Gold was discovered in a creekbed in 1859, and soon 15 hotels and 30 stores stood ready for the rush, which lived up to all expectations. New South Walesīuilt on the wave of a goldrush in 1860, the town of Kiandra was once home to thousands of people and survived for 100 years, but is today better known as the birthplace of Australian skiing. Coolgardie's main promenade, wide enough to allow long camel trains to turn around, with its elaborate 19th century hotels and office blocks, is like so many ghost towns scattered around the country - standing at odds with its present status, and is both a reflection of not only the great riches and but also the impermanence of the gold rush era. The population fell dramatically and, at one point, had declined to less than 200 people before a brief revival in gold prices during the 1980s. The town, which had a peak population of around 15,000, had ceased to be a municipality by 1921. However, mining operations were already moving to nearby Kalgoorlie, where the gold deposits were much larger. By the turn of the century water was being piped to the city.
Coolgardie sparked the greatest gold rush in Australian history and grew rapidly from the first discovery of gold in 1863 to become the third largest town in the state after Perth and Fremantle. The remoteness of the region did little to encourage continued growth, despite the arrival of the railway line in 1896. Perhaps the greatest example of calamity to befall a once great mining centre is the town of Coolgardie in Western Australia, where vast quantities of gold were discovered and largely exhausted for the individual prospector in a short time. With only a few buildings still standing, the ghost towns of Home Rule and Gulgong, near Mudgee in New South Wales, are only shadows of their former brief glory in the roaring days of the 1860s and 70s. Heathcote, the centre of the McIvor diggings in Victoria, had sprung up as a mining village of 30,000 diggers in 1852 and was deserted a decade later. Like Clunes, further north, it was a huge mining community now reduced to around one tenth of its size. The small township of Creswick, just north of Ballarat, for example, had a population of 25,000 during the peak of its gold rush. Some gold mining towns with a short productive life declined significantly in the decades after the gold rush as other towns in the district continued to grow. Just about every 19th century ghost town in Australia burst into life and faded into oblivion just as quickly as a result of mining, particularly gold mining.
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