The discovery was murky from the start. By one account, station hands named Ingpen and Watts on the Annean pastoral run first suspected gold and, around May 1890, showed the site to a New South Wales mining engineer named Connolly - who found gold but seemed unimpressed. It took McPherson and Peterkin, directed to the same ground that October, to grasp what was there. By August 1891 the diggers had recovered some 1,700 ounces, and by December about seven hundred men had crowded onto the field. The Murchison Goldfield was proclaimed in September 1891, with Nannine at its heart. It was the first town in the entire region, the spark from which the whole goldfield caught fire.

Nannine was born twice. The original settlement huddled in a gully between the later townsite and the mines, an unplanned sprawl of canvas and corrugated iron. In 1892, John Forrest - then Premier of Western Australia and the colony's first to hold that office - ordered lots surveyed and a proper townsite declared. When the miners heard the land auction would be held in distant Perth, eighty-five of them petitioned to move it to Geraldton, closer to home. The townsite was gazetted in April 1893, and over the next few years the businesses simply picked up and shifted to the official blocks - hotels, stores and all - a town relocating itself across open ground. By 1894 Nannine was large enough to hold its own electoral district.

For a while the future looked secure. A telegraph line reached Geraldton in 1894; a stone post and telegraph building rose in 1896; the railway from Cue arrived in 1903, with the line pushing north toward Meekatharra by 1909. The town had its hotels - the Pioneer, the Royal, the Victory with its renowned billiard table and twelve bedrooms - and the busy social machinery of a goldfields settlement. But the field could not hold. In 1913 ferocious rain dumped nearly two inches in a single day, flooding the railway and tearing a washaway north of town. The water passed; the decline did not. By 1919 Nannine was fading fast, its people drifting toward Meekatharra and the newer strikes beyond.

What becomes of a town that everyone leaves? At Nannine, much of it was simply carried off. The police station closed in 1922 and the building was hauled to Yalgoo. The Masonic Hall, built here around 1900, was dismantled and transported to Meekatharra as the town faded - and there it still stands, on the corner of Savage and Darlot Streets, a timber-framed, iron-clad relic of "Federation Gothic" style that the heritage register calls a distinctive if forlorn reminder of times long past. That hall is, in a sense, the truest monument Nannine has: not a ruin on the original site, but a building that outlived its town by leaving it. On the shore of Lake Annean, where the first Murchison gold town once stood, there is now mostly silence and salt.