, and besides that they were getting miners' silicosis... I got a job in a boarding-house in Boulder as a kitchen maid... I used to wash up the dishes, peel the potatoes, scrub the floor. I was busy - not too busy - but I enjoyed it there. There were boarding-houses all over the place, all sorts of women running them.'

The railway line had reached Coolgardie in March 1896 and came to Kalgoorlie in September. Over 3,000 people attended the official opening ceremony in Kalgoorlie, which was performed by the Governor, Sir Gerard Smith, and followed by a banquet (for an elite 260) in the Miners' Institute. Other amenities were installed thereafter: a sanitary system, the hospital and a fire brigade. The latter was much needed, as major fires were a feature of those days: most of Kalgoorlie was burnt down and rebuilt before the Great War.

The railway line was extended to Kanowna in 1898 and north to Leonora in 1903. A loop line was constructed around Boulder in 1902. The Gold Rush County tourist brochure says: 'Before the railway arrived everything was expensive: cake was 2s a Ib, milk (if available) 1s a pint, eggs 5d each, beer 3s a bottle, whisky 12/6, champagne 25s, water 6d - 4/6 a gallon... But gold was plentiful. Through all the gold-rush years the price of gold was about £4 an ounce, and most finds were giving the prospectors at least one ounce a day.'

In 1894 gold production in Western Australia topped £1 million. Hundreds of mining companies were floated in London, peaking at just under 800 in 1896. After five years of frenzied speculation, bogus dealing and fraud, the boom went bust, and the companies were reduced to 140.

There were about 6,000 people in Kalgoorlie in 1896 and over a thousand in Boulder. The following year, Paddy Hannan returned to Kalgoorlie, and a tree was planted at the spot where he said he had first found gold. Years later it died

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In 19.. a tough bronze replica took its place. The original statue, restored, now stands safely inside the Town Hall foyer.

The Town Hall would not be completed until 1908. The railway station, with one of the longest (313m) platforms in Australia, was built ten years earlier, and the Post Office and its clock tower in 1901. One of the first hotels to be built, in 1897 on the site of the tent hospital, was the Palace Hotel, on the corner of Hannan St and Maritana St. The Palace, built of local ashlar stone, became a fashionable establishment, the temporary home of visiting VIPs, and a second home to John Honeycombe.

It was also the birthplace of one of Kalgoorlie's most famous sons, Walter Lindrum, who was born there in August 1989. The manager of the Palace, Wallace Brownlow, was his godfather, who had leased the hotel's billiard room, with its two tables, to a professional player, Fred Lindrum, Walter's father. The Lindrums moved to Donnybrook soon afterwards, but were back in Kalgoorlie in 1906, when Fred was briefly the manager of the Great Boulder Hotel in Maritana Street, where he also arranged billiard competitions and displays, which John Honeycombe may have seen. By this time Walter was eight. Small for his age even then, he was not thought by his father to have any great potential as a billiard player. One day, however, he would be regarded as the best in the world.

Another famous son, AB Facey, who wrote A Fortunate Life, came to Kalgoorlie in October 1899, when he was 5.

Bert Facey and his brothers and sister stayed with their Aunt Alice, her husband, Archie McCall, and their five daughters and one son near Boulder. They all lived in a large hut: 'It consisted of bush poles for uprights with hessian pulled tight around the poles.' The exterior was white washed, and the interior, 36 feet long, was divided into three rooms; the kitchen was in a separate hut. Water was brought in buckets from the condenser a mile away; it cost 2 shillings a gallon. Condensers converted the salty underground water from bores and wells into something that was drinkable.

Archie McCall's job was to chop wood for the condensers and mines at Boulder. He was away for several weeks at a time and used to take Bert Facey's older brothers with him, Eric (13) and Roy (10). Meanwhile, Aunt Alice made a few extra shillings by taking in washing, and ironing. She and the younger children also made forays in the bush, collecting empty tin cans where prospectors had camped. These were melted down into sticks of solder which then sold at five shillings a pound.

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Bert Facey's brother, Roy, now 13, was left behind in Kalgoorlie, where he worked at a grocer's for about a year, delivering and doing odd jobs around the shop and earning his keep and six shillings a week. Perhaps he served John Honeycombe.

