1899 Coolgardie Exhibition

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Ref: Goldfields Tourism Network

From 21st March until 1st July 1899, Coolgardie hosted its own ‘Great Exhibition’ – The Western Australian International Mining and Industrial Exhibition. Between March and July 1897 the colonial government agreed to a matching grant and provided land in Coolgardie. This support was later increased by raising the grant and agreeing to frank exhibits by rail. In 1898 once ‘a handsome building had been erected’, the government vested the land in the Municipal Council ‘for the purposes of a Mining Exhibition, School of Mines, Technological Institute and Geological Museum, and for other municipal purposes’ . This allowed the Coolgardie municipality to borrow on the security of the grounds…..The buildings formed a quadrangle. The main building was of stone with a tower. The stone section housed the exhibition administration, a concert hall and the agricultural exhibition hall. The remainder of the buildings were of galvanised iron. The Western Australian Chamber of Mines in London originally promised to support the exhibition, ‘but the notorious slump fell upon us, and the dream of big donations from London companies vanished with the boom’.

There was considerable disappointment that other Australian colonies, with the exception of South Australia , had not contributed to the exhibition. The Coolgardie Miner was bitter about the town council’s failure to vote funds for hospitality for the Mayor of Melbourne. Perhaps underlying this bitterness was debate over the relative importance of convincing Victorians that their expatriates prospered in Western Australia.

Souvenirs included medallions minted in the exhibition. At the closing ceremony Forrest announced that minerals exhibited would be purchased by the government for display at the Paris Exhibition in 1900. He wished the world to know that ‘W.A. was the greatest gold producer in the British Empire’.While the Exhibition had confirmed Coolgardie’s celebrity status on the world stage, it could not halt the growing rivalry of Kalgoorlie as the new centre of the goldfields. The School of Mines was not opened until November 1902, and it lasted only a year before being supplanted by a School of Mines in Kalgoorlie. When the School closed in 1903 the building was occupied for some years by the Education Department as a technical school. The Exhibition buildings were destroyed by fire in the 1930s.

The Coolgardie International Mining and Industrial Exhibition catalogue (35 MB file!) details the exhibits and other aspects of the exhibition, and contains advertisements from businesses during that time.