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SYDNEY - It swelters in temperatures up to 48C, has no mains power or water and lies 130km from the nearest pub, but a tiny Australian town is fighting an unprecedented attempt to have it wiped off the map.
Australia is littered with former mining towns which were
abandoned once their gold, copper or silver was exhausted.
But Wittenoom, in Western Australia, is set to become the first mining town in the country's history to be forcibly closed down, its existence all but obliterated from the record.
The dusty outpost, which lies 1500km north of Perth, grew rich on mining asbestos and once boasted a population of 1500.
But since its mines closed down in the mid-1970s, the number of inhabitants has steadily dwindled, until now just eight diehards remain - six men and two women, their average age 62.
By necessity they have become entirely self-sufficient, running diesel-powered generators for electricity and pumping water from underground bores.
The state Government of Western Australia says asbestos contamination makes Wittenoom too dangerous to inhabit and wants to bulldoze the town into oblivion. It will move this month to have the community de-gazetted, allowing road signs to be pulled down and the name Wittenoom removed from all maps. The remaining houses would be destroyed and the dirt track into the town dug up.
The settlement would simply cease to exist, the area where it now stands allowed to revert to desert scrub.
But stubborn locals insist the asbestos poses no risk and suggest dark motives for the Government's determination to turf them out.
"There's iron ore throughout these ranges. My view is that they want to open up new mines and we're in the way," said Meg Timewell, 61, who came to Wittenoom in 1985 and ran the only pub until it closed in 1992.
The last eight residents have been offered A$50,000 ($56,667) to sell their homes and relocate.
But they have dismissed the amount as paltry - Western Australia is going through a mining boom fuelled by China's growth and property prices have soared.
"It's piss-poor," said Timewell, whose 71-year-old husband Frank, a former jackaroo, has lived in Wittenoom for 45 years. "You couldn't even build a dunny for that much."
Inhaling airborne asbestos fibres can cause fatal disease but four reports commissioned by state governments since 1986 found there was no significant risk in Wittenoom and recommended the town be allowed to exist.
The present Government says the studies were politically-motivated and unreliable. It has a new report which says the asbestos in and around the town poses an extreme health risk.
"This is the worst asbestos-contaminated site in the world," said Jon Ford, the minister in charge of shutting down Wittenoom.
"Instead of using sand as a building material, they used asbestos - it's in the roads, in the dirt, under the houses. And there's hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it around the mine."
The remaining eight inhabitants say Wittenoom, which is set amid the rocky canyons of the Hamersley mountain range, is one of the Outback's most picturesque spots and that they should be left alone.
Mario Hartmann, 43, arrived as a backpacker from Austria 17 years ago and used to run the power station before the Government closed it down.
He earns a modest income doing a mail run three times a week and spends the rest of his time swimming in desert rock holes and enjoying the tranquillity of the desert.
"Anything you need doing, you do it yourself," he said in a broad Australian accent. "There's no doctor, no shop, no nothing. The closest pub is in [the mining town of] Tom Price, but that's 130km away. We have to make our own fun.
"There's no danger from the asbestos - half the people here are in their 60s and 70s and there's nothing wrong with them."