A week ago we were in Kansas City, MO, celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary with some of the family. On friday 11th, we enjoyed an anniversary dinner at the restaurant Le Fou Frog where Ivan works at the moment. It’s French cuisine, all cooked from scratch. The festively priced restaurant week menu was just right for our occasion. If they’d had croquembouche listed we’d have most likely ordered it because that was the dessert at our wedding. I don’t remember what we did actually order, but the management, knowing of our celebration, came out instead with this fabulous chocolate dessert I’d call a terrine. It was a layered construction of 0.75cm base of fudge brownie-like cake, topped with a firm 1.5cm of chocolate mousse and that topped with a 0.75cm layer of beautiful chocolate, set but not set hard. A layer of edible gold leaf covered the top surface and into that someone wrote ‘Happy 50th’, which you can just pick out in the photo above.
We didn’t schedule a honeymoon trip. Mike’s first foray into the sharemarket frenzy a few months before had temporarily left him a bit strapped for cash 🙂 and my first teacher appointment to the Eastern Goldfields Senior High School would begin soon, leaving just a little time to set up house in our mining company-provided accommodation. So a couple of days after the wedding we left for Kalgoorlie, the famous gold mining town in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia.
Back then, a trip from Launceston to Kalgoorlie-Boulder normally required just one overnight stop, in Perth. However, a nation-wide pilots’ strike just a day or two before our wedding made it slower going, with the airline only able to put us on one fight each day. But they did put us up in a nice hotel each night in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, so it wasn’t all bad 😉 and we spent a fair bit of time on the phone and in lines waiting at airports.
On the Adelaide to Perth flight a young woman sitting over the aisle from Michael struck up conversation. Humbly dressed, plain looking and lacking any style or grooming, she said she was going to Kalgoorlie to stay with her auntie. Mike said later he was sure this really meant she was on her way to work in the Hay Street brothels there, which I found amazing, knowing virtually nothing about such things at that time. She asked where we’d recommend going to have fun in Perth that night. Other than having dinner somewhere, we weren’t concerned about what the bright lights could offer, and not knowing Perth, we couldn’t help much. But she managed OK – next morning she took breakfast in the dining room with a smartly dressed, slightly older fella, who sat her in a snappy car for the trip to the airport, while we boarded the airline bus. As our plane arrived mid afternoon in 100+F heat, there, drawn up on the tarmac was a large black luxury car, and standing beside it a smartly coiffed Auntie Mame figure dressed in floaty peacock blue chiffon edged with matching ostrich feathers, wearing gold sandals and holding a long gold cigarette holder. Auntie, a well-known brothel madam, whisked her niece away even before we got to the passenger lounge, and I’ll bet she looked completely different within a day or two!
We only expected to remain on the Goldfields a couple of years before travelling off to somewhere exciting like europe, or north america. But we settled in and became part of the community, and found the twin towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and the exploration community very congenial, much to our liking. We decided it would be a great place to have children and produced our two there. We loved it, became involved in various sports and committees and stayed on, always feeling it would be our decision when to leave, if we ever did. I’ve got plenty of food related things to write of in future posts about our 7+ years there.
All booms fade, though. Exploration companies closed offices and disappeared. Friends began to be transferred elsewhere or actively seek other opportunities. Shops began to empty, services to be curtailed. There were similar stories to that of the historic Great Boulder Mining company that Mike had worked for for 7+ years – it was taken over and in the merger 500+ people lost their jobs the same day he did. He’d seen it coming and had begun a job hunt at a time with few openings for geologists. He was lucky to get a job offer he didn’t particularly want, but having 4 mouths to feed we found ourselves moving to Darwin in the Northern Territory, entering the two years I call Our Tent Period. (see Glossary) There will be some ‘Tent Period’ posts, and several more relating to our second boom, the gold boom of the 80s in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, 1981-87.