Then They Called Me Norma

The autobiography of Goldfields author/historian and artist, Norma King. She was born in Kalgoorlie in 1922 and lived in various places in the Eastern Goldfields of WA for most of her life, married a miner at the age of seventeen, had ten children and reared nine. She began writing in 1969 after an illness that restricted her physically, and after seven of her children had left home.

She describes her life in towns such as Kalgoorlie, Gwalia, Mertondale, Agnew, Lawlers, Wiluna, Big Bell, in the 1930s and 1940s and what was happening around her during that time. (some of these are now ghost towns) She and her family left Big Bell in the 1950s and moved to Kalgoorlie, where they lived for the next forty years. The book not only describes the big changes in her life during that period, but also the changes in the area.