I’ve been to Kalgoorlie so that you don’t have to

Perth to Kalgoorlie, Sunday 6 May 2012

The Prospector from Perth to Kalgoorlie

Another journey; another train trip. This time it’s the Prospector (don’t they give such terrific names to train lines, let alone the trains?) from Perth to Kalgoorlie. I’m in Car2, Seat57, which puts me at the very back of the train. I’m seated next to a young Kiwi called Ben, who’s come over here to work in the mines. He doesn’t smell and he’s friendly; given that this is a nine hour journey, these are very good things. He is, however, epically hungover, which can’t be much fun. I can’t remember the last time that I undertook a serious journey with a throbbing head and rolling stomach, but I don’t want to be doing it again in a hurry.

Kalgoorlie is an old mining town that was built on gold, and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It is, however, fairly well served by transport from two major cities: It’s the last stop before the big push west as the Indian-Pacific heads from Adelaide to Perth.

The in-train TV is currently televising the view from the front of the train. It’s far from exciting as we pass through Perth’s south eastern suburbs. This one is called Success Hill. What’s the betting that it’s actually a misnomer, much like Greenland not actually being green? I’ll look into it.

Some kids in Guildford have just filmed the train going past on their iPhones. I can’t imagine that it’s such an event, especially as the Prospector is a daily service.

We’re at Midland. The train is filling up.

The seats are airline style and there are TVs positioned overhead along the aisle. We’ll be treated to two films along the way and there’re a selection of music channels to keep us entertained, too. Unfortunately, the headphone port is unreliable and I’m fortunate to hear anything at all. Perhaps that is fortunate at this very instance, as the music choice is terrible.

Ooh, and we’ve just been informed that there is a delay on the track ahead of us and we could be detained here at Midland for some time. Joy! Depending on how late, I might have to call ahead to the hotel where I’ll be staying in Kalgoorlie to inform them; when on schedule, I’m due to arrive late enough as it is. The thought of rocking up to find reception closed is slightly disturbing.

The in-train TV, with the thrilling of site of a deserted track, is the equivalent of watching paint dry right now.

I’ve switched to the classical music channel. Rolling timpani: Ma would love it.

It’s going to be a very long trip. We’re severely delayed and I won’t make it to the hotel before it closes. Thankfully, they’re prepared for this sort of thing and they’re leaving the key to my room beneath the mat. Now, I’m going to watch Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I’ll catch you on the flip-side.

The film was lovely. We’re now moving through the outback, between small towns. Toodyay seems to be horse country.

The moon is huge, and close, but the sky is inky black. There’s absolutely no mobile phone reception here; this is isolated territory, save for the train line. When we talk of the first settlers at Kalgoorlie as being pioneers, it’s true. This was days’ journey through bush and across desert; water would have been more precious than the gold they went to dig, they were at the mercy of poisonous and hostile animals. Many left and never made it, let alone returned having made a fortune. Even on a train, with a buffet car and serviceable toilets, it’s an undertaking.

We’ve been told that we’re delayed by at least two hours. After holding the headphone jack into the socket for the entirety of one film, I don’t feel like doing it for a second. I think I’ll sleep. With any luck, I’ll wake in Kalgoorlie.

Kalgoorlie, Monday 7 May 2012

The Star and Garter

Growing up, the Star and Garter was a slightly dodgy pub in Stetchworth. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the Star and Garter in a country mining town in Western Australia, but I didn’t expect too much. I’m not certain I could have lowered my expectations sufficiently for what I encountered when I unlocked the door of my room. It hadn’t been serviced. The sheets were dirty and the bed unmade. Both towels were used. The bin was full. The cups were stained with coffee sediment.

It was almost midnight and there was no one on site to remedy the situation. I was exhausted and the chances of my being able to find alternative accommodation were limited. I improvised. I selected the pillow that looked the least used and turned the pillowslip inside out. I pulled the top sheet up over the bottom sheet and slept directly beneath the blanket. And then despite being exhausted, I slept fitfully.

I also managed to get that night removed from my bill. It was the least that they could do.

Gold, girls, and grog

Kalgoorlie’s a pretty town. You wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look, however. The signs above shop doorways are tawdry and cheap, you need to look across the street, and glance upwards to see evidence of attractive late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture. The original buildings’ functions are usually emblazoned into the facade decorated with curlicues, from butchers to lawyers to general stores, along with the date of construction. What started out as a typhoid-ridden tent city of expectant men scratching at what would prove to be the most lucrative gold seam in Australia (and the second most productive in the world) has grown into a respectable town that even had streets paved with gold at one point.

