After a hot and humid night where we run the air-conditioner for the first time, it cools off to a tolerable level of steaminess. For once, the highly unseasonable cool weather works in our favour because everything there is to see in Kalgoorlie is outside. It is a fortuitous twist of climate change-induced fate that we are not trying to walk around in Kalgoorlie’s usual 40 degree heat.

Our first stop is the Kalgoorlie Tourist Information. Augie, who has an enthusiasm for golf that far outweighs any talent he has for it, is keen to do the Nullarbor Links. So we register him and pick up some golf clubs.

Kalgoorlie is a major centre for gold-mining in the country. It’s also up there for the whole world. When you’re in Kalgoorlie, you cannot escape the how-Paddy-Hannan-found-gold story. Paddy was an Irish prospector wandering through with a pack of other prospectors. He thought the area around Kal would be good for gold, so he tricked the others in to going on without him, and staked his claim with the office in Coolgardie.

Turns out he was right.

Queue a massive gold rush, a whole pile of competing claims all around what would become Kalgoorlie, some men getting rich, most dying trying… the usual story.

Paddy himself only stayed around for seven months before selling his claim. But he’s revered in Kalgoorlie as if he single-handedly built the entire town himself. He didn’t; that was the women.

We’ve a few hours to kill and the weather is staying overcast and coolish, so we decide we just can’t get enough of mining and visit the Hannan North Tourist Mine.

It’s essentially a mining history museum, with large hunks of rusting mining equipment representing 100 years of mining development. That makes it sound rather boring but it’s actually really well done and quite interesting. Everything you ever wanted to know about gold mining but were afraid to ask you can find out here.

It may have been the men finding the gold but this was something they did voluntarily. Wives of this era had very little say in the foolish inclinations of the men they married. In spite of this, they set about making the most of their circumstances and as a result, built the Kalgoorlie community. Sure, the men dug for gold and sold it, but the women ran the local businesses after their husbands died; worked in the hospitals and schools keeping men, women and children alive; educated the children; kept everything clean with very little water to reduce disease and improve hygiene; and built a cohesive network of people in a highly inhospitable place.

Undoubtedly, they suffered. Aside from physical diseases taking their husbands and children, depression was rife, often resulting in suicide. Anyone with money escaped to the coast during the scorching summer, as is still the case now. Those left behind had to deal with the oppressive heat in tiny shacks made of tin with all these kids everywhere.

Strangely enough, there’s no statue of a woman in Kalgoorlie, only old fly-by-night Paddy Hannan.

We also visit the KCMG Superpit. It is essentially all the original gold claims combined into one enormous mine to extract as much gold out of the ground as quickly and cheaply as possible. Enormous trucks trundle debris and rock up out of the pit, empty them and then trundle back down to do it all again.

On one hand, it’s quite awe-inspiring. On the other, it’s a grossly obscene monument to capitalism and corporate greed.