Yamarna

My father took up the Yamarna Station lease of 360,00 acres (about 140,000 hectares) in 1963. Yamarna itself had no houses or buildings. There was one Government water well about a mile from where the homestead was. The ‘Well’ as it was known to us, had an old windlass to draw water and no windmill.  In the late 1950s, the Lovicks had built a low-lying tin shed at Minnie Creek, about 16 miles from Yamarna. They had lived there for a few years trying to establish a sheep property. They also fenced one paddock on Yamarna using the Well as their watering point.

Yamarna Homestead

The first building on the property was transported on a low loader 314 kilometres (195 miles) from Leonora in 1964. A canvas-roofed Thornycroft truck pulled the low loader or jinker trailer built by my father. The building which became my home was the old Police station from Gwalia, and one of the ‘bedrooms’ was the cell block. It had a massive timber door complete with a peephole. Undertaken in the summer heat, transporting the house took a lot of work.

The road from the Great Central Highway (also known as the Great Central Road) to Yamarna didn’t exist then and came through Minnie Creek. It was Christmas Day, and going through the creek system, an overhanging branch knocked the roof and two walls from the kitchen. Later the same day, in heavy rain, the truck and jinker became bogged in another old creek system, only a mile from the intended location. The house never moved again. Jacked off the trailer where it was and put on stumps. The house stood in the creek system until demolition by a mining company in 2011.

The cork tree where my tree house was built 60 years ago is alive and well. All the timber frames are rotted and eaten by white ants. However, the steps are still visible in the trunk.

Goldmine

It is ironic, given we went broke on the property, that the mining company Gold Road Resources are now developing one of Australia’s newest goldfields. The Yamarna Belt holds interests in tenements covering ~6,000 km² in the region. According to the company, the leases contain a gold resource of some 6.5 million ounces.

My grandfather, a gold miner from the Depression years, always swore (literally) that there was gold on Yamarna. My father pegged 17 lease blocks in the 1970s and had material assayed. CRA now Rio Tinto did express interest, but the deal fell through. A few ounces of the gold back then wouldn’t have gone astray!