January 1896: The bodies of O’Conlon and Cantwell have been found. They were walking from Sandy Soak when they became lost. The tracker who found them shows that at one point they walked one hundred and fifty yards from water.
August 1907: Only one photograph of the little Carr boy was ever taken. Copies have been distributed in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the hope someone has seen the missing child.
September 1907: When Annie Badock’s brother left the family fancy goods store in Kalgoorlie at midday she was working behind the counter. When he returned at six she was nowhere to be found. Doors were locked, everything was in its place. She is 5 foot 9, hazel eyes, fair hair, dressed in grey with green trim and wearing a green hat. She has a birthmark on her left hand between thumb and forefinger.
December 1910: Hoping the earth would swallow him up, Greenway walked out into the bush. He was found in the nick of time. His role in the Chaffinch Mine scandal is gradually coming to light. He swears he is innocent. The mine’s dramatically fluctuating share price tells a different story.
May 1911: The three boys went kangaroo shooting. The oldest shot one and left the ten year old in charge while he and the second went to get tools. When they returned the boy was gone. He has not been seen since.
June 1911: The skeleton found on the stope at the Oroya-Brown Hill mine has been identified. Annie Solly was good tempered and sociable. She liked a drink, and who doesn’t out here? She dressed in mourning, but for whom she never said. Sometimes she wore male attire. Her friends could go weeks without seeing her. Cause of death unknown.
May 1926: A child is missing near Gascoyne Junction. No information on the child’s name, sex or age has been released yet.
May 1926: Detectives Walsh and Pitman set off from Kalgoorlie on their bicycles to investigate a gold theft. They have not been seen for two weeks. Colleagues assume the worst has happened.
November 1927: Police searching for the missing boy Aubrey have discovered two skeletons of adults, lying well apart from each other but in the same region the boy disappeared.
August 1928: Rosser found a skeleton at Coffin Rock. It was Neilson, missing for six months. A pair of spectacles identified him. His eyesight was failing. He’d been depressed. No inquest is necessary.
June 1932: Last Wednesday Curtis, 59, left Kalgoorlie for Ora Banda. He did not arrive. Curtis was last seen wearing a tweed overcoat and trousers, felt hat and tie. He has a large scar on his forehead and walks with a stick.
June 1936: Magician, mind reader and illusionist Dr Raymond has vanished. His car was last seen near Norseman.
January 1939: Harry Hodges was in fact Herbert Pascoe, 14, of North Perth. He left Boulder about a month ago and has not been seen since. Police believe the missing boy may have travelled to Wiluna, or even to the Eastern States. In early December he and two friends jumped a freight train in Midland and rode it to Kalgoorlie.
October 1950: Liberty looked out across the dry, red plains. There’s plenty of water out there, he said, refusing the offer of a water-bag. He set off, pushing his bike, his dog trotting beside him. Somewhere among the granite and the mallee a long seam of gold waited for him. Three days later remains of man and dog have been found on the track, in their last embrace. Was it thirst that killed Edward Liberty, or loss of will?
November 1901: The hunt club leaves Malcolm outside of Leonora around dawn. The master blows his trumpet and cries ‘tally ho!’ The greyhounds are released and with jaws slobbering they set off in pursuit of the kangaroo. The riders try to keep up and as the dogs corner the terrified marsupial they dismount to end its life. The hunters agree that it was another great meet
June 1902: Shooting one kangaroo without a licence can be forgiven, killing one hundred and eighty not so easily. Noble has been fined five pounds plus ten shillings for every skin in his possession. The Albany courtroom collectively gasped when the accumulated fine of ninety five pounds was read out.
April 1904: Another kangaroo has died from bubonic plague.
March 1905: Last year, over 187 days, John Skipworth shot on average 75 kangaroos each day. On February 24 he shot 170. He shoots the furthest away first, sending the mob towards him. Next he shoots the leader. He is a legend out here, where some fifty other kangaroo hunters work the same area. He estimates that in the last two years they have killed 880 000 kangaroos between them.
August 1905: Fox was hunting kangaroos when he ran into a tree. Heath rode seven miles for help and returned with a cart. Fox was taken another seven miles to Kellerberrin to wait for the Northam train. By the time that reached Cunderdin he was dead.
October 1909: The pet foal playfully pawed at kangaroo hunter John Fleming’s rifle lying on a canvas tarp. The gun went off, the bullet passed through Fleming’s leg. On the one hundred mile dash to Carnarvon, Fleming died.
July 1914: “Nature has painted the kangaroo to be invisible at night”, says hunter Tom Donohoe, tired of shooting at the shadow rather than the substance on a clear night. And that secret code the creatures send out when hunters are about or all is clear, Donohoe can’t replicate it. Though he has tried these last few years. He remembers when the mulga teemed with roos. Hardly any about anymore.