Despite this growth towards permanence and respectability from Hannan, Flannagan, and Shea’s find in 1893, Kalgoorlie’s clearly still a working town; there are 25 (as of today, after the Golden Eagle burned down overnight) pubs, most with barmaids wearing very little (they’re called Skimpies), all with clear codes of conduct and dress expectations plastered to the door. Work boots are not allowed. There’s a racecourse and an oval that serves for cricket in the summer and football–of the Australian variety–in the winter. It’s a town designed for hard-working people with not much on which to spend their hard-earned money. Other than girls, gambling, and grog.

Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie’s main street, is wide and dusty and with its proliferation of bars and government buildings, is just how you’d imagine an outback town built on gold to look. Minus the brothels.

The lusty barmaid plying dust-encrusted prospectors with alcohol is integral to the image of the male-dominated, testosterone-driven isolated mining town. So where were the bordellos?

The answer was Hay Street. From 1907, the authorities practised ‘containment’ and relocated all the brothels to one street. It was an attempt–and probably one that worked–to elevate Kalgoorlie into a more respectable, family-oriented town. They realised that attempting to rid the town entirely of working girls would be counter-active. Men out-numbered women 20 to one at this point. It would result in either an increase in rape, male and female, or prostitution being forced underground; probably both. Contained, licensed brothels meant that girls would not be responsible for soliciting; men knew where to find what they wanted; the rest of the town wasn’t subjected to the trade; and importantly, the girls were afforded some degree of protection. At its height, there were 24 brothels on Hay Street. Now there are just two, and more on those later.

Kalgoorlie’s Aboriginal population runs at about 7.5% of the total, which is roughly double the national average. Unfortunately, they are predominantly at the lower end of the socio-economic scale and this is noticeable. I saw my first congregation of them early on Monday morning, queuing outside the bottle shop and conforming to the hideous stereotype of alcohol-addicted. I spotted the second group sitting on the pavement outside the Aboriginal housing development. So often, they appear dishevelled, dirty, and disaffected. That can’t be, isn’t, how they all are. But it is the overwhelming impression, and it’s heartbreaking.

Prospectors might have flocked to the goldfields dreaming of making their fortune, but it came at a price. In the early years, the pioneers died of starvation, dehydration, and privation. Typhoid and exposure claimed thousands of lives. Even now, water is Kalgoorlie’s most precious commodity; this is the middle of the desert, after all. Water is piped about 560 kilometres from the Mundaring Weir, close to Perth, to Mount Charlotte at the top of Hannan Street. It takes ten days for a drop to pass along the entire pipeline. When it was conceived in 1895, everyone thought that it was a crazy scheme. One hundred-and-odd years on, and its Kalgoorlie’s lifeline. There is, though, a reserve reservoir, just in case something should go wrong. But when you take a shower, you can’t help but notice how heavily chlorinated the water is: I smell like a swimming pool 14 hours after showering.

Whilst Kalgoorlie might be built with the money from the gold mines, it is quite literally built on not very much. The underground mines run for miles, directly beneath the town. There was an earthquake here two years ago that caused some structural damage to the town’s buildings; another earthquake could spell utter disaster as it’s possible that the entirety of the conurbation could collapse into the mine shafts. The Super Pit now dominates mining in Kalgoorlie. It’s an opencast mine that has consolidated all of the privately operated mines barring one, the Mount Charlotte shaft that still operates underground. The Super Pit runs for almost four kilometres. It churns out millions of tonnes of ore every day and 800,000 ounces of gold a year. Daily, and 1pm and 4pm, you can feel the shudder from the controlled detonation exposing of the guts of the earth for exploitation. The mine employs thousands of people, about a quarter of them women. The miners work 12 hour shifts, the technicians, engineers, metallurgists, and administrative staff likely less. KCGM, which operates the Super Pit, expects it to yield gold until 2021. After then, unless there are significant advances in mining or new seams are discovered, they’ll allow it to fill with groundwater, something that could take around five years. There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen to the obsolete Super Pit, but I’ve not heard any discussion about what will happen to Kalgoorlie. That, I feel, will become obsolete, too.

Kalgoorlie strikes me as a town living on borrowed time. There’s virtually nothing other than mining to support it and without the thousands of tons of ore that it dragged from the earth every day, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live there beyond the life of the Super Pit.

In many respects, I find it hard to understand why anyone would want to move there at all: the Super Pit is a monstrously large, throbbingly ugly scar on the landscape; the town is isolated; public transport is verging on the non-existent; and there was a crushing sense of ennui there.

I’m pleased that I visited Kalgoorlie, but I was pleased to leave it, too. It felt brash and cheap–but of course, being at the heart of the mining boom, it’s not that cheap–and three days was definitely enough. I think I might have started to lose my marbles if I spent any more time there. Especially as I didn’t have a car.

Questa Casa

I’ve been around what we think were brothels in Pompeii, and my intense curiosity and predilection for social history meant that I couldn’t really turn down a trip to a working brothel and the opportunity to meet a real life Madam. I booked myself on to a tour of Questa Casa.

