They were not statistics, and they should not be remembered as a number. Brett Hansson was twenty-seven. Kerry Peters was thirty-five. Timothy Proctor was thirty. Darryl Sandford was twenty-seven. Darrin Williams was twenty-three. Terreance Martin died alongside them. The flood came fast on that June night, the creek systems south and east of the mine swollen by rain the country rarely sees, the water in a disused pit rising and then bursting through the thin neck of ground into the operating decline. Police divers were called to a hole in the desert. The official report into the EMU mine disaster became a grim landmark in Australian mine safety, and the men's names remain on the Western Australian miners' memorial - young workers who went underground and did not come back up.

Gold has been worked at Agnew since the early 1900s, first by a company called East Murchison United - EMU for short, which gave the original mine its name - and by interests of the flamboyant mining promoter Claude de Bernales. The modern mine took shape in the 1980s, when Western Mining Corporation acquired the tenements and opened an open-cut mine and processing plant in 1986. By then the town of Agnew, once home to thousands, had dwindled to little more than a run-down hotel, eclipsed by the new company town of Leinster nearby. When WMC took over the Leinster nickel mine in 1989, the Agnew gold operation was folded in alongside it, the two sharing facilities across the red expanse of the northern Goldfields.

Today the gold comes from two very different kinds of mining. Far below the surface, the underground Waroonga complex follows the ore down through hard rock in a maze of declines and stopes. Nearby, the Songvang open pit works the gold from above, cutting terraced benches into the ground in a widening bowl. Ownership passed from WMC to the South African major Gold Fields in late 2001, part of a US$180-million-plus deal that also brought the company the St Ives mine. A second nearby operation, the Lawlers gold mine, was run by Barrick Gold until Gold Fields bought it in 2013, consolidating the district's gold under one roof. Agnew remains one of Gold Fields' four Australian mines, alongside Granny Smith, Gruyere and St Ives.

The most surprising chapter is the newest. In a place defined by isolation and the cost of hauling diesel hundreds of kilometres, Agnew has become a showcase for renewable energy at a mine. Completed in 2020 and built by the energy company EDL, its hybrid microgrid pairs five large wind turbines with a solar farm and a battery storage system, backed by gas and diesel generators and run by an advanced control system. On favourable days, renewables have supplied up to 85 percent of the mine's electricity - among the highest figures achieved at any mine in Australia. The desert that once drowned six men with a sudden flood now turns its more reliable gifts, sun and wind, into the power that keeps the gold flowing.