2029 will mark two significant Western Australian milestones. The first milestone is the Bicentenary of European settlement. The second is FamilyHistoryWA’s 50th Anniversary. To mark these events, the Society (FHWA) has launched a project to gather together everything we can find about the people who lived in the ghost towns of Western Australia. The project timeframe is six years. The project will be launched in 2029 to coincide with the joint celebrations.
At present the list of identified ghost towns sits at more than 450. Starting with a pilot of four towns, groups of volunteers will work progressively through the towns, indexing the people found in as many records as we can locate for each community. We use the term Community rather than town in our lists recognising that some of these places were not gazetted towns. Some came into being to support specific task, such as the building of the Kalgoorlie Pipeline, and then disbanded when the task was completed. Forces came together to form communitys for all manner of reasons. Some communities lasted for a century or more, while others came and went in the space of a very few years. Some communities grew and shrank, only to grow and shrink again. We would like to capture them all.
If you would like to part of the team, please complete this form and our volunteer coordinator will contact you. Please join us on our journey of discovery.
And if you are interested in finding out how we choose what communities to include, check out this post.
Note: the photo in our header is of Cossack and comes from the SLWA.
People of Western Australia's Ghost Towns 