Kambalda Mine

 mine  Add category

 Upload a photo

Reference for location:
bonzle.com/c/a?a=p&p=776&pg=1&m=0&c=3&x=121%2E697898664...

Kambalda is located 75 kilometres south east of Coolgardie and 616 kilometres east of Perth. Prior to European settlement the Kambalda area was known to be within the traditional tribal lands of the Galaagu people.

We know our early settlers wanted land and the Government wanted to know what this Colony of Western Australia was all about. Exploration and the search for good land have been responsible for some of the greatest journeys of discovery in European history. We tend to forget or ignore the severity of our climate and cannot conceive the suffering of Burke and Wills, Sturt, Edward John Eyre, the Forrest brothers, John Septimas Roe, CC Hunt and the Gregory brothers. But very little credit is ever given to the discoveries of H M Lefroy, Gilles McPherson and all the prospectors who blazed the trail for others but never made maps or kept diaries. It was a harsh country and if your skills were not good enough, you perished.

Europeans came, survived and settled. C C Hunt made three journeys from York right through this area in the 1860’s setting up water supplies for others to follow and use. Forrest and Lefroy were also in this area in the 1860’s. Lefroy was searching for land. These people travelled under the most exhausting conditions and yet two brothers named Dunn casually walked into one of Hunt’s night camps, north east of Kambalda. They had come from Ravensthorpe searching for good land.

Hunt’s string of dams, tanks and wells, roughly along the line of the present Perth to Coolgardie railway line, made it possible for others to follow in his tracks. A company called Hampton Land and Railway Syndicate was formed in the year 1880, with the intention of farming land around the Kambalda area. The produce was then transported to Esperance by rail and then shipped out to sea. This sent surveyors and others out along Hunt’s Track to take up good grazing land. Hunt’s Track, with its water supply (not totally reliable, of course) and the camps of the employees of Hampton Land Syndicate made everything so much more bearable for the gold hungry prospectors who were to follow.

In the 1860’s, rumours of “Gold” were circulating. The Government employed Edward Hargraves of Bathurst fame to look for gold. He only travelled as far as Emu Hill near present day Narembeen and reported that the country was not gold bearing. By the late 1800’s, prospectors were out in force. How many and who they were is lost to us except a few names. One of the greatest of all time, Gilles McPherson, was certainly in this region in 1888 and again in 1889, and we have named a children’s playground after him in Kambalda West.

Gold was found in Enuin (1887), Southern Cross (1889), Coolgardie (1892), Kalgoorlie (1893), Menzies, Kanowna, Norseman, and Leonora. Men came from everywhere. Within four years of the first discovery of gold, the limits of the gold bearing country had been defined by prospectors moving across the country on foot, camel, horse or bicycle. Then in December 1896, Percy Larkin, prospecting around the edge of Lake Lefroy in gullies leading off Red Hill, found payable gold. He took 106 ounces of gold to Coolgardie in January 1897 and the Red Hill Rush was on. The very first prospectors lived in and around Red Hill, with the town being surveyed and gazetted in December 1897.

The streets in Kambalda give you the names of some of the leaseholders and Progress Association members of the first year. The town street names, of course, do not give an accurate indication of the number of people who were here at the time. Before there was a “Kambalda” in March or April 1897, a meeting was called by banging a tin lid, “a Roll Up,” for the purpose of forming a Progress Association. According to James Balzano, 300 people were at that first meeting.

When William Wenzel died on 1 June 1897 (he had been sick for several weeks and not a young man), over 40 people attended his funeral. Wenzel had a shop in Widgiemooltha Gully and had previously been at Widgiemooltha and Coolgardie. He is remembered in one of the Kambalda parks. Sarah Jane Wilson came from Widgiemooltha with her husband, two sons and two daughters, their husbands and five grandchildren. What a woman she must have been, keeping her family together and moving as she did from Coolgardie to Widgiemooltha to Kambalda. She was a nurse and looked after Wenzel until he died. She also is remembered in one of our parks.

Kambalda, like so many of our early gold towns lived and died in a fairly short time. By the end of 1907 it was all over except for fossickers and addicted prospectors. Renewed interest in the area occurred in 1954 when George Cowcill took samples of what was thought to be uranium. Analysis found deposits of nickel, and by 1966 Western Mining Corporation established Australia’s first nickel mine.

The story of the discovery and early exploration of Nickel over the summer of 1964-65 is well documented in “Kambalda, History of a Mining Town” by J J Gresham. The first diamond drilling was done in January 1966. The first hole, KD1, is marked with a stone plaque just below the Silver Lake Shaft. Progress was immediate and very rapid. Silver Lake Shaft infrastructure, concentrator, powerhouse and all the necessities mushroomed and a town grew up on the site of the first Kambalda. Western Mining Corporation built a town without crossroads and a sixty year time difference needed a different approach, but a pretty, well designed friendly town appeared out of nowhere. The original street names were re-used; some with the addition of the word “new” and three other “peoples” names were added. George Cowcill, Gordon Adams and Beresford, the last two being Surveyors. After those names were used, the company established and has maintained a policy of naming streets after local Australian flora.

And of course it didn’t stop there, exploration went non-stop and it was soon found that Kambalda was sited over a nickel field. More housing was necessary and a new town site was set up a few kilometres west and became Kambalda West. The same policy as regards to street design and naming stayed in place and another attractive town has grown up.

Gold mining is again, an important part of life in Kambalda with a huge complex of mines and mills at Goldfield’s St Ives, south of Lake Lefroy, S Ives is the second largest gold mining operation in Australia. Time and life do not remain static. Life in mining towns is not always easy, with fluctuating world prices causing down turns, changes in technology, and industrial trouble all having an effect on the town. Kambalda still continues to survive and no-one can see that changing.

Reference for information:
www.coolgardie.wa.gov.au/history/kambalda