Another arrival in Kalgoorlie at this time was Richard Moore, who would be Mayor of Kalgoorlie for nearly 30 years, from July 1937 to September 1966, and be knighted in 1960. He had set out for the gold-fields early in 1900, when he was 21. Like his father, he was a blacksmith; he was also one of 15 children.

'I caught a cattle boat, the Piroo, from Victoria. Everything seemed to be progressing well until we got out of the bay and then I was for it. I was the first man sick, and very, very sick I was. I ate a meal at Adelaide and then nothing else until I reached Albany in Western Australia. I had never seen the sea before and I didn't care if I never saw it again. On St Patrick's Day, 1900, I arrived in Fremantle, and that night I caught the slow, uncomfortable train to the place of my choice, Kalgoorlie. I stepped off the train and was really amazed at the buildings in the new settlement. All the main buildings [except the Town Hall] were then completed, a remarkable effort as all material had to be brought about 150 miles from Southern Cross, which was the nearest big railway station. All buildings were completed in six years. Everywhere else, people were under canvas, and there was an excitement in the air, an excitement which I will never forget.'

Two years later the population peaked at 30,000; there were 93 hotels and 8 breweries, and the railway passenger traffic between Kalgoorlie and Boulder was the busiest in Western Australia. Electric trams also ran on 15 miles of track, down dusty, treeless roads, and dust haze, caused by horse, camel and human traffic, still infested the area, denuded of trees for miles around: mine machinery was powered by steam, and tons of wood were needed for burning in the boilers. Dust lay everywhere; housewives were plagued by it, and after a family had shared the same bath water in a tub, it would be sprinkled on path and yard in a vain attempt to lay the dust. Occasionally the whole community would be enveloped in huge red dust-storms.

In 1903, when gold production reached a peak of over 1,151,000 onces, the twin towns had five newspapers, 13 banks, 80 mills and cyanide plants, around 100 head-frames, and 590 stamp batteries, whose 24-hour use lent a never-ending sound of thumps and thrumming to every human activity in the town.

Some 7,000 men were employed in mining, and their average pay was £3-12s a week. Tradesmen earned about 12/6 a day and labourers 10 shillings. By 1910 miners at the face were paid £4-10s for a 48-hour week.

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Next to gold, water was the commodity prized above all others in the gold-fields of Western Australia. Boreholes provided some brackish water from salt-lakes that had to be distilled to make it drinkable; this was done by the government. The distillation plant at Coolgardie (population, 15,000 in 1900, with 23 hotels and 3 breweries) produced 100,000 gallons a day and consumed 100 tons of firewood. The water was sold at anything from 6d to 2/6 a gallon, depending on the weather. Trains also brought water from Northam. But this was not enough. Men and beasts were incapacitated and production halted when water supplies ran low. They died when it became contaminated. Any civic development also depended on a reliable flow. A permanent solution had to be found, and the Chief Engineer of the then colony, Charles O'Connor, who was responsible for the construction of Fremantle harbour, devised a scheme in 1896: a pipeline from Perth to Kalgoorlie. It would traverse a distance of 350 miles, uphill.

The cost was colossal, £2% million, and incapable of being supported by the state's 110,000 people. The money was raised by an overseas loan authorised by the Australian government. Work on the pipeline began in 1898. A storage reservoir at Mundaring was built with a 100 foot wall; there were 8 pumping stations and miles of 30-inch steel pipes were laid across the scrub. 'For four years', wrote John K Ewers, 'the pipeline moved slowly eastwards like a great black snake, gangs of hard-working men toiled through the scorching sun of summer, or the cold days of winter, digging trenches and pits, unloading and handling pipes and caulking joints.' They worked at night under huge arc lamps.

The whole scheme was strongly opposed; the cost was enormous; this and the effort would be wasted as the gold-fields were bound to decline; the pipes would leak or burst. O'Connor was so disturbed by the sustained attacks on him and his scheme, that in March 1902 he rode out on his horse and shot himself on a beach south of Fremantle; he was 59. He wrote in a last letter: 'I feel that my brain is suffering... I have lost control of my thoughts. The scheme is alright, and I could finish it if I got the chance and protection from misrepresentation. But there is no hope for that now.'

The pipeline, then the longest in the world, reached Southern Cross, Coolgardie and then Kalgoorlie, where the reservoir was officially opened by the State Governor, Sir John Forrest, on 24 January 1903.

A large crowd gathered, and the ceremony was attended in a temperature of 106 degrees by many dignitaries. Everything but water was drunk.