Kanowna
Extraordinary and unusual ghost town.
The Western Australian Tourism Commission sums this ghost town up succinctly in four sentences. 'Perhaps the most incredible of all ghost towns. In 1905 there were 12 000 people living in this town 18 km north east of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. There were 16 hotels, two breweries and an hourly train service to Kalgoorlie. Nothing now remains except rubble, tourist markers and memories.' But this only hints at the true wildness which characterised a town which, in the words of Katherine Susannah Prichard, was 'rougher and richer than the mob on Hannans had ever been'.

Kanowra, which probably is a corruption of 'gha-na-na' meaning 'place of no sleep' in the local Aboriginal language, was originally called White Feather. Gold was discovered there in 1893 and almost instantly the area was swarming with miners. By 1894 a town site had been selected and by 1895 a battery had opened serving the 4000 people who had poured onto the field. Although it was wild, ramshackled and temporary, the town became a municipality in 1896.

Tales of the town's early history are remarkable. Fortunes were made overnight as the miners, like a plague of locusts, swept through the area. One of the early miners, Tom O'Connor, walked away from the field with the extraordinary sum of £15 000. All of his gold had been found in a claim which was adjacent to the local cemetery so, in a decision showing no respect for the dead and a huge respect for gold fever, the cemetery was opened up to mining. In Glint of Gold Malcolm Uren writes that 'the Methodist portion was soft clay soil, easy to dig, but the Roman Catholic area was solid quartz, and holes had to be blasted out with dynamite.'

The alluvial gold had all but disappeared by late 1896 and it was replaced by underground mining. Although the town was continuing to progress - 1897 saw the arrival of the railway and electricity - people were starting to drift away from the area. It was probably as a result of his concern about the town's declining population that the local Catholic priest, Father Long, announced from the balcony of the Kanowra Hotel that he had been shown a gold nugget weighing nearly 100 pounds. He gave vague directions as to where the nugget had been found and, with due piety, the nugget was named the 'Sacred Nugget'. It didn't take the miners long to realise that the priest had attempted to hoax them into staying on the field. It is said that the miners were so furious they threatened to burn down the town.

In spite of Father Long's efforts the town started a slow and steady decline. Long's hoax had provoked a brief rush in 1898 but, without a new strike, the town was doomed. By 1912 it was no longer a municipality. During the Depression the post office and the railway closed. The school closed down after the war and the last hotel closed its doors in 1952.

Things to see:  

Attractions
Today all that is left is rubble, memories and some plaques telling visitors where gracious buildings once stood and where people once brawled and toiled.

Accommodation and Eating
Nothing available. See Kalgoorlie.