August 1915: Jones offered Ryan a job hunting kangaroos. The two rode out to Lime Lake, Jones was drunk all the way. At the camp he accused Ryan of being a bushranger and chased him through the scrub, then as they sat for lunch he waved his rifle at Ryan and pulled the trigger. The bullet scraped Ryan’s head. Ryan is just a boy. He fled to Wagin. Jones was still drunk when the police rode up.
October 1924: Do the maths: One man claimed to have shot 200 000 kangaroos in two years. Edgar O’Donnell has worked out that he would need to shoot 274 animals every day of the year, while collecting, skinning and hanging out the hide of every kangaroo in three minutes, for fourteen unbroken hours of work every single day. That doesn’ty include time for breaking camp, moving it, and eating meals. O’Donnell says that 25 hides was a good day for him. Also he barely made a living.
July 1930: Station workers are reporting kangaroos moving across the landscape in vast flocks. The road to Wiluna is strewn with their carcasses. They are labelled a menace out here.
August 1930: The seventeen year old kangaroo shooter went out to do the work he was paid for. Days later the police recovered his body. His head was missing, blown off most likely, by his own hand.
June 1931: Station owner Lejeune was with his wife and children, chatting amiably with a kangaroo shooter out near Mount Magnet. Suddenly Lejeune fell dead. About half a mile away another kangaroo shooter had aimed his rifle at a boomer leaping through the mulga. The bullet killed the kangaroo before travelling unhindered to cut Lejeune down.
May 1892: The four men were fit and able workers, until they fell sick at the mine. Delirium set in, then one after the other they died. Some are saying typhoid, but in truth, no one out here knows.
January 1895: The dust storm was so thick it threw the world into darkness. Then the rains came. Coolgardie has been washed out. Mine shafts have filled with water. Canegrass Swamp has disappeared in the tempest.
March 1895: Ambrose was riding through the mulga when he found a swag, and a short distance away a skull, then a leg bone. Other remains he turned up nearby included a cabbage tree hat, a home made stockwhip and a prospector’s manual.
May 1907: Edward Gooch was in the habit of stopping by the Day Dawn hotel for a beer on his way to lunch. He didn’t yesterday. No one can explain his disappearance though everyone believes it is suspicious.
August 1907: At first the police believed Leah Fouracre had run inside her burning house to save possessions and died from smoke inhalation. The discovery of an axe, and bloodstains on a bowl of barley she was carrying changed their opinions. Aubrey Kilcheder, 24, arrested for impersonating a police officer, was also identified as the man riding Miss Fouracre’s horse in Waroona.
October 1908: Fred Stone, an early prospector of Kimberley, who had his arm chewed off by a camel, has recently returned from a long trip which included a thorough scour of the district between Southern Cross and the York-Northam districts. On a big gimlet-wood tree on the back track, behind Doodlakine and Merriden, Stone came across a tree blazed by Dick Greaves in 1887, Greaves, Anstey and party being then on the way to locate Golden Valley, the immediate predecessor of Southern Cross. The marks on the tree, which include the name of Dick Greaves and the date and direction of the expedition, are as plain as when chipped out.
April 1910: McNaught was sitting at his desk reading a newspaper, not realizing until Hatt slumped dead at his desk that his employer had swallowed a cyanide tablet. McNaught had taken on management of Hatt’s hotel, the Never Never a few months earlier. In March the Never Never Hotel burnt to the ground.
April 1911: The drought south of Southern Cross, in the Yilgarn goldfield, is so acute that most of the women and children are leaving, and many leaseholders will be forced to suspend operations during the summer months. Unless rain falls there shortly, water will have to be carted from Southern Cross, a distance of 30 miles.
January 1912: The remaining water is too brackish for the stock. Dingoes have decimated the sheep. Woolyalling outside of Quairading is struggling.
June 1915: The largest explosion in the world will take place at Roelands Quarry in about six weeks. Twenty tones of dynamite will be placed in tunnels and when detonated will shift 180 000 tons of granite.
September 1921: Rabbits have disappeared along the fence north of Burracoppin. The farmers and the boundary riders are reporting a handful where there used to be a swarm. Professor Edgeworth David says he saw evidence of an epidemic in Eucla in 1917. “Dead bodies piled against the fences.” None of that here, yet.
October 1925: The accused had tried for months to hide her pregnancy, to a man so far un-named. In the end she delivered it herself. The accused’s mother buried the newborn in a pile of ashes some way from the pumping station. The verdict depends upon how long the newborn was alive before its grandmother wrapped it in a sack. Yerbillon is a desolate place. The accused was desperately unhappy.
October 1926: A dead city peopled with ten thousand ghosts is how Mr McLean of Boulder describes Coolgardie these days.
March 1938: Peg Leg Pete, Long Dick, Jack Payne, Black Tommy, Paddy Dorgan, all the old sandalwooders are dead now. The world changed and left them behind.
March 1938: If a snake enters the house and finds a hole, she should sit on a chair a safe distance away, resting a shotgun on her lap while she plays the harmonica. Experts say she only has to blow softly a few minutes and the snake will emerge. The gun will do the rest.