Mundaring Weir
Stone dam and reservoir that once pumped drinking water across the desert to a gold rush.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Mundaring Weir, in the hills east of Perth, follows the engineer Charles Yelverton O'Connor and the desperate thirst that gripped Western Australia's goldfields in the eighteen nineties. It traces the pipeline he designed to carry water more than five hundred kilometers uphill to Kalgoorlie, and the newspaper campaign that turned against him while he built it. You'll hear what miners paid for a drink of water on the goldfields. Stand at the dam wall, where the old pump house, now a small museum, marks where the scheme began.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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