Hoover's land of "red dust, black flies and white heat"

In one of his many letters home, Hoover described Western Australia's goldfields as a land of "red dust, black flies and white heat" (1897). And it was, indeed, an inhospitable landscape. Heat, thirst and typhoid took a terrible human toll in the early gold rush years. By the time Hoover became a director of London's Bewick Moreing & Co (1902-08), the company was managing mines throughout the goldfields, including the fabulously rich Great Fingall at Day Dawn, just north of Lake Austin, one of the region's hundreds of normally dry salt lakes (shown in this photgraph following a rare rainfall event).