Wake in Fright riffed on Broken Hill’s lack of affordable transport. Some things haven’t changed since 1971

Epic journey: the view from the 13-and-a-half hour Outback Xplorer to Sydney, which spans more than 1,100km. Photograph: Penry Buckley/The Guardian

I could be imagining it, but there’s a mineral taste in the air as I wait on the platform below a blackened, tumorous slag heap – the remains of what was once the most lucrative mine in the world.

I’m trying not to think about the gruesome deaths of the 800 miners commemorated in a memorial at the top of Broken Hill’s Line of Lode – “Asphyxiated, Dynamite Fumes”, “Scalded”, “Crushed by Wagon” – some of them entombed in the mound, their bodies never recovered.