Qualla: Great Fingall Mine office

Great Fingall Mine office: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Gnangarra, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is a strange thing to find in the middle of nowhere: a handsome single-storey building in stone, with the proportions and dignity of a small Italian villa, set down in the red dust of the Murchison. The Great Fingall Mine office was never meant to be remarkable. It was the place where ore was assayed and accounts were kept for one of Western Australia's richest gold mines. But the mine closed, the town of Day Dawn around it disappeared, and the office simply stayed - outliving everything it was built to serve.

Image: User:Gnangarra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Fingall Mine office: Built to Run an Empire of Gold

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The office went up around 1902, in the Federation Italianate style favoured for buildings meant to project permanence and authority. It was constructed of local stone - and the masons were probably Italian, believed to have been brought in specifically for the work, though no sur...

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Fingall Mine office: The Last One Standing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E.W.Digby, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the Great Fingall mine closed in 1918 and the men left for the war and for other fields, Day Dawn unravelled around the office. House by house, hotel by hotel, the town came down or fell apart, until by the 1930s it was gone. The office endured. Today it is the only substant...

Image: E.W.Digby | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Fingall Mine office: The Work Inside the Walls

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. It helps to picture what these rooms were for. The assay office was a small laboratory in the desert, where workers fired ore samples in furnaces, weighed the gold that separated out on delicate balances, and turned raw rock into the hard numbers a mining company lived or died by...

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Fingall Mine office: On the Edge of the Pit

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The office faced a fresh danger when mining returned. In the mid-1990s a new open-cut operation reopened the ground, and the pit was dug startlingly close - the building now perches near the very edge of an open-cut mine, a heritage monument balanced against an active excavation....

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0