Qualla: Nannine, Western Australia

Nannine, Western Australia: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit not stated, Public domain. Long before anyone here thought about gold, the Wajarri people knew this place by the shape of a story written in the land. In the Dreaming, they said, the great Dingo bit a piece from an Emu, and the trace of that act remained in a nearby cliff-face they called nganiny. The name that came down from it - Nannine, meaning 'fat' - was first recorded by a surveyor in 1889, a year before prospectors arrived. Then gold was found, and for a few decades Nannine was the first and largest town on the Murchison goldfield, a place of hotels and railways and seven hundred eager men. Today it is a ghost town on the northern bank of Lake Annean, so thoroughly erased that its most prominent building no longer even stands here.

Image: not stated | Public domain

Nannine, Western Australia: First on the Field

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. The discovery was murky from the start. By one account, station hands named Ingpen and Watts on the Annean pastoral run first suspected gold and, around May 1890, showed the site to a New South Wales mining engineer named Connolly - who found gold but seemed unimpressed. It took ...

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nannine, Western Australia: A Town That Moved Itself

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit not stated, Public domain. Nannine was born twice. The original settlement huddled in a gully between the later townsite and the mines, an unplanned sprawl of canvas and corrugated iron. In 1892, John Forrest - then Premier of Western Australia and the colony's first to hold that office - ordered lots surv...

Image: not stated | Public domain

Nannine, Western Australia: Rails, Rain and Decline

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. For a while the future looked secure. A telegraph line reached Geraldton in 1894; a stone post and telegraph building rose in 1896; the railway from Cue arrived in 1903, with the line pushing north toward Meekatharra by 1909. The town had its hotels - the Pioneer, the Royal, the ...

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nannine, Western Australia: Carried Away

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rfahrytas, CC BY-SA 3.0. What becomes of a town that everyone leaves? At Nannine, much of it was simply carried off. The police station closed in 1922 and the building was hauled to Yalgoo. The Masonic Hall, built here around 1900, was dismantled and transported to Meekatharra as the town faded - and the...

Image: Rfahrytas | CC BY-SA 3.0