…While Steve was having a rest one day, I took myself and my camera down to the lunchtime session Marble Bar’s iconic Iron Clad Hotel. I found a few locals getting in a bit of practice before the Friday night pool competition.

Marble Bar is officially Australia’s hottest town, holding the record with 161 consecutive days over 37.8C (100F). Fortunately it was a very manageable 32 degrees when we were there recently. This outback town is named for its jasper which the early explorers believed to be marble. There’s more photos of the jasper patterns and colours in an earlier blog post.

With a rich history of gold mining, Marble Bar still draws gold prospectors from far and wide, hoping to find their fortune.

Early explorers in the Pilbara mistook the jasper outcrops for marble, and called the new town Marble Bar. The colours in the rocks around Marble Bar Pool are unbelievable, especially if you pour a little water over them to bring out their vibrancy.

Five men walked into a bar - an Aussie, an American, a Canadian a Norwegian, and Spaniard…they told us they were a team of five NASA scientists who are working on the Mars landing next year. We thought we might meet some interesting people in Marble Bar’s famous Iron Clad Hotel, but this was most unexpected!

Pretty much everyone we got to know in Marble Bar, we met in the Iron Clad Hotel, including Tim. Like so many people in this outback town, gold is in Tim’s blood. While Tim uses a metal detector his mother Katie used a yandi. Shallow multi-purpose dishes, yandis were traditionally used by Aboriginal women to carry water and bush tucker, but they could also use them to sort chaff from seeds, and in these parts, to separate gold from dirt.