In the 1890s, The Goldfields Water Supply Department in Western Australia commissioned the diamond drilling of two deep artesian exploratory water bores near Coolgardie (Blatchford, 1899). At the time, in spite of strongly-worded advice to the contrary from the Government geologists, there was a wide popular belief that you could obtain artesian groundwater virtually anywhere providing you drilled deep enough. The first Coolgardie hole was drilled to over 900 m, despite the fact that the bore penetrated granite from a depth of 5 m below the surface. Drilling proceeded for more than 16 months, between July 1896 and November 1897. A small quantity of salt water was struck at a depth of 36 m. The second bore was mercifully terminated at a depth of 50 m, also in granite, with again only a small inflow of salt water. Such were the desperate lengths that were pursued to obtain a reliable water supply for the influx of people in the Eastern Goldfields gold rush. The WA Goldfields continued to rely on huge condensers for water supply until that great engineering feat, the construction of a water pipeline from Mundaring Weir to Coolgardie, was completed in 1903. An enormous network of rail tracks penetrated outwards from Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie for the collection of timber, principally to feed the condensers. Remnants of the rail network are still visible today. The acute shortage of fresh water led to great deprivation, disease and death among the early miners. Today, the water problems faced by the mining industry are thankfully not as severe, but they are nevertheless no less challenging. The southern part of the WA Goldfields is a notoriously difficult area for finding potable quality groundwater. Even as recently as the 1990s, there were occasional serious efforts to find potable groundwater in that area, some very imaginative and innovative. One mining company, working south of Southern Cross, spent many months experimenting with recovery of potable quality water from a shallow freshwater lens overlying hypersaline water in a low permeability weathered granite aquifer. They used very low capacity pumps manufactured from car windscreen washer pumps powered by solar panels.