rt-motions

Having lunch in the middle of the road was an illustration of how truly remote the center of Australia is. And we had another example of that when we visited Lake Bollard, some 60 Km NW of Menzies, a town of around 60 inhabitants, north of Kalgoorlie. In a salt lake which is normally dry we found 51 carbonised steel sculptures by Antony Gormley; true to our reputation, it had just rained for a few days, so we had to walk through the mud. It takes at least two hours to walk around the installation. "The "insider" reveals an attitude in a taut abstract shape formed by the passage of the person's life". Visiting this place is a very strange experience. The sculptures are cast in an alloy containing molybdenum, vanadium and titanium, all found in the Archean rock of Western Australia.


In Kalgoorlie we visited the Super Pit at the time of a planned blast; it is done with milli seconds spacings, so there is not just one big bang, it looks like rolling out a carpet. The pit is 1.5 km wide, 410 m deep and 3.2 km long and the planned maximum depth will be 600 m. If you enlarge the picture, you'll find a yellow trailer on the RH side; you can also see the blast hole pattern near where the first holes have exploded. The Kalgoorlie goldfields have produced already more than 50 million ounces of gold. There are lots of statistics but one impressive figure is the 225 ton of ore which goes into one haul pack truck and it takes only 4 scoops to load it! These monsters are usually driven by women (better drivers?)