Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the capital of the Western Australian goldfields, a desert city built on a fortune that never quite stopped being dug out of the ground. It is rough-edged, practical, and unusually vivid: wide streets, old hotels, mining headframes, red dust, and the enormous Super Pit at the edge of town.
The first stop should be the Super Pit Lookout, because it explains the scale of everything else. From there, the Museum of the Goldfields gives the rush, the money, and the mining culture more depth, while Hannan Street shows how much Victorian ambition was dragged into the desert.
This is not a resort town, and that is the point. Kalgoorlie-Boulder is most rewarding if you are curious about work, wealth, isolation, and the way a boomtown keeps reinventing itself when the hole in the ground keeps paying.