What is a Homestead Lease ???

The Homestead Leases, or more correctly Miners Homestead Leases (MHL), were issued under the mining laws of the time – until the demise of the 1904 Mining Act in 1982. These laws allowed bonafide miners/prospectors who held a Gold Mining Lease (GML) in the area to apply for suitable land (mostly away from their workings) […]

An Unlucky Gamble – by Big Jim Allanson

Dolly Pot – Western Mail, Perth – 21 November 1940, page 8 OVER THE PLATES An Unlucky Gamble. DEAR “Non-Com,” Early in the “Roaring Nineties,” Billy Collins, Ned Campion, Barney – and I were camped at a pool ten miles west of Cue. At the south end of the pool, flies were making short work […]

The Coolgardie Safe – a family story

Several members of the McCormick family were to emigrate from South Australia to Western Australia in the late 1890s but the most well know of them, was Arthur St Patrick Creed McCormick who was the inventor of the ‘Coolgardie Safe’. The following photographs are connected to this family but are also valuable in their own […]

The Prosperity of Southern Cross – 1936

Western Mail – Perth  24 December 1936, page 16 THE PROSPERITY OF SOUTHERN CROSS NEW TOWN HALL OPENED SOUTHERN CROSS was in a gala mood last Wednesday. The cause of many arrangements, official and festive, was the opening of a new ornament to the district’s civic architecture, an imposing Town Hall surmounted by a high […]

Kundana – The town that never was!

Kundana is situated 25kms west-northwest of Kalgoorlie and 27 km nor-northeast of Coolgardie. In the 1890s the area was known informally as the ’21 Mile’ because it was 21 miles from Coolgardie on the Black Flag Road. Other unofficial names used were ‘Barkers Find’ after the first prospector in the area and also ‘White Flag’ […]