Tucked away in the Kalgoorlie Town Hall is a little jewel of a gaiety theatre, with eight tiers of tip-seated iron-framed chairs, all at dress-circle level and all sumptuously upholstered in crimson velvet. The balcony itself describes a graceful curve and has alabaster ornamentations tipped with gold. The pressed-tin roof features a fleur-de-lys design and is painted in airy pastel colours – pinks, creams, and swooning blues. On either side of the diminutive proscenium arch is a painting depicting an Arcadian, or at least a determinedly un-Australian, landscape. According to the only relevant bit of literature I could lay my hands on in the Town Hall, the theatre was built in 1908 and ‘brilliantly lighted with a central electrolier of 1,500 candle power’. Thus did energy and culture come early to the infant gold town of Kalgoorlie.

I noted from the portraits of past dignitaries in the council room that the name of the Mayor officiating at the time of the theatre’s construction was Mark Rosenberg. I was to try several times during our stay in Kalgoorlie to discover something about this rather melancholy, unmunicipal-looking man, but never succeeded. All I unearthed about the semitic history of the goldfields was that a pickpocket of international reputation, known as Jack the Jew, had been active in the area in the early part of the century. According to all accounts, Jack the Jew could slip the watch off your wrist and the braces out from underneath your waistcoat without your knowing the first thing about it. So it was probably a good job that his talents were regulated by a nice sense of honour; that his victims were primarily imprudent drunkards whose belongings Jack would spread amongst needy widows, or just hold in safe keeping until their owners were sober enough to deserve them back.

You would think that a place like Kalgoorlie, with its natural taste for eccentricity and lawlessness, would put up plaques to shining examples like Jack the Jew, instead of to the more conventional figures who have passed through, men such as Herbert Hoover, whose only distinction, once he’d served here as a young mining engineer at the end of the last century, was to go on and become President of the United States.