Agnew, Western Australia
Encyclopedia
Agnew is a town in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia. It is located 982 km north-east of Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

  and the closest populated town is Leinster
Leinster, Western Australia
Leinster is a town in the northern goldfields area of Western Australia. The town is located 4 km east of the Goldfields Highway, in the Shire of Leonora Local Government Area, northeast of the state capital, Perth...

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The town is named after a miner, John A. Agnew, who worked for a local mining firm, Bewick, Moreing & Co.
The townsite was declared in 1936.

At one point the town had a population of 500. The Agnew hotel, that is still operating, was built in 1945 amongst a row of shops on the main street and is all that remains today of the town. An old head frame of a stamp mill
Stamp mill
A stamp mill is a type of mill machine that crushes material by pounding rather than grinding, either for further processing or for extraction of metallic ores. Breaking material down is a type of unit operation....

 and the large taling dumps of the East Murchison United gold mine also remain just outside the town.

In 1947 two prospectors
Prospecting
Prospecting is the physical search for minerals, fossils, precious metals or mineral specimens, and is also known as fossicking.Prospecting is a small-scale form of mineral exploration which is an organised, large scale effort undertaken by mineral resource companies to find commercially viable ore...

, Charles Farranda and Alberto Barnardi, discovered a new gold find north of the Emu mine. The quartz
Quartz
Quartz is the second-most-abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, after feldspar. It is made up of a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall formula SiO2. There are many different varieties of quartz,...

 reef containing coarse gold returned about 10oz per ton and was described as the best find in the district for years.

An operating gold mine is located adjacent to the townsite and is also named Agnew
Agnew Gold Mine
The Agnew Gold Mine is a gold mine located west of Agnew, Western Australia. It is owned by the South African mining company Gold Fields. It is one of two mines the company operates in Australia, the other being the St Ives Gold Mine....

. The mine is owned by Gold Fields Ltd
Gold Fields
Gold Fields Limited is a South African gold mining firm, one of the world’s largest, which is listed on both the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange ....

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