I’ve no idea what a brothel Madam is supposed to resemble, but Madam Carmel definitely didn’t meet any of my expectations. She wasn’t flamboyant or brash or lewd or bawdy. She was probably around 60, authoritative but approachable, and ran the business but was in no way involved in the business end of things.

What she definitely was, was a brilliant storyteller.

She was originally from Queensland and bought Questa Casa about 20 years ago, after she was widowed. Her doctor had advised her to find a job to help stave off depression. Becoming a brothel Madam probably wasn’t quite what her doctor envisaged, but I don’t think it was Carmel’s first idea, either. Moving to Kalgoorlie definitely wasn’t. As she said, the first six months were very steep learning curve.

Questa Casa is Australia’s oldest working house. It first opened in 1904 and there are still two ladies working there today. Containment meant that all of Kalgoorlie’s brothels were located on the one street, Hay Street, until a few years ago. The idea was that the miners could get what they wanted but that the town wasn’t overrun with working girls and could market itself as being suitable for families.

That’s changed now, and Hay Street has declined as a consequence. Whether that is a cause for regret is debatable, but I’m inclined to think that the protection afforded to working girls via the brothel system left them better off. Madams were subject to extensive background checks to ensure that they were not involved with drugs racketeering or any other illicit activities; all the women were subjected to regular health checks; and they fell under the protection of the house, where there’s less chance of rape or physical violence and they can’t be charged with soliciting. I doubt very much that selling themselves is any young girls’ first choice of occupation, but there are better ways to do it than turning tricks on street corners.

When it came to racy stories, they weren’t so much racy, but definitely amusing or thought-provoking. We heard about the gentleman whose activity was so frenetic he crashed straight through a wall, picked himself up, and resumed business. We heard about the man who died not quite in the throes of passion, but almost. She told us about the Dutch woman who came to work in Kalgoorlie for four months every year for fifteen years; she saw the entire world first class, but did once service 70 (yes, seventy) men in sixteen hours. She locked herself in the bathroom after that stint. And we heard about Carmel refusing to break the rules by sending a woman out to a client, and telling him that if he insisted, he’d be presented with Quasimodo in six inch heels.

What surprised me was the appearance of the rooms. None of them resembled the expected tart’s boudoir; they weren’t vulgar or nasty, just rather ordinary. Even the domination room didn’t resemble anything out of my not-quite wildest dreams.

Doing my social historian bit, I asked Carmel if there were any evidence to suggest that prostitutes from Kalgoorlie’s early days practised as abortionists, suppliers of contraceptives, and even as midwives, much as we think happened in Ancient Rome. Her answer was an emphatic no. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by the answer, but with the force of its delivery. It was definitely an open-and-shut discussion.

I was so surprised that I forgot to ask if they ever had any women clients. Still, I learned a great deal and I’m very pleased that walked through the door.

Oh, if you’re interested, it’s $280 for an hour. That price includes a shower, a massage, oral stimulation, and penetration. Anything else is extra and paid directly to the lady. Carmel splits the takings 60/40, in favour of the ladies. If you just want to take the tour, that’s a slightly more modest $20 for 90 minutes.

Royal Flying Doctors’ Museum

Unless you’re fairly determined, finding the Royal Flying Doctors’ (RFD) Museum is no easy feat. It’s at the RFD base, which is at Kalgoorlie-Boulder airport, but there are no signs indicating that the base includes a museum and being at an airport, it’s fairly remote and inaccessible. By the time that I’d made it there, I was exhausted.

Just as well that the tour starts with a video; it gave me an opportunity to sit down. After that, Mary, the guide, gave a quick talk describing some of the more personal details of the RFD service. Unfortunately, her narrative style was somewhat confused and I’m certain that the Swiss couple who were seated behind me didn’t have a clue what she was going on about.

I did manage to pick up that all RFD staff are contracted to the RFD and only them. It’s not a part time profession. All the pilots are high-ranking commercial pilots; the doctors are surgeons; and the nurses are trained ED nurses and midwives. There’s a radio GP service; fly-in fly-out clinics; and of course emergency support.

Did you know that the police are able to convert Australia’s highways into landing strips for the planes? They close the road between designated points and pull out the cats’ eyes. The pilots can land their planes in 800m if they absolutely have to, but they prefer 1200m. And there’s only one metre of clearance on either side. But these pilots are good.

As for the planes, they’re pressurised Pilatus PC12s. There’s a jet, too, which was donated by Rio Tinto. We got to go inside one of the PC12s. Even I had to duck. The jet was up at Port Hedland, though. It’s very swanky, or so we were told.

Apart from being led by a slightly confused guide, it was a fascinating hour and a bit and worth $5.