Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Stand at the edge of the Fimiston Open Pit - known universally as the Super Pit - and the scale of human ambition made visible is genuinely humbling. The pit stretches 3.6 kilometres long, 1.6 kilometres wide and plunges more than 600 metres into the red earth, a wound in the landscape so large that the dump trucks working its terraced walls look like toys. The free lookout on the eastern rim is open daily from 7 am to 7 pm, and on a clear morning you can watch the shift change play out across a pit that operates 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Mining is scheduled to continue here until at least 2035, so the show goes on.\n\nStep back from the pit and you step into one of Australia's finest collections of Federation-era architecture. Hannan Street - named for Paddy Hannan himself - is lined with ornate hotels and civic buildings erected in the late 1890s and early 1900s when the goldfields were flushed with money and ambition. The two-storey timber York Hotel, the grand Palace Hotel with its elaborate pressed-metal ceilings, and the Kalgoorlie Town Hall are all intact and in use. The WA Museum Kalgoorlie-Boulder, housed in the restored 1896 School of Mines building, holds the state's largest collection of gold bars and nuggets and takes visitors up into the original headframe for panoramic views over the city and its red-earth surrounds.\n\nFor a deeper look at the underground workings that preceded the Super Pit, Hannans North Tourist Mine offers a guided descent into a genuine hard-rock gold mine, complete with original machinery, ore demonstrations and the chance to try your hand at gold panning. The site preserves early 20th-century mining infrastructure and the stories of the men - and women - who built the goldfields. Hannan Street also retains several of the two-storey timber and iron hotels that once served a population drinking hard to forget the heat and the distance from everywhere else.\n\nThe Wangkatha peoples have lived across this country for thousands of years. The name Kalgoorlie is itself a corruption of the Wangai word Karlkurla, meaning "place of the silky pear" - a reference to the edible native plant Marsdenia australis that grows through the region's mulga scrub. The WA Museum's permanent exhibitions include material on Wangkatha culture and the profound disruption the gold rush brought to communities that had managed this arid country with sophisticated knowledge of its water sources, food plants and seasonal rhythms.\n\nKalgoorlie-Boulder rewards those who stay long enough to feel its pace. The evenings cool quickly and the stars over an outback city with limited light pollution are extraordinary. Day trips reach the evocative ghost town of Coolgardie 40 kilometres to the west, or the otherworldly sculptures of Antony Gormley at Lake Ballard 200 kilometres north. For photographers, the combination of Victorian-era streetscapes, monumental industrial machinery and the blood-red landscape at golden hour makes this one of the most visually rewarding cities in regional Australia.