Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A heartwarming and intriguing romance in the mining town of Pilbara.. We’ve never been but the name sounds nice. Want to come with us?
Iron Junction
What you need to know before your trail
Dr Beth Harding leaves Sydney and the pressure of meeting her family’s expectations and instead takes a locum job at Iron Junction – a mining town in the distant Pilbara. The mining town is growing fast and workers are flocking to it but at the same time, tensions are running high as the changes are happening rather quickly for some.
Beth starts to wonder if she’s made the biggest mistake of her life. But when she quite literarily stumbles into Will, they form a bond and their attraction grows
But there is trouble at the mine, not to mention the trouble that Beth stil feels faces her if she ever decides to return home.
Travel Guide
Pilbara is a remote and unique place in Australia. It is well known for its Aborigine peoples, dry and desert like landscape and also well known for its deposits of iron ore. A unique place and not the likeliest of settings for a romance perhaps since the population is small to say the least.
“Beth rounded a bend and spied a neat township nestled between two rises. All the mental images she’s had – of wild, frontier towns – turned out to be quite wrong. Iron Junction’s were a neat grid hanging from the connecting highway and rimmed by a twin row of train tracks.”
However in Beth ends up in this town all the way from her native Brisbane and from Sydney where she studied. Being a photography fan, she did want to see more of the wonderful country but not sure this was one of the places on her list.
The red landscape, the dust on the roads and in the air, the smell of the mines, the mining community and lifestyle… all evoked in eloquent detail as is the dangers here –
“A flash flood had lanced right through town , leaving over ninety per cent of buildings damaged and water trapped in the low parts within the ridges, The min was shut, its dam burst, the pits flooded.”
Soon she bumps into Will and he is a engineer at the local mine. He was also born into a life he didn’t want and so wants to escape his life too. The mining community and activity is not all that it seems. Morale is low and tension is high and there are a growing number of casualties, more than usual…
Iron Junction is where they both end up and its this junction which will decided their paths in life and where they will go next.
Where Next?
