60th Anniversary of Goldfields Water Supply SchemePrint Page

The plaque commemorates the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme.

On 16 July 1896, the Premier of Western Australia, Sir John Forrest introduced to Western Australian Parliament a bill to authorise the raising of a loan of £2.5 million to construct the scheme: the pipeline would convey 23,000 kilolitres (5,100,000 imp gal) of water per day to the Goldfields from a dam on the Helena River near Mundaring in Perth.

In 1903 the first water was pumped from Perth to Kalgoorlie, 600 kilometres east, along the newly built Coolgardie Water Supply pipeline. The pipeline was the vision of Charles Yelverton O`Connor, Chief Engineer of Western Australia from 1891 to 1902, who managed what many people considered was the impossible, to pump 22,700 cubic metres of water from the plentiful supplies of Mundaring Weir (East of Perth), lifting it 355 metres with only eight pumping stations, and delivering it to the dry goldfield towns 600 kilometres away. This major engineering feat was treated with much scepticism by the press and politicians of the day whose unprecedented criticism of the project drove O`Connor to suicide a year before the pipeline became operational.

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