Wittenoom doesn’t exist.

It was a town…once. A mine used to breathe life into its economy. But the fibre that once held the Australian outback community together has a nasty habit of nesting in your lungs and causing cancer.

The potential risk of exposure to blue asbestos meant the government disconnected power and de-gazetted Wittenoom in 2007. It’s been razed by bulldozers and erased from road signs forever. Now you can’t even find it on a map.

It’s a true ghost town in every sense of the term; a town on a desert that’s become a deserted town. Long, dry grass grows where buildings used to stand and weeds choke the cracking, pot-holed roads. Nature has taken back what is rightly hers.

A hospital once existed here, as well as a police station and school. A few houses still stand - half of them vandalised and trashed. The cemetery remains the one untouched monument. But the whole town resembles a legacy to the dead.

The 1990 Midnight Oil song 'Blue Sky Mine' and its album ‘Blue Sky Mining’ was inspired by the town and its mining industry. Now the only inspiration comes from the eight residents who are still brave enough to call the lonely place home.

Wittenoom, located in the Pilbara region of northern Western Australia, was a thriving town during the 1950s, but it was shut down in 1966 due to health concerns from asbestos mining at the nearby Wittenoom Gorge.

During those heady days of mining productivity, thousands of people lived and worked there, unaware of the risks posed by the iron material which can cause the deadly lung disease mesothelioma.  

Today, you can still find blue fibres lying dormant on the roads and in old driveways. A mountain of tailings lies exposed in the gorge 10km from town.  

I find Lorraine Thomas positioning a sprinkler on the front lawn of her small property that is inhabited by a run-down weatherboard house. She is one of the eight people who have refused to leave the town despite the pressure from the WA government. She wears a black Wittenoom tourism t-shirt and begins telling me about her bad back before we’ve even exchanged names.

Lorraine, twice widowed, has lived in the shadows of the stunning Hammersley Ranges since 1984 and vows never to leave.

“The best cure for a bad back is to sit out in the sun,” she says. “The weather here is wonderful. I don’t like the urban living – that’s why I intend to stay. I’ve been brought up with a rural background and I intend to keep it that way. Not everyone is friendly here but we’re not fussed by the isolation.”

Lorraine owns the town’s still surviving gem shop, visited by a trickling flow of curious tourists that pass through each day. She also rents out a couple of modest holiday homes, which she says are still sought after because of the beauty of nearby Karijini National Park.

The government has offered the stubborn residents up to $40,000 for each property but Lorraine reckons that sort of price is a slap in the face.

“I don’t see a threat to my health. A mining report found there is no more airborne asbestos here than anywhere else. It has to be in the dust in the air to be dangerous and I dare say the blasting from mining elsewhere in the region is causing more problems.

“Yet the government has demolished every heritage building in this town, the power supply has been taken away and the water’s been handed over to the residents to deal with themselves. It’s not sad, it’s just bloody criminal. The government is doing nothing to clean-up the pile of asbestos in the gorge.

“Wittenoom was the biggest town in the Pilbara region once. It’s hard to believe now.”

A couple of hundred metres from Lorraine’s home is a brick house ransacked by vandals on more than one occasion. Beer cans litter every room and large holes have been punched through the walls and roof. The kitchen looks like a bomb has hit it and a mass of books lies sprawled across what used to be a modest lounge room.

It’s as if the owner just got up and moved on, personal possessions left behind like the memories of a town that the nation once recognised.

At the front entrance of the home a piece of graffiti scrawled in texta reads: “Welcome home cunts’’.

But it doesn’t look as if anyone’s coming.

Pictures by Daniel Clarke