The reason a town grew beneath the hill came in July 1891, when prospectors struck rich reef gold on the eastern flank of the mount. At a spot still called Poverty Flats, alluvial nuggets lay so thick that diggers said they were pulled from the ground like potatoes. The rush that followed scattered three separate townsites across the area: Mount Magnet itself, Boogardie, and Lennonville. Lennonville was abandoned at the outbreak of the First World War, and the foundations of its bank and railway station still sit empty in the scrub. Boogardie was swallowed whole by the open-cut pits of the Hill 50 mine. Of the three, only Mount Magnet endured, and it has kept going long enough to become the longest-surviving gold-mining town in all of Western Australia.

Long before the surveyors and the diggers, this was a gathering place, and the land remembers it. In 1972 the Surveyor General restored the hill's Aboriginal name, Warramboo, meaning campfire camping place, a quiet acknowledgement of who was here first and what the rise had always meant. Northeast of town lie significant Aboriginal sites, now cared for jointly by the local community and the Western Australian Museum, and the living culture of the region is carried on at the Wirnda Barna Arts Centre. The country that drew the gold rush had been a meeting ground for far longer than any mine has operated, and it remains one.

A short drive from town stands one of the Murchison's most striking landmarks. The Granites are a low escarpment, roughly fifteen metres high, where soft white granite has eroded out from beneath a hard rust-red iron cap, leaving sculpted hollows and shallow caves with surfaces curled and grooved by veins of quartz. To the Badimia people the place holds deep cultural significance, and their old paintings and carvings can be found at several sites among the rocks. At dawn and dusk the red caprock catches the light and seems to glow above the pale stone beneath, a natural amphitheatre that has drawn people, for ceremony and for wonder, far longer than the town has stood.

Mount Magnet owed much of its staying power to steel. When the Northern Railway pushed up through the Murchison toward Meekatharra, the town became an important junction, the point where the Sandstone branch line split off to serve the fields further east. Trains meant the difference between a flash-in-the-pan rush and a town that lasted: ore could leave, supplies could arrive, and people could come and go without days of hard travel across waterless scrub. The line is long closed now, lifted and sold off like most of the Murchison railways, but the town it anchored kept going. Mount Magnet is still served by air, with Skippers Aviation flying in and out to Perth and Meekatharra, a modern echo of the old role as the place where the wider world reached the goldfields.

Walk Mount Magnet's main street and the gold-rush ambition is still legible in its width. Unusually for a community this size, the town never built its own public stamp battery to crush ore; the nearest stood five kilometres west at Boogardie, and it now sits in the Mount Magnet Mining and Pastoral Museum. The mines, though, never really stopped. Today Ramelius Resources works the pits with names borrowed from the heavens, Saturn, Mars, the Galaxy area, and the Perseverance cutback atop the old Hill 50 underground workings. Come the wildflower season from August to November, the surrounding plains erupt in scarlet Sturt's desert pea, royal-purple mulla mulla, and drifts of pink and yellow everlastings, briefly turning the hard goldfields country into something soft and luminous.