The 128-year-old Cornwall Hotel in Boulder has survived riots and earthquakes and is now on the market. It last operated as a pub in 2010, when an earthquake caused severe damage, though the building has since undergone extensive structural repairs. The interior still needs more restoration work, but a shortage of skilled tradespeople and heritage restrictions make that difficult.
The heritage-listed hotel, located in Western Australia's Goldfields, is infamous for its connection to the murders of two police officers a century ago. It is listed with an asking price of more than $1 million. This is the second time in a decade the hotel has been put up for sale, suggesting the overheated construction market and strict heritage obligations may be deterring buyers.
Built in 1898, just five years after gold was discovered at Kalgoorlie, the two-storey hotel is named after the Cornish miners who arrived during the gold rush and constructed it from locally quarried stone.
Real estate agent James Brennan described the nine-bedroom hotel as a unique piece of Goldfields history, but conceded the interior "needs a lot of love". He said a mining company needing workers' accommodation could be a potential buyer, as the city faced ongoing accommodation shortages. "A property like this, it needs the right owner, someone who can bring it back to its former glory," he said. "It really is hard to put a price on that history, and obviously it's a beautiful building … heritage does scare people at times, but there's definitely been a lot of interest."
The hotel's most famous former licensee was Evan Clarke, who turned king's evidence after the murders of detectives Inspector John Walsh and Sergeant Alexander Pitman in 1926. The detectives were pursuing gold thieves. Rumour has it that after the murders, the bodies were taken to the hotel, dismembered, set alight, and thrown down disused mineshafts.
The family of Jack Osmetti, a well-known local sportsman who ran the pub for around 50 years, bought it in 1927. The hotel was badly damaged by fire during the 1934 race riots in Kalgoorlie and again by a magnitude-5 earthquake in 2010, but it has been extensively repaired. Negotiations with insurers meant the building was propped up and fenced off for four years until matters were settled in 2014. The owners then applied for and received $992,090 from the state government's $5 million Goldfields Earthquake Restoration Fund, but structural repairs did not begin until 2016.
When the Cornwall Hotel was built, stonemasons created lasting public and commercial buildings using cheap, highly skilled manual labour, traditional lime mortars, and hand-dressed masonry. Today, retired Kalgoorlie stonemason Ken Ball said his 55-year occupation was a "dying trade" and that the loss of historic buildings was a sign of the times. "I've got a lot of good memories here," he said, standing outside the Cornwall Hotel.
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