Talk:Coolgardie, Western Australia

population after was 2,ooo then soon after raised

Lack of Aboriginal Reference
Like many discussions of Western Australian history, Aborigines are totally absent. Can this be added. John D. Croft 01:41, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I guess the article could mention the supposed aboriginal origin of the name Coolgardie, and mention that the Wangai people lived in that general area (they weren't limited to the town site). However I would have thought that there are more significant points that are missing in this article. The article makes no mention of Arthur Bayley or William Ford, and they were the ones who discovered the gold that led to the establishment of the town in the first place! Not everything in WA is about aboriginals you know. As I understand it, Coolgardie isn’t particularly significant in Aboriginal history in the way that, say, Moore River, Rottnest Island, or even Northam (where the population were “cleared out” for “health reasons” in 1933) are. Nor have I heard about aboriginals being particularly prominent in the founding of the town, or the development of its mines (that may be my ignorance, but do you know differently?), and given the attitudes of the time, I wouldn’t expect otherwise. I haven’t heard of any great massacre of aboriginals in Coolgardie or the surrounding area either – if there was, it should go in. I guess that a proportion of the 800 people there today are aboriginals, but I don’t think it’s a town with a particularly high aboriginal population, unlike Wiluna. It seems a bit pointless to say that the population “includes aboriginals” – weasel words that apply to just about every town in the state and don’t add anything much to a reader’s knowledge of the town. You could give an ethnic breakdown of the population (do we even have one?) but is that a true aboriginal reference? That said, I think the aboriginal connection to the area, and the fact the name is apparently of aboriginal derivation, is at least as notable as the "Afghan" camel drivers, who got a whole paragraph devoted to them for some reason. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.58.245.247 (talk) 14:46, 27 July 2011 (UTC)