Gold Quest Trail - Britz

Five nights and 1,983 kilometres in a loop from Perth in a campervan, out through the Wheatbelt into the goldfields and back.

Corrigin and Hyden come first, with Wave Rock near Hyden, a granite face fifteen metres high and a hundred long that looks exactly like a breaking wave, then Coolgardie, which held tens of thousands of people in the 1890s rush and now holds a few hundred, with the courthouse, the post office and the warden’s court still standing.

Kalgoorlie follows, where the Super Pit is a single open-cut mine several kilometres long and deep enough to be visible from orbit, and where the main street was built wide enough to turn a camel train. Menzies and Lake Ballard come next, and the lake holds Antony Gormley’s Inside Australia, fifty-one steel figures spread across ten square kilometres of salt pan. Leonora, the ghost town of Gwalia, where Herbert Hoover managed the mine long before he became president, and Laverton close the route at the edge of the Great Victoria Desert.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. Six days for nearly two thousand kilometres makes this a driving trip rather than a leisurely one, and the leg out to Laverton and back is long and empty. Lake Ballard is best at dawn or dusk, when the figures throw shadows right across the salt.