The People of WA’s Ghost Towns

Come along and learn about the People of Western Australia’s Ghost Towns project.

In a state that is larger than many countries around the world, you could expect to find some extraordinary stories. Stories of hardship and courage; stories of extreme wealth and extreme poverty; stories of cultural diversity and of bonds formed in adversity; stories of the building of a national identity, but also stories of environmental vandalism.

It’s all there, written in the earth.

And sometimes the earth is all that is left to mark the passing of the communities that have made up the history of the state. There’s one thing that brings all these stories together, the people who lived them.

At present, the list of identified ghost towns sits at around 700. Of these. Perhaps the mining towns are best known. In the 1901 census the largest towns in Western Australia included the mining towns of Day Dawn, Kanowna, Mount Morgan and Nannine, all of which are ghost towns today.

There were many other non-mining gazetted towns that reflect Western Australia’s history of building railway lines, a long pipeline from Perth to Kalgoorlie, timber towns (which supplied the railway sleepers), the government-initiated Soldier Settlement and Group Settlement schemes in towns that were created to service widespread farming communities,

The People of Western Australia’s Ghost Towns project will become an index of these people drawn from every identified source and will eventually include millions of references. The project timeframe is six years, with the project having a completion target date of 2029.