The Rise and Fall of Mt Palmer: Western Australia's Short-Lived Gold Boom in the Yilgarn

A rich find, a frantic rush, a proper little town with a survey and a name, a mine that paid extraordinary returns — and then war, labour shortages, and a played-out reef, and the whole thing folds up and blows away with the red dust. In this post I want to walk through the lot: how the gold was found, what the mine and the town were actually like, why it died, and — for those of you keen to go and stand on the ground yourself — exactly what you need to know about getting there and, crucially, why you can't just wander in and swing a detector