Australian Ghost Towns
Often the product of a previous mining boom, many ghost towns were once thriving communities containing the entire infrastructure that goes into creating a community. Things like schools and hospitals, sporting clubs and pubs, taverns, businesses and garages.
Towns are abandoned or deserted for a variety of reasons including climatic and environmental factors or the cessation of a rail link or industry.
It is Australian Government Policy that ghost towns do not become part of the landscape and that modern mining towns are dismantled on depletion of the mine. While environmentally this may appear to be an admirable policy, it is hardly respectful of the lives of the inhabitants, the businesses that were fostered, the architecture of the era or the concept of community.
Australia’s history is littered with the booms and busts of the mining industry. Around the 1900’s towns mostly become abandoned due to Gold drying up in a particular area and the diggers moving on.
By the 1960’s Australia was mining a variety of minerals. Health became an issue for towns like Wittenoom in Western Australia as the closure of the mine and fear of asbestos drove the community away.
Other towns sprang up from the demand for resources like iron ore. Large corporations like BHP erected overnight villages and populated them with mine employees and their families. For many families, 2nd and 3rd generations were raised in these towns, only ceasing to live in them when the mine closed and the companies removed the infrastructure.
We want to help record the history of these places. If you or someone you know has knowledge of a town now considered to be a ghost town and is interested in helping to record its history – then contact us.
We need articles about these places from people who speak about them authentically. Spelling, grammar and punctuation don’t matter. We will sort that out. Your name doesn’t have to be published if you don’t want.
If you can include a couple of photographs showing life in the town as it was that is even better.
Articles can be sent via email by selecting the 'CONTACTUS' link at the top of the page. Alternately you can just drop us a line if you want to discuss the possibility of putting something down on paper.
Current articles can be viewed here -
Ghost Towns - Condon Landing
Ghost Towns - Goldsworthy
Ghost Towns - Shay Gap
Ghost Towns - Wittenoom
Ghost Towns - Kuridala
Ghost Towns - Greenough
Ghost Towns - Mary Kathleen
Ghost Towns - Kanowna
Ghost Towns - Farina
Ghost Towns - Duchess
Ghost Towns - Arltunga
Ghost Towns - Mount Mulligan - North Queensland
Ghost Towns - Kathleen Valley
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