Easy to miss – if you don’t spot the dirt-track – clean, neat, methodical, and apparently deserted, Goldsworthy owes its existence entirely to iron ore. Although there was no reason to suppose it concealed any sinister secrets it reminded me, in its eerie quiet, of Jabiru, the uranium town in Kakadu. It possessed the same unsettling stillness and had imported, into a similarly inappropriate terrain, the same sterile ideal of gracious suburban living. The streets were spotless enough to eat from. The drive-in cinema was too beautifully laid out to allow the entrance of cars, so in orderly rows before the vast tilted screen deckchairs were arranged instead. Outside the factory gates a board announced a continuing 100 per cent safety record. There was no reason for anyone to come to harm in Goldsworthy, but then there was no reason for anyone to come to live in it at all. And, in truth, for all we saw of Homo sapiens in Goldsworthy it’s possible that nobody did. The water sprinklers turned of their own accord. The bright material of the deckchairs flapped tenantless. The bus drove twice around the town, picking no one up and dropping no one off.

Just before we came into Port Hedland, another seventy kilometres down the highway, we were kept waiting at a railway crossing by a long train belonging to Newman Mining. It took nearly ten minutes to pass us. Like the snakes which Wayne claimed he’d run over in the Northern Territory, you could never at one time see both its head and its tail. Max was able to give us all the details: there were 180 carriages, each weighing 20 tons, the whole train being 2 kilometres long. Bearing in mind all these measurements and taking into account how far the train had to travel, I calculated that in order to bring it to a stop at its destination the driver would have to start applying the brakes before the train had actually begun moving.