Qualla: Big Bell, Western Australia

Big Bell, Western Australia: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phcrack, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most goldfields towns grew by accident, a tangle of tents that hardened into streets. Big Bell was different - it was planned. In 1935 the Premier Gold Mining Company announced it would develop the Big Bell mine, and a town was laid out to serve it, gazetted in 1936 with proper roads and a population that soon swelled to around 850. The centrepiece was a two-storey art deco hotel whose bar, by local reckoning, was one of the longest in the country. Today the hotel is a roofless brick shell, and the streets it anchored survive only as faint dirt lines in the scrub.

Image: Phcrack | CC BY-SA 3.0

Big Bell, Western Australia: A Bar Worth the Trip

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lennix3, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Big Bell Hotel opened in 1937, a large two-storey building in brick with the clean, confident lines of its art deco era - colonnades along the north and east faces, a graceful curved corner, a tiled roof catching the desert sun. It was the kind of building meant to tell a you...

Image: Lennix3 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Big Bell, Western Australia: The Railway That Came and Went

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Western Australian Government Railways (WAGR), Public domain. A town built around a single mine needs a lifeline, and Big Bell's was the railway. The Cue-Big Bell Railway Act passed in November 1936, after the Western Australian government struck an agreement with the American Smelting and Refining Company to build the line. The first train...

Image: Western Australian Government Railways (WAGR) | Public domain

Big Bell, Western Australia: Gold by the Tonne

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The gold here was first found in 1904 by Harry Paton, and a mine was quickly established, though ownership changed hands repeatedly before the Premier company gave the field its modern shape. Over its working life from 1904 to 1955 the historic Big Bell mine produced some 730,000...

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Big Bell, Western Australia: A Town You Read from the Air

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phcrack, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mining ceased again in 2003, and by 2007 the processing plant was dismantled and trucked off to feed a mine near Westonia, hundreds of kilometres south. What it left behind is a townsite best appreciated from above. Not many buildings remain standing, but the original road grid i...

Image: Phcrack | CC BY-SA 3.0