Gold Town - Paperback

by Lynne Cairns (Author)

Gold Town is an historical novel with a female protagonist, set in the gold rush years of late nineteenth century Western Australia. It has elements of mystery and romance, set against the dramatic Australian outback landscape.

In 1895, Nora Patterson arrives by stagecoach in the shanty town of Hannans to join her husband, Ned, who had found gold and written asking her to come. He's not there. Alone and broke, Nora searches for work, but the rough and ready place is not safe for a woman alone. She is fortunate to be befriended by widowed Mary O'Callaghan and miners miner Ben Drummond and Danny O'Hara. When a boy is found murdered, Ben suspects Ned was also a victim and revisits a lonely grave. Investigating odd activity in the bush, he discovers Nora is in danger. Can he save her?

In 1892 and 1893, rich gold discoveries at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie (then simply known as Hannan's Find, or just Hannans), in Western Australia, drew thousands of hopeful prospectors from all over the world to the remote colony, not yet a state, clinging to the coastline of Australia's western third. As it was 1896 before the railway line from the capital, Perth reached those towns, it was no easy journey from the ports of Albany and Fremantle. Some could afford to buy horses or rides on wagons, but many walked, carrying their worldly goods or pushing wheelbarrows, often knocked together from bush timber.

Today, seeing the barren, outback plains, dotted with ghost towns, that surround Kalgoorlie, one would suppose that anyone who set out on foot with no air-conditioned, four-wheel-drive vehicle, no refrigeration and only the water he could carry, must have been insane. Most of these men were completely rational, however. But, unlike previous gold rushes, water was even scarcer out there than gold. Even veterans sometimes underestimated the semi-desert conditions. So, from time to time, prospectors would come upon the decaying remains of men who had perished of thirst. But these gruesome finds deterred few of those afflicted by gold fever.