Menzies

Yesterday after setting up and a bite of lunch we drove out to the ghost town of Kookynie stopping at Niagra Dam and the town of the same name.


Niagra Dam is a really pretty spot, with free camping and yabbies!!! The dam was built at the end of the 1800s to supply the town but they discovered more reliable underground water closer and the dam became a white elephant. It is only tiny, but cost 1/6 th the amount Mundaring Weir(Kalgoorlie and the goldfield's main water supply but coming from Perth) did, but Mundaring holds 335 time the volume of water. The little dam is remote and cement for it had to be carried in on 400 camels from Kalgoorlie.

Kookynie is one of the more interesting ghost towns we've visited. It has a pub sill operating and a couple of houses and the ruins of others are pretty good. The pub is for sale, but you'd have to be a major optomist to buy it.



After all that, we went looking for a number of rocks that should have been nearby, but could only find one. I'm guessing the rest weren't very imposing. I can't tell you the name of the one we found as we don't know where we were on the road.



Today we drove out to Lake Ballard to view 51 sculptures of Menzies residents, actually set in the salt lake itself. It's a really question as to why you would do it, but very interseting anyway. The red dirt and the snow white salt make amazing backdrops for the figures. They are scattered over a 4 km walk which is supposed to take around 2 hours to complete. We spent just over an hour out on the lake and saw about 30 of the sculptures (got close and personal with about a dozen). It was pretty hard going on the salt as it got really slippery-just like ice- as it crusted to the bottoms of our shoes. In wetter years, we'd have been wading through knee high water apparently. We were the only ones there until two sisters turned up as we were leaving. They were both widowed within 6 weeks of each other and were on their first trip away together out in the gold fields "getting some red dirt back in their veins".



We left the lake and drove to a lookout which gave us great views of the lake. It's massive seen from there. Then we visited a few more little towns, stopped for some lunch, found an old Cobb and Co staging post at Ularring Soak, missed a turn and took the long route home through stations and past mine sites and generally had a great day out.