The town of Wilbrook was Chandler Jenkins’ home. Had been his whole life. All thirty-two long, dry years stuck on the Pilbara plateau in the inner reaches of Western Australia, a land mass conservatively estimated to be two and a half billion years old and once part of the ancient continent of Ur. Some days Chandler believed these prehistoric atoms had seeped into his bones and aged him prematurely. The copper-red dust, a fiery topping on a land scorched almost to death, did that to many people.

The town was a remote outcrop, a hundred kilometres from the nearest place of habitation, Portman, linked by a road that stretched into the distance like the twisting tail of a dragon. Wilbrook itself wasn’t old, even by Australian terms, gazetted at the end of the 19th century and named after a famous prospector from Albany, who had left the lush green wine country down south to scrabble around in the dirt up here in search of wealth. And he’d found it. A fat deposit of gold; chunks that poked from the earth like marshmallows in a kid’s breakfast cereal. Some even needed two hands to lift them. Word spread and soon shacks flew up, wooden structures that defied gravity and sensibility. After the shacks came the businesses: bars, saloons, brothels. At least two of each. The population exploded, thousands clambering for riches, newspaper articles proclaiming it as the place to realize dreams. But the dream died quickly, the hauls abruptly dwindling to little more than flecks caught in rusted pans. Yet more came, desperately panning rocks and dirt in the streams before drowning their sorrows with whisky and women they couldn’t pay for. As the debts grew so did the tensions.

The result was a powder keg that exploded one summer night when ten men had a shootout on Main Street; the sole survivor, Tomato Tom Kelly, dying the next day from the punctured artery in his shoulder. As the violence increased, the prospects of wealth diminished. The doctors, lawyers and merchants were first to go, shipping out for the newest gold rush, leaving the once burgeoning town of five thousand cut down to barely a fifth of that, supported by a couple of bars and brothels that held firm. Nothing was better for business than desperation.