The Goldfields - Lake Ballard

Bender with a small statue on Lake Ballard

Well, I showed you Gwalia already, so I figured I should show you some more places that we went to when we lived in the Goldfields town of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

A friend of mine came from Perth to stay with us for a while, so we took her on a day trip to Lake Ballard. The place has lots of statues on a big salt lake that is dry most of the time.

The “Inside Australia”: exhibition was commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Perth International Arts Festival in 2003, and an idea of internationaly reknowned artist, Antony Gormley. Apart from 2 or 3 passers-by the 51 sculptures are derived from laser scans of the inhabitants of Menzies. The sculptures stand scattered over 10 sqare kilometres of the salt lake, named ‘Lake Ballard’, approximately 55km west from the townsite of Menzies.

One of the statues standing proud on the lake.

There is a lot of walking to do - some people rode their bikes on the salt lake - you can tell cos you can see the tyre tracks until the next rains.

More walking!

Bender found some treasure.

It was an exhausting day, but Bender enjoyed it - apart from us stopping him from peeing on the statues. It's not that anyone would notice, but it just seemed disrespectful. It was so so hard for him not to pee on them as they were the only things sticking out of the ground on the huge salt lake flats.

Places we used to live: the Goldfields, Western Australia

Just checking out the view....

A long, long time ago, before Barbie and Mittens joined the household, Froufrou, Bender, N & I spent a year in the Goldfields town of Kalgoorlie.

We used to host backpackers through the website couchsurfing. It helped Frou get over her fear of strangers, and Bender had to share the back seat of the four wheel drive with random backpackers more than once on road trips to the surrounding tourist attractions.

We had a couple of Estonian backpackers stay with us on their way to work in a 'country pub'. Kalgoorlie couldn't have been more different to their home country. We asked them what pub they were working in, and they said Laverton.

A couple of weeks after I had loaded them on to a bus out there, we went for a drive out to Laverton to visit them and see how they were going.

Laverton itself wasn't that interesting, though we did have fun taking Bender to the pub, where we were allowed to sit with him in the beer garden. That kind of thing is not allowed in the city.

Anyway, we went out to an old abandoned mining town called Gwalia. A lot of abandoned townsites in the Goldfields are nothing more than rubbish and abandoned cars, but there are still houses at Gwalia.

The sad abandoned houses at Gwalia

Another vintage car which isn't going to be moving anywhere, and an old windmill used for pumping water.

Bender says, hurry up, if I'm not allowed to pee on it then I am totally not interested.

I managed to get him into the cab of this old train. It was pretty cool pretending to drive it, wasn't it Bender? Though I think he is plotting his escape in this photo.

I don't think this old car would be able to take us anywhere now.

Edgar Hoover's house

My American followers would be impressed to know that this grand mansion for it's time was the home of the US President Hoover before he became president. It has been preserved and is now the site of a museum. Bender was impressed with the green, lush lawn as he hadn't seen much lawn out in the desert.