Day Dawn is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

in the

Mid West The Mid West region is one of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is a sparsely populated region extending from the west coast of Western Australia, about north and south of its administrative centre of Geraldton and inland to east of W ...

/upper Murchison 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 was a significant mining town and mine in the late nineteenth century. Located a short distance south-west of Cue, rich gold deposits were discovered there in 1891 by Ned Heffernan, who pegged out what became known as the 'Day Dawn Reef'.History of country town names – D

Landgate The Western Australian Land Information Authority operates under the business name of Landgate. Formerly known as the Department of Land Information (DLI), the Department of Land Administration (DOLA) and the Department of Lands and Surveys ( ...

website, accessed: 25 January 2010 Originally the settlement was informally called Four Mile, that being its distance from the town of Cue. It was gazetted as the town of Bundawadra on 2 March 1894, p. 320 and renamed Day Dawn on 25 May 1894. It had its own municipality, the Municipality of Day Dawn, from 1894 to 1912. The

Mullewa–Meekatharra railway The Mullewa–Meekatharra railway was a section of the Northern Railway (Western Australia)#Northern Railway, Northern Railway in Western Australia. History The ''Mullewa–Cue Railway Act 1894'', an Act of Parliament, act by the Parliament o ...

arrived at Cue from Mullewa, a distance of , in 1894. In 1895 the ''Day Dawn Associated Gold mine'', ''Kinsella'', ''Trenton'' and the ''Day Dawn South mine'' were all operating ten head

stamp mill A stamp mill (or stamp battery or stamping mill) is a type of Mill (grinding), mill machine that crushes material by pounding rather than Mill (grinding), grinding, either for further processing or for extraction of metallic ores. Breaking materia ...

s close to the town for processing ore. An important strike was staged there for nine weeks in 1899 when local miners protested against the use of Italian immigrant contract workers and Great Fingall's attempt to reduce miners' wages by five shillings per week. A newspaper for the town, the ''Day Dawn Chronicle'', launched in May 1902 and ran for about seven years. Great Fingall Consolidated Gold Mining Company operated the mine from 1898 until 1918, when it was closed. By October 1921, shorings at the abandoned mine, which had been known as the 'Great Fingall mine', had collapsed and the town had disappeared altogether by the 1930s. All of the town's buildings are now in ruins with the exception of the Great Fingall Mine office, which is on state and federal heritage registers. Various mining companies have operated the mine from the early 1990s using the open cut method and by reprocessing the tailings from past activities at the Big Bell gold processing plant. The last owners, Harmony Mining, have recently halted production and have sold the mine to Monarch Gold along with the Big Bell Mine and the Hill 50 Gold Mine at Mount Magnet. Monarch however was never able to pay off the mine and went into administration, returning Hill 50 to Harmony. The area has a

semi-arid A semi-arid climate, semi-desert climate, or steppe climate is a aridity, dry climate sub-type. It is located on regions that receive precipitation below Evapotranspiration#Potential evapotranspiration, potential evapotranspiration, but not as l ...

climate with hot summers and mild to cool winters, but is prone to the occasional inundation, in 1925 several buildings in the town collapsed following heavy rain and flood waters. The town received of rain over the course of two days.

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