The pit that swallowed a town

One of the biggest holes ever dug by man, the Super Pit at Kalgoorlie is visible from space. Photo / NASA

There are plenty of photographs of the Super Pit, Australia's biggest goldmine, yet it is only when you stand on the edge of it, gazing down, that you really grasp its enormity.

From up high the 240-tonne dump trucks toiling up the terraced pit face laden with rock look like children's toys.

One of the biggest holes ever dug by man, the Super Pit is visible from space, and is even rumoured to affect the weather in Kalgoorlie, the hard-bitten mining town crouched on its rim.

Now the open-cut pit, gouged out of the Western Australian desert, is set to become even larger. Once a current expansion programme is completed, it will be 3.6km long, 1.6km wide and 650m deep.

The expansion, which will prolong the life of the mine until 2021, has been welcomed by many locals, particularly with the gold price reaching record highs.

But not everyone in Kalgoorlie, situated 600km inland from Perth, is pleased.

Residents living close to the mine claim that existing problems of noise, dust and pollution will worsen.

And for an Aboriginal community perched almost on the edge, the quality of life is no way improved by the riches excavated from below.

Australia's greatest gold rush began in this remote and arid region.

Making camp here in 1893 after one of his packhorses threw a shoe, Irish prospector Paddy Hannan spotted several nuggets in a gully. Before long, he and two companions had picked up 100 ounces of gold, and within days the place was crowded with men frantically pegging out claims.

They had found what became known as the "Golden Mile" - the richest square mile of earth on the planet. Kalgoorlie, and its twin town of Boulder, sprang up, and more than 100 underground mines were established.

By the 1970s nearly all had closed. Then Alan Bond, the since disgraced Perth tycoon, conceived a plan to buy up all the old leases and turn them into one huge open-cut operation.

Now the Super Pit itself, which opened in 1989, is reaping rich rewards for its current joint owners, the American giant Newmont and Canada- based Barrick Gold.

The gold price hit an all-time high of US$1249.40 ($1765.95) a fortnight ago, and analysts expect it to reach US$1500 by the end of this year.

That is sweet news not just for Newmont and Barrick, but also for the residents of Kagoorlie-Boulder who work in the industry, service it, go prospecting for gold, or own shares in goldmining companies.

"The price is unbelievable," declares Ashok Parekh, an accountant with extensive mining interests.

"Everyone is Kalgoorlie is happy; you can feel it in the air. I drink every Friday night with my friends - builders, taxi drivers, businessmen, pensioners - and we all talk about the same thing: the gold price and gold shares, which companies are doing well."

But in Williamtown, a suburb sandwiched between the Super Pit and Mount Charlotte, Kalgoorlie's sole surviving underground mine, the mood is very different.

Here, residents dread the daily blasting. As well as being close to the pit, they have to put up with the underground operations going on beneath them, day and night.

Keren Calder points to the cracks in her living-room wall.

"When there's a big blast, the whole house shakes - it feels like the floor's going to cave in," she says.

"All the pictures are at an angle, and I've had ornaments fall off the shelf and smash. Visitors get a hell of a fright.

"The dust is diabolical, too. If I don't sweep my floor every day, it's like someone has emptied a vacuum cleaner over it."

Kalgoorlie-Boulder once consisted of many small communities, each one focused on an underground mine, with a headframe denoting its location.

Over time, the headframes disappeared and the communities were consolidated - except for Williamstown, the only residential neighbourhood that remains on the industrial side of the Goldfields Highway. A bleak, sunbaked spot, it is pointed out as a curiosity to visitors on tours of the Super Pit.

Cheri Raven hears drilling every morning, when she showers. "Sometimes it sounds so close, you think a miner's going to pop up the plughole."

Like her neighbours, Raven believes that Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mining (KCGM), which runs the Super Pit on behalf of Newmont and Barrick, would like to depopulate Williamstown.

It has already bought and bulldozed houses, "This is my home and I'm not moving; it doesn't matter how much money they offer me." says Raven. "My grandparents lived here; my husband and I were both raised here; I've got history here."

Williamstown hints at an underside to the mining boom propping up the Australian economy, a boom so spectacular that the Government is, controversially, trying to squeeze an extra tax (on "super profits") out of the industry.

But in Kalgoorlie, where most of the town benefits, the protests of the minority are dismissed. "The squeaky wheel gets the most attention," says Russell Cole, the Super Pit's general manager.

Already the world's second largest gold producer, Australia could overtake China this year, following the re-opening of an enormous mine at Boddington, southeast of Perth.

In Kalgoorlie, high gold prices have seen the town prosper in recent years - even during the global economic turmoil, when investors flocked to the precious metal, a traditional "safe haven".

A different perspective may be gleaned, though, from the community of Ninga Mia, with its run-down houses, stray dogs and rusting abandoned cars.

Ninga Mia is not even marked on maps. No one from there works at the Super Pit, and Geoffrey Stokes, an Aboriginal pastor, says the benefits of living next door to one of the world's richest goldmines consist of "sweet nothing, beside the pollution and the dust and the noise".

Stokes says: "Every week we have a funeral in Kalgoorlie: that's our reality. We die of common diseases while the rest of the community gets fat and rich on our birthright, our inheritance."

Sitting outside her house, Mary Morrison sighs when asked about the pit, and the ceaseless excavations taking place close by. "Dust comes through here all the time, from the mine and the trucks," she says.

"The children end up with sore eyes, and some of them get sick."

KCGM believes the criticisms are unfair. "If the wind is blowing towards town, we don't blast, and we've not blasted for two or three weeks at a time sometimes," says Cole. "We live in the town as well, so we have to do the right thing."

Locals can telephone the company's "Public Interaction Line", and Cole says complaints are always quickly followed up. He also notes that KCGM contributes at least $100,000 a year to community groups.

Tony Cooke, an occupational health and safety consultant who has investigated the industry's impact on the area, believes houses in Boulder will have to be demolished as the mine creeps closer, something KCGM denies.

Cooke also maintains that decades of shaft mining have left the town unstable. One person "lost their washing and Hills Hoist into a hole that just opened up in the back garden", and even cars have been gobbled up. Seismologists blame mining activity for some of the tremors that periodically shake Kalgoorlie.

Steve Kean, a Williamstown resident, says: "It's like a nightmare, particularly the dust." The expansion of the Super Pit will make life worse, he believes. "It feels like the Super Pit is swallowing up the town."

MAKE THAT A LIGHT

Infamous as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting town, Kalgoorlie once had 30 brothels and 44 pubs. Just two brothels remain, and they make more money now from showing curious tourists around than from prostitution.

However the town still has 32 pubs, seven of which offer "skimpies" - scantily clad barmaids.

Outside one of the oldest pubs, the Palace Hotel, an electronic board flashes up the latest gold price.

Keen to shed its Wild West image, Kalgoorlie is trying to promote itself as a family-friendly town. But despite the sports facilities, and the book clubs, and the repertory theatre, it retains a hard edge.

With so many transient, cashed-up single men around, alcohol-fuelled violence is a major problem. Hannan Street, which is lined with handsome, gold rush-era buildings, is not a place for the faint- hearted on a Saturday night.

Perhaps because of its isolation, Kalgoorlie has a reputation as a resourceful, can-do place.

In the early 1990s, frustrated at government delays in building a bypass road to divert heavy vehicles and equipment, residents got together and built it themselves over a long weekend.