Our Goals

Fabulous fortunes, shocking tragedies, mystery and excitement surrounding Western Australia’s many ghost towns are being unveiled.

At present, our list of identified ghosts towns has grown to more than 500 with more being identified every day. Of these perhaps the mining towns are the best known. In the 1901 census the largest towns in Western Australia included the mining towns of Day Dawn, Kanowna, Mount Morgan and Nannine, all of which are ghost towns today.

Western Australia’s size, vast distances, boom and bust and unforgiving climate have left us with many places where once there was life that now has gone or almost gone. What remains may only be a crumbled down structure or grid patterns of a few streets which have now all but gone back to bush.

The project is providing a richer, more human connection to these places, by giving voice to communities whose stories are often overlooked or marginalised in traditional historical narratives. The project will ensure that these individuals and locations are not forgotten. Information gathered will be published on an online website and index.

The Index

We will be creating an searchable index of the records of people who were associated with our Ghost communities at any time in their history. The index will be drawing upon as many sources as we can find and users of the index will be able to locate their person no matter where they were (or when) even if they moved from place to place, as so many of them did.

A bespoke website is currently under development and, once this has been completed we will be releasing a percentage of the records that we have captured, progressively, until 2029. From 2029 onwards all records will be added to the available database as they are collected.

It is expected that the number of records will total in the tens of millions by 2029 – the target date for the bicentennary.

The Community Profiles

Once you have found your ancestor living in one of our communities, you will want to know what that place was like and what life was like for them living there. So the second major deliverable for the project will be profiles of all the communities in our list.

Some of the communities are very well known and well documented. Some are almost totally forgotten. Whatever the case may be, we will be writing about these places – their history, their industry, their milestone events. Where to find them, how big was the population, what facilities existed, what social life and sporting events. Anything we can find will be included in the profiles to try to build a complete picture. So that you can have a complete picture of the life lived by your ancestor/s.

You can see some early examples of these profiles right here on our website now – Abbotts, Bardoc, etc. – and as we find out more about the communities we will continue to build the profiles.

The Blog

As we are doing our work on the project, we often come across interesting stories from the past and we want to share with you. We do this through our Blog – Ghosts WA. We are adding stories all the time, so please subscribe to our blog and follow our progress.

Community Engagement

If you are interested in having a member of our team come to speak to your group, please email us at ghostswa@fhwa.org.au and we can organise a suitable date and time. Our presentations last about an hour and have been very well received by a wide range of audiences across Perth and in regional areas.