In 1896, the idea of pumping a river's worth of water 560 kilometres uphill to the goldfields was described by its critics as a scheme of madness. C.Y. O'Connor built it anyway: a weir across the Helena River in the jarrah hills, eight steam pump stations, and a steel pipeline running east to Kalgoorlie. It opened in 1903, it is still delivering water today, and the place where it all starts is one of the best easy day trips Perth has.

Walk the wall

The dam wall walk is the centrepiece — a concrete rampart across the valley with the reservoir glass-flat on one side and a long drop to the outlet valves on the other. Interpretive plaques run the length of it, and the white domed valve towers give the whole thing a strangely Mediterranean look against the eucalypts.

The pump station story

At the base of the wall, the old No. 1 Pump Station houses the museum of the whole improbable enterprise — the boilers, the scale of the thing, and the tragedy of O'Connor himself, who died months before the water reached Kalgoorlie and never saw his scheme vindicated. It's the best engineering story in Australia, told in the building where it started.

Forest, trail, pub

The weir precinct plugs straight into the hills' trail network — the Kep Track follows the pipeline's old alignment, and loops through the jarrah run from twenty minutes to half a day. Kookaburras supervise all picnics. And up the hill, the Mundaring Weir Hotel has been pouring drinks since the construction camps, with a beer garden built for the end of a walk.

Go in spring: the reservoir is full, the wildflowers are out along the Kep, and the forest smells like rain on gravel. Take the long way home through the hills villages.

Photo: JarrahTree via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5 au).