The main problem in Kalgoorlie and Boulder was dust. In 1892 visibility in Kalgoorlie had remained at nil for a whole twenty-four hours. It wasn’t so bad now. A Goldfields Dust Abatement Committee had the matter in hand, planting trees and otherwise devising methods of keeping the ground on the ground. Of especial concern still, though, were the tailing stumps – the flat hills of waste which marched across the landscape – since these contained cyanide and arsenic. Pollution altogether was a sticky issue. Before we left Kalgoorlie we were to hear the Mayor deny that there was any. But I was struck by the effect the dust had on the town’s graveyard. I’m speaking aesthetically now. It had settled prettily on the headstones, softening the usual grey severity with a blush of almost roseate pink. Kalgoorlie’s was the only carnation-coloured cemetery I had ever seen.

A descent of 200 feet into Hainault Mine, in the heart of the Golden Mile, was, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, the high spot of our tour. Wearing our brightly coloured hard hats – Ros and I looking remarkably like the Thatchers on a building site, I thought – we crowded into the little lift, six at a time, and began to learn what it was like to be a miner. ‘If you think it’s difficult to move and difficult to see, you’ll soon discover how difficult it was to hear.’ John Yellard told us. He had been a miner himself for forty years, originally in Cornwall but subsequently in South Africa, North America, Malaysia, and finally Kalgoorlie. Now he earned his crust the clean and easy way, scaring the living daylights out of tourists with his stories. ‘We called this the widow-maker,’ he explained, showing us the compressed air drill used for making holes to take explosive charges, ‘on account of how it sent out so much dry dust that no miner who used it could expect to live for more than about eight years.’ He threw a beer can down one of the vast empty shafts, created when the eyes between the exhausted levels had been picked out. We listened as it ricocheted in the darkness, taking an eternity to reach the bottom. ‘I have to do a lot of drinking to provide those cans,’ he said. He singled out a sweet old lady. ‘A labour of love, though, my dear,’ he told her.

He was a good operator, John Yellard. He abounded in what’s called Cornish charm. Like many Cornishmen he was a curious mix of the raconteur and the recluse; there was a slight collapse, almost feminine, around his jaw, but the rest of his face was criss-crossed with hard lines of bitter experience. He frequently referred to the miner as ‘a beast of burden’, and made a habit of beginning his sentences, ‘Of course no self-respecting mine,’ by which he meant us to understand, ‘Of course no profit-conscious’ one.