Early history Until the 1880s, the economy of WA was based on wheat, meat and wool. A major change in the colony's fortunes occurred when gold was discovered, and prospectors by the tens of thousands swarmed across the land in a desperate attempt to discover new goldfields. The first gold rush occurred in 1885 when Charles Hall discovered alluvial gold in the
Kimberley region, near the future site of a
town named after him. Further alluvial finds occurred across the state during the following five years, with finds in
Marble Bar,
Southern Cross and
Yalgoo. From these discoveries, the prospectors moved further afield. In 1890, gold was discovered in the
Norseman region at
Dundas, south of present-day Norseman, followed in 1894 by a gold discovery near the future town of Norseman itself, by prospector Laurie Sinclair, who named the deposit after his horse,
Hardy Norseman. In 1891, the rush to the Murchison goldfields began when
Tom Cue discovered gold at the town which now bears his name. In the years that followed, gold towns such as Abbots, Austin, Barrambie, Big Bell, Day Dawn, Garden Gully, Lennonville, Moyagee, Munarra, Nannine,
Peak Hill, Pinnacles, Reedy and Rothsay flourished, only to be abandoned when the mines were worked out. The major discovery at
Coolgardie in 1892, by William Ford and Arthur Bayley, set off a new
gold rush. This was accelerated by the discovery the following year by
Paddy Hannan,
Tom Flanagan and Dan Shea of gold at
Kalgoorlie. These early discoveries in the Eastern Goldfields sparked a true
gold rush. , In 1896, the
Sons of Gwalia mine, named after an archaic
Welsh name for
Wales,
Gwalia, was established by
Welsh miners.
Herbert Hoover, the later
President of the United States, served as the mine manager in its early days from May to November 1898. In 1896, gold was discovered in the
Wiluna region, which was then known as
Lake Way, by three prospectors, George Woodley, James Wotton and Jimmy Lennon. On 29 December 1897, a nugget was found in Wiluna, then the largest found in the colony of Australia. The location of its discovery was later to become the spot for the powerhouse of the
Wiluna Gold Mine Limited, the operators of the early mine. By the end of the 1890s, more than a third of the colony's population was located in the Eastern Goldfields. The political influence of this population was demonstrated in proposals that the region should become a new, separate colony, with a name such as
Auralia, and Coolgardie or Kalgoorlie as its capital. These campaigns accelerated when there was opposition in Perth to
Australian Federation. There were calls for "Auralia" to join federation as a separate state. In many cases, the boom was short-lived, with towns and mines in the Goldfields disappearing quickly, once the surface deposits were depleted. Only where larger companies developed in underground mining did towns survive. By 1903, the gold mining industry in Western Australia reached its peak, and population of the Goldfields started to decline again. The discovery of the
Golden Eagle nugget at Coolgardie in 1931, at the time the largest ever found in Western Australia, attracted many prospectors to return to the state. ==Current situation==