Road Trip to Kalgoorlie – Western Australia’s Goldfields

Trip Date: March 2018
Destination: Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia
From: Maylands, Perth

🚗 Getting There: The Journey from Maylands

The drive from Maylands to Kalgoorlie covers approximately 600 kilometres via the Great Eastern Highway. From Maylands, head east through the suburbs before joining the Great Eastern Highway proper. The journey takes around 6.5 to 7 hours depending on stops.

Route Summary:
📍 Maylands → Great Eastern Highway → Merredin → Southern Cross → Kalgoorlie
🛣️ Total Distance: ~600 km
⏱️ Drive Time: 6h 30m – 7h
🛢️ Fuel Stops: Merredin (recommended), Southern Cross

What to Expect: It is not a particularly exciting drive scenery-wise – the landscape does not change much. You will have the historic Goldfields Water Supply Scheme pipeline as your companion for most of the journey. This engineering marvel stretches 560km from Mundaring Weir to Kalgoorlie, built in the 1890s to supply water to the goldfields.

🚙 Our Trip: First Impressions

[Write your personal experience here – Magda’s impressions, your favorite moments, something unexpected, why this trip mattered, your recommendations…]

This section is for your personal story. What did you think when you first saw the Super Pit? How did Magda react? Any funny moments or surprises along the way?

⛏️ A Brief History of Kalgoorlie

In the winter of 1893, prospectors Patrick (Paddy) Hannan, Tom Flanagan, and Dan Shea were travelling to Mount Youle when one of their horses cast a shoe. During the unexpected stop, the men noticed gold in the area around the foot of what is now Mount Charlotte.

On 17 June 1893, Hannan filed a Reward Claim, leading to hundreds of men swarming to the area in search of gold. Kalgoorlie – originally called “Hannan’s Find” – was born. Within a decade, it became one of Australia’s most significant gold mining towns.

🕳️ The Super Pit – Australia’s Open Cut Wonder

The Fimiston Open Pit, colloquially known as the Super Pit, was Australia’s largest open cut gold mine until 2016. Located off the Goldfields Highway on the south-east edge of Kalgoorlie, the pit is truly massive:

📏 Length: 3.5 kilometres
📐 Width: 1.5 kilometres
📊 Depth: Over 600 metres
🏗️ Owner: Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines (Barrick Gold & Newmont Goldcorp)
💰 Production (2018): 628,000 troy ounces (19.5 tonnes) of gold
👷 Workforce: ~1,100 employees and contractors

Standing at the viewing platform and looking into this enormous wound in the earth gives you a true sense of the scale of modern mining operations. The Super Pit is still active and continues to produce gold today.