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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.
By then, the originator of all this activity, Paddy Hannan, had upped and gone. As the big
companies and capital moved in, lone prospectors moved out, seeking the simple solitude and
space of the outback, as much as the illusory prospect of gold. Hannan, sick with fever, had
retreated for a time in 1893 to Coolgardie, and was nursed there by a teenager, Clara
Saunders, who was rewarded, when he recovered, with the first small nugget he had picked up
at Kalgoorlie. He then went prospecting up north at Menzies. Clara later achieved another
distinction by becoming the first woman to be married at Coolgardie.
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
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