Kalgoorlie Part One

To help us get a better understanding of the Australian culture, Notre Dame organizes a special class for the exchange students. It's led by two University of Western Australia professors, one Anthropology and one History, and they take us on three weekend trips to different points of interest around Australia. Last weekend we had our first trip, and we went to Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is about 7 or 8 hours from Perth by car, but luckily Notre Dame decided to spring for 45 minute plane ride. Right now Western Australia is going through an economic boom, mostly from all the mining that's taking place, and Kalgoorlie is one of the big mine sites. We went to Kalgoorlie to see the real, raw, red dirt Australia, where men are men and sheep run wild.

The entire weekend was extremely sleep deprived. It started off with a 4:30 am bus ride to the airport. I didn't talk to anyone who got any more than about 3 hours of sleep. Straight from the plane we went to the Superpit, which is a giant hole visible from space with a lot of gold mining happening in it. One of the head mining engineers gave us a presentation about the operation of the mine. He fit the mining engineer stereotype pretty well, since he spiced up the pretty dull presentation with multiple profanities and he looked pretty hungover. The main gist of the presentation was: they blast the rock into smithereens, haul tons and tons of it around to different processing buildings, boil out the gold, and it is very, very expensive. I asked him what percentage of the mining engineers in Kalgoorlie were female, and he said 30%, but I'm not sure I believe him.

From there we were bused to various mining attractions where we shuffled around, rubbing our eyes and trying not to drool too visibly. We went to a museum with replicas of old tyme buildings, like a typical miner's house, a bank, and a police station. To the right is me, experimenting with being a miner's wife.

Then we went to the Mining Hall of Fame where we watched a guy pour what we thought was a gold brick until he started passing it around the audience. It was totally false advertising--it said everywhere that it was a "gold pour demonstration", but it was just some bronzey mixture metal. I mean, sure, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a brick's worth of pure gold just out in the open at some random Mining Hall of Fame, but we were too tired to think about it analytically beforehand, so it was a let down. After the "gold" pour, we went on a mine tour to get a feel for what it was like to mine before machinery. Basically, it was every bad thing you can think of. Mining sucks now, and it sucked even worse at the turn of the century.

We were staying at a "Camp School", which I think is Australian for "giant dormitory building with no heat and really spread out bathrooms". I think it's how Notre Dame could afford to fly us out there. I don't know if it's just a Western Australia thing, but very few buildings are heated. That's one of the reasons the weekend remained sleep deprived. Anyway, they provided us with food for a do-it-yourself Aussie BBQ, and the meal was 75% meat. Steak, sausage, chicken kebabs, but no kangaroo.

To the right is a traditional mining bathroom (bucket with threadbare curtain).

After dinner we headed over to The Trots, which sounds very uncomfortable, but in Australia it means horse races. One of the professors said there was nothing more Australian than "a bet and a brew", so we all gave it a shot. I don't think anyone came out on top, but most people won at least once. I didn't win anything until the very last race when my horse, Kapow!, blasted to the front unexpectedly. It's amazing how even just $2.20 can produce a pretty sweet winner's high.

Shoot--I don't want this to get too long, so I'll post in installments. That's it for the first day!