Coomberdale is a small town located along the Midlands Road between Moora and Watheroo in the Wheatbelt region of

Western Australia Western Australia (WA) is the westernmost state of Australia. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east, and South Australia to the south-east. Western Aust ...

. It had 56 residents in the . The

Midland Railway Company The Midland Railway (MR) was a railway company in the United Kingdom from 1844. The Midland was one of the largest railway companies in Britain in the early 20th century, and the largest employer in Derby, where it had its headquarters. It ama ...

constructed a railway siding in 1895 when the Midland line to Walkaway was opened. The town's name comes from a well that was named by the explorer

Alexander Forrest Alexander Forrest CMG (22 September 1849 – 20 June 1901) was an explorer and surveyor of Western Australia, and later also a member of parliament. As a government surveyor, Forrest explored many areas of remote Western Australia, particula ...

when he surveyed a property for Edmund King who settled there in 1866. The Coomberdale Hall, a timber framed,

weatherboard Clapboard (), also called bevel siding, lap siding, and weatherboard, with regional variation in the definition of those terms, is wooden siding (construction), siding of a building in the form of horizontal boards, often overlapping. ''Cla ...

clad structure with a

corrugated iron Corrugated galvanised iron (CGI) or steel, colloquially corrugated iron (near universal), wriggly tin (taken from UK military slang), pailing (in Caribbean English), corrugated sheet metal (in North America), zinc (in Cyprus and Nigeria) or ...

roof, was built in about 1920. It is now heritage listed, and used as an adjunct to the adjoining community centre. The main industry in town is

wheat Wheat is a group of wild and crop domestication, domesticated Poaceae, grasses of the genus ''Triticum'' (). They are Agriculture, cultivated for their cereal grains, which are staple foods around the world. Well-known Taxonomy of wheat, whe ...

farming with the town being a

CBH Group The CBH Group (commonly known as CBH, an acronym for Co-operative Bulk Handling) is a grain growers' cooperative that handles, markets and processes grain from the wheatbelt of Western Australia. History CBH was formed on 5 April 1933, at a ...

receival site. A

silicon Silicon is a chemical element; it has symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic lustre, and is a tetravalent metalloid (sometimes considered a non-metal) and semiconductor. It is a membe ...

producer, Simcoa, has a

quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The Atom, atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen Tetrahedral molecular geometry, tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tet ...

mine close to the town. The mineral mined there, Coomberdale

chert Chert () is a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of microcrystalline or cryptocrystalline quartz, the mineral form of silicon dioxide (SiO2). Chert is characteristically of biological origin, but may also occur inorganically as a prec ...

, is situated in the Coomberdale (also known as Noondine) threatened ecological community that contains some threatened species such as Acacia aristulata and Cryptandra glabiflora.

References

External links

{{authority control Wheatbelt (Western Australia)