The People of Western Australia’s Ghost Towns project team are pleased to announce the launch of Phase 5 on 7 December 2025. Phase 5 will add 19 new communities to those already in progress.
Click on the name of the town to find out what we know about it – so far. Our research continues and we will be keeping all our content up to date with our latest discoveries!
Do you know anything about any of these communities? Do you have pictures, stories, documents, records of any type? Please let us know via the comments panel.
Author’s Note: This report is taken from The West Australian – 15 Aug 19411.
Farthest-east School.
“The State Government is about to provide a school for 20 children at Coonana, 100 miles east of Kalgoorlie on the trans-Australian railway. It will be the Education Department’s farthest-east school. The Commonwealth Government is building cottages for its railway employees at Coonana, where there are about 12 married men with families, and the department took advantage of the presence of builders to have the school erected at the same time. It will consist of a wooden classroom (20 ft. square), for the construction of which the tender of Henry Martin and Co., amounting to £627, has been accepted.”
The Coonana Primary School operated from 1942 until 19802. Coonana Siding was named after a nearby hill that was first recorded as Coonaanna by W.P. Goddard in 1890. The possible meaning of the word is “hill of ashes”3.
In May 2011, The Weekend West‘s Rod Moran published an article under the banner “The Way We Were”.1 The short article reads:
August 4, 1898
In three decades Goongarrie grew from a camp to a thriving town and finally a ghost town.
This lighthearted snap shows a picnic gathering at Goongarrie, a flourishing gold-mining site in the back-blocks between Menzies and Kalgoorlie. The first gold discoveries in the area were mde in 1893. The hamlet was also called the Roaring Gimlet, due to the thundering noise of icy desert winds through the gimlet trees. More prosaically, early on it was simply called the 90 Mile camp, its approximate distance from Coolgardie.
Despite its isolation, Goongarrie developed into a thriving little town. By the 1890s it boasted two pubs, as well a other essential services such as a post and telegraph office. In 1898 the Cobb and Co coach from Coolgardie was boosted from a bi-weekly to a daily run. The government rail line opened in the same year. The town also boasted a blacksmith, a carpenter, two butchers, a baker two restaurants and a cool drink manufacturer. But the citizens depicted here at play also had some weighty concerns on their minds in its August 4, 1889 [sic] edition The West Australian reported “Considerable dissatisfaction is expressed in this district at the failure of the Education Department to establish a school at Goongarrie. From 15 to 30 children are now resident here, and…not having any educational facilities whatever, are to a great extent running wild about the country…growing up in almost total ignorance.”
In 1904 the district’s electoral roll listed 109 names. But by 1921 the postal directory had only 21 people on it. even if a school had been built, Goongarrie’s fortunes would have waned as alluvial gold petered out.
The information and accompanying image were said to be taken from the archives of The West Australian. However, a search of Trove for the period in question has not located the original photo. The quoted comment about the lack of a school in Goongarrie can be found in the Kalgoorlie Western Argus2 along with further details on the issue.
In September 1898, Cyril Jackson, the Inspector General of Schools, responded to a letter from the local Board of Health in which an offer of a suitable building (the Miners’ Institute) was made to house a school free of charge. He said “…the Minister is very anxious indeed to extend education to as many children as possible. It seems impossible, however, in the present state of the funds to establish a school at Goongarrie.”3
Some things, it seems, never change.
Source
Rod Moran, 2011. The Weekend West : The Way We Were. Published 28-29 May, 2011 by The West Australian Newspapers. ↩︎
What was school like for the children and teachers of Western Australia’s Ghost Towns?
In the years of rapid growth of mining communities, timber camps and the railways, (which encouraged the opening up of much agricultural land), schools opened and closed rapidly, sometimes even in the same community as the population grew and shrunk and grew again. Schools were indeed perfect barometers of the rise and fall of centres of population.1
During the years of the early 1900s, Western Australia was fortunate to have a head of the Education Department who believed that every child in Western Australia, no matter how remote their home was, should have access to education.2 This thinking caused many tiny schools to open. Sometimes as few as 10 children were needed before a school could be established. Schools were in tents, slab huts, transportable buildings with canvas walls and a tin roof, in the back rooms of halls or churches and in school buildings, which were often erected by the community.
Both the pupils and their teachers did it tough in these bush schools. Pupils often walked long distances to school or if they were lucky rode horses. Pupils were expected to attend school if they lived 2 or 3 miles away, (the younger children under 9 were only expected to walk 2 miles, while those over 9 could walk longer distances). School ‘buildings’ got very hot in summer and were freezing in the winter months. School rooms were also home to local wildlife such as mosquitos, flies, frogs, lizards, mice, and snakes.
Teachers were under pressure to not only teach but keep the school grounds looking good, either making a garden or, at the minimum, planting trees. Sometimes this resulted in children spending a lot of their school time in the bush gathering materials for fencing the school, missing out on their education, and ruining their clothes.4
A teacher’s first difficulty when appointed to a bush school was finding out where the school was and then how to get there. Once they arrived at a remote railway siding most of the community were there to meet them, especially if the teacher was a young female.
Housing for the teachers was also a problem. A community that wanted a school had to supply accommodation for the teacher. Often the teacher boarded with a local family, and most families lived in very basic houses. The teacher sometimes shared a room with older children and female teachers were usually expected to assist with household chores as well as paying board. Teachers got to school the same way as their pupils, by walking up to three miles or in some places riding a horse.
Once the teachers got to school they had the daily challenge of teaching a class of pupils whose ages ranged from 5 to 14. After the school day was finished the bush school teachers needed to clean the school, (for which they were paid a little extra, and complete hours of paperwork – such as ensuring attendance records were up to date, writing letters to the Education Department or answering such letters, and having written plans in place for all grade levels they taught.
Up until the 1930s the majority of schools outside West Australian towns had less than 20 pupils. The government of that day put education as their second highest priority, after ensuring a satisfactory food supply for the state.5 Eventually as people began moving to larger towns, there was a move to centralise schooling and pupils began to be bussed to larger schools.
The era of small schools in the bush was drawing to a close. Thousands of children attended small bush schools in Western Australia. Did they receive an education that was comparable to the children in the larger towns? In many cases yes, due to the efforts of their intrepid teachers and their parents who ensured that their children were up and off to school.
As children across Western Australia return to school this week in their air-conditioned classrooms, let’s take a moment to remember what it was like for many of the children in years gone by in lonely schools down the dusty tracks or forest paths.
School children at the Lewis and Reid No.2 Mill, near Allanson, c19206
SOURCES
Quote attributed to an Inspector Miles in 1912 in McKenzie, J.A. (1987). Old bush schools: life and education in the small schools of Western Australia 1893 to 1961. Doubleview, Australia: Western Australian College of Advanced Education. P. 7. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworks/7075↩︎
Cecil Andrews, an Oxford graduate, was head of the Western Australian Education Department from 1913 to 1927. ↩︎
Bush Schools: A Plea for the Children. Letter to the editor of the Bunbury Herald and Blackwood Express, 26 November 1920. p.6 ↩︎
McKenzie, J.A. (1987). Old bush schools: life and education in the small schools of Western Australia 1893 to 1961. Doubleview, Australia: Western Australian College of Advanced Education. P. 14. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworks/7075↩︎
State Library of Western Australia. School children, Lewis and Reid No. 2 Mill, near Allanson, Western Australia, ca. 1920. Photograph retrieved from https://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b6797766_2 on 29 Jan 2024. ↩︎
People of Western Australia's Ghost Towns 