Talk:Coolgardie safe

Were White The Only Ones To Have Problems?

Given the following statement from the article: The harsh desert climate created great challenges to the white people who had rushed here to find their fortune, particularly of food preservation — hence the need for such an invention. Reading that one thinks either only Whites had problems or only whites rushed to find their fortune. I think this could be rewritten better to indicate which is correct and to flesh it out some more. Thanks Bad S Mini (talk) 18:34, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Whilst I can understand you reacting against that sort of language, the local aboriginals didn't typically store food, but too fresh food from the surrounding countryside as required. So clearly the aboriginals would not have had the problems with food storage to require such a unit any more than they "suffered" as a result of the Goldfields water pipeline not being built. They lived within the resources of the land, and knew where to get what they needed when they needed it. As I understand it, there wasn't much in the way of Chinese immigration by the time of the WA goldrush (which was in the 1890's, or 30 to 40 years after the Victorian one, and after the colonies tried to bring a halt to Chinese immigration), and the Afghans were an itinerant population of camel drivers who spent most of the time taking caravans between the goldfields and the coast rather than being fixed in one spot. So the overwhelming majority of prospecters flocking to the area would have been "whites" from the eastern colonies or from Britain, or to a lesser extent from Europe and the US. What I would like to see here, however, is some indication of how effective it was at keeping food cool. Did it reduce the temperature by 10°C? Apparently my grandmother still had one in the 1950's, and my mother mentioned that it was better than refrigeration for butter, as it didn't get as hard and difficult to spread.