Wooden Bicycle
29 June 2021
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Kalgoorlie's
Wooden Bicycle 29 June 2021 |
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During a visit to Perth in to see our daughter and her family during January 2013, Edith and I took off for a week to see what lay between Perth, kalgoorlie, Esperance and Perth. During this ~2000 km trip, we climbed 1469m, descended 1469m, and I took several photographs. One these was taken in Kalgoorlie, and it has remained dominant in the anals of my mind, probably becuase I had taken up cycling after I retired. It was a photograph of a Wooden Bicycle that we spotted in the Kalgoorlie Museum.
Jumping forward to 2021 I meet a guy who not only rode a wooden bicycle, but rode a replica of the original, the “laufmaschine” (running machine, later dubbed a “dandyhorse” or “draisine” after its inventor, Baron Karl von Drais) during a parade in Germany. These two bicycles prompted me to write a blog about cycling with othere retired (old/senior) riding out of Howick, the hub of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands Meander. When I went in search of the photograph of the wooden bicycle, I once more found myself being utterly amazed by the \'Super Pit\', an enourmous hole in the ground that is still being dug in order to find gold.
On the day that Edith and I visited the Super Pit Viewing Site we were fortunate enough to see and seriously large mobile crane lower some brave individual to a rock fall that had made one of the roads descending into the Super Pit dangerous. Such falls occur as a matter of course and also because digging and road construction sometines uncovers old mine shafts that were dug before the days of the Super Pit.
I could go on, and if I did it would be about the trucks and their drivers, that descend into the mine in order to remove the rock that is loosen by periodic blasts. The trucks are of course now driving themselves, and have been for some time if I am not mistaken.
As I have already mentioned, Kalgoorlie is 600 kilometers east of Perth and close to the West Australian Desert. The prospectors and gold miners that found themselves in that area 100 years ago had a problem finding drinkable water. The water they could lay their hands on was brackish and had to be destilled and that placed an exhorbitant price tage on it. To solve that a pipeline was built and installed to carry fresh water from the Mundaring Weir just outside of Perth, to Kagoorlie.
The engineer responsible for that was Charles Yelverton O’Connor, who was initially appointed by the then Premier of Western Australia, John Forrest, to be in charge of ‘Railways, harbours, everything’. What he achieved back then, remains impressive even to this day. Unfortunately the construction of the pipeline took its toll and he ended his life shortly before the first water was delivered by the pipeline to Kalgoorlie. Sadly ironic that he had to deal withThe Irish-born engineer took his life before the construction of the 560-kilometre pipeline — designed to pump water from Mundaring to the booming Goldfields hub of Kalgoorlie. It is rather ironic that despite the enourmous success of the projects he was responsible for, he probably did this as a result of having to endure unrelenting criticism.
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If you have any comments, corrections, suggestions or plain criticism, I would appreciate it if you would communicate the same to me.
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[email protected] |
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Google+ | www.robdempster.com |
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