Norseman is a mining town at the Western Australian end of the trip across the Nullarbor. Located 726 kilometres east of Perth and 278 miles above sea level, Norseman is the last major town in Western Australia before heading east across the Nullarbor Plain.

For people heading across the Nullarbor Plain it is essential to stop at the Norseman Tourist Bureau in Roberts Street (signposted off the Eyre Highway) where there are a number of invaluable sheets available which provide detailed and up-to-date information on the cost and availability of accommodation, water, credit cards, food, fuel and other facilities at all the major stopover points on the route.

The quest for gold in the Kalgoorlie-Coolgardie area led to the establishment of Norseman. The story of the town`s origins and it`s naming has become folklore.

The first discoveries in the area were made in 1892 on what became known as the `Dundas Field` and the town which sprang up in this harsh and inhospitable environment was called Dundas, for the lack of anything better. Two years later (and here legend and fact become rather confused) the town was named Norseman after a horse owned by a prospector named Laurie Sinclair. It has been claimed that Norseman kicked at a large nugget on a site which Sinclair later pegged and discovered a substantial reef.

Like most of the Goldfields towns, Norseman grew rapidly. It was proclaimed a town in 1895, became a municipality the following year, was connected to the telegraph in 1896, and by 1905 had a population of 3000.

The area suffered acutely from a shortage of water (its average annual rainfall is 276 mm) and isolation from major centres. Houses were built out of anything miners could find and rainwater was supplemented by distilling saltwater from the numerous lakes in the region. Services in the area improved slowly between the wars - the railway arrived in 1927, reliable water came to the town in 1936 and the southern road through Esperance and Port Augusta was upgraded in 1941 - but the gold dwindled.

Today there are a number of small gold mining operations in the area but only the Central Norseman Gold Corporation can be considered a major producer. Still, it is claimed that since 1892 over 100 tonnes of gold have been extracted from the area. Modern Norseman is basically a large, sprawling town driven by mining and tourism and dominated by a huge (4 million tonnes of fine quartz) tailings dump.