Photos of the southeast of Western Australia

Coming from South Australia, across the Nullarbor Plain, the lonely Eyre Highway stretches westwards from Eucla, a village with amenities for the traveller. Further west is Australia’s longest straight road, the “90 Mile Straight”, and the next stop of any size is the town of Norseman, more than 700 kilometres from Eucla. It was founded in 1892 on the Dundas gold field; as legend has it, a horse kicked up a gold nugget here, leading to the discovery of the reef and the town that grew up here was named after that horse, Norseman; the Norseman Gold Project is still in operation.

In the dry interior, almost 190 kilometres north of Norseman are the gold mining towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and Coolgardie, 38 kilometres from there. In 1893, Patrick Hannan found gold, where the local Aborigines called a particular shrub “kulgoolah”, which became “Kalgoorlie” for the town that grew here. A twin town, Boulder, grew up when the “Golden Mile” was discovered, one of the world’s richest gold reefs. Earlier, gold had been found in 1892 at a place called “Golgardi” by the local Aborigines. This brought in many gold seekers: at one stage, the population of Coolgardie was 15,000, Australia’s third largest town. But soon, people moved on, and today, the town is almost an open-air museum.

A little over 200 kilometres south of Norseman, on the Southern Ocean coastline, is the town of Esperance, first settled by Europeans in the 1860s and formally established in 1893. There is a spectacular coastline with fine beaches west of Esperance, while only a 20-minute drive east from the town centre is Cape Le Grand National Park, with granite coastal formations and sheltered white sand beaches.