Golden Pipeline, Cunderdin Museum & tractors - 19th September, 2007

Today was planned as basically a travelling day since it is 596 km from Kalgoorlie to Perth but we happened to stop at a public convenience just before the township of Cunderdin and noticed a lot of tractors and other old machinery inside a fence next to a building with a very tall chimney. Fin took a wander along the fence to a signpost in front of the building and found that it was the Cunderdin Museum which is actually in the building which housed the 3rd pumping station of eight for the Goldfields Water Supply which, as I mentioned in the last post, delivered water 560 km from Mundaring near Perth to Kalgoorlie and many towns in-between. It is approximately 120 km from no. 1 pump station at Mundaring and used an existing railway dam to store the water before it was pumped on to the next station. There were three pumps at Cunderdin and they were steam driven so would have required a lot of man power to keep them stoked up with timber so that they kept pumping away. Since the 1950s it has been replaced with electric pumps which these days are computer controlled and water can be controlled and diverted at the tap of a keyboard to fulfil the requirements of the country areas as well as the distant goldfields. The scheme was designed with the eight stations to overcome the difficulty of pumping water uphill over the Darling Range; a total lift of 34o metres, and over such a great distance. It is amazing to think of the feats achieved by early Australians to overcome difficulties and make previously unliveable areas reasonable places to live. Other items on display included the Coolgardie safe which most of us know is the first ‘fridge’ used by many early Aussies consisting of a cupboard with hessian walls that are kept wet to allow the air inside to be kept cool via evaporation. A simple yet fairly effective way to keep foods in the early days. Another amazing item was a chair made of tree branches and an old car seat. I guess you use what you’ve got when you have to!
Next we went outside to look at the tractors and other farm machinery/implements. They had a lot of tractors of all kinds and I took lots of photos because I know my brother-in-law, Rod, will be very interested to see them. He will have to go on a holiday to Perth one day and drive down to Cunderdin and take a look for himself! There is a sign post in yard there that has arrows pointing to different places and one of them is a place I had seen the signpost along the way for and found rather amusing. It is called Wyalkatchem. You have to wonder how these types of names were ever thought of, don’t you? When we had looked in another building at some early household items, a T-model Ford, a 1959 Volkswagen etc a man came along and asked us if we had been in the earthquake house. We said we hadn’t and he insisted we try it; it is a little model house within the same building that has a table & chairs in it and a TV on a bench. You are instructed by writing on the table to press a red button next to it and the TV starts playing a video about earthquakes with a newsreader at a desk then the house starts to shake and the newsreader comments on the tremor, more follow with the house shaking quite a bit. The newsroom on the video is in chaos and then she comes back to her desk and tells us that we have experienced an earthquake like the one in Newcastle. We had no idea what this display had to do with the area until we passed through Meckering and saw tourist signs for an earthquake site so we gathered that there had been an earthquake there at one point. We didn’t stop to look at it because we had to get to Perth in reasonable time to get our key.