Banjawarn is the kind of place a person goes to disappear. The station sprawls across more than 400,000 hectares of mulga scrub and saltbush on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, 350 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, with four creeks, a few waterholes, and not much else for a hundred kilometres in any direction. For most of the twentieth century it ran sheep and then cattle, an ordinary if enormous pastoral lease. Then, for a single year in 1993, Banjawarn was bought by a Japanese doomsday cult, and one of the loneliest properties in Australia became one of the most sinister.
Banjawarn's story begins long before any of that. In 1928 the Warren brothers held the lease and ran a flock of a thousand sheep across the wanderrie grass and saltbush. The land is harsh but not lifeless: gum trees and mulga trace the watercourses, and lake systems hold water when the rains allow. By 2010 the property carried around 2,500 head of Droughtmaster, shorthorn, and Brahman cattle, hardy breeds suited to heat and drought. It is one of the seventy largest stations in the country. For generations the rhythm here was the slow one of mustering and waiting for rain, a life measured in distance and dust.
In April 1993, a man named Kiyohide Hayakawa arrived in Western Australia. He was the second-in-command of Aum Shinrikyo, and on his sect's behalf he purchased Banjawarn. Officially the group had come prospecting for uranium and praised the local ore, though some of those notes actually referred to South Australia. That September a team of Aum "scientists" flew in with mining gear, generators, gas masks, respirators, and a mechanical ditch digger, paying over twenty thousand dollars in excess baggage. Australian Customs searched them and found concentrated hydrochloric acid, some hidden in containers labelled as hand soap, alongside other chemicals that had nothing to do with mining. The authorities seized it all, without yet grasping what they had stopped.
Two years later the world understood. On 20 March 1995, Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people and injuring thousands of commuters on their way to work. In the investigation that followed, Australian Federal Police examined Banjawarn and found sheep carcasses showing signs of sarin exposure and soil laced with methylphosphonic acid, a chemical residue of the nerve agent. The conclusion was grim and clear: the cult had used this remote station as a testing ground for chemical weapons, rehearsing in the empty desert the atrocity it would later commit on a crowded city train.
There is one more mystery here, still unsolved. On the night of 28 May 1993, while the cult held the lease, a powerful seismic event shook the region. Witnesses reported a fireball in the sky and a long, low rumble; the shockwave registered with the force of a small explosion. When Banjawarn's owner was revealed, some speculated the cult had tested a nuclear device, though it possessed nothing of the kind. A geologist named Harry Mason chased witnesses across the goldfields and carried the riddle all the way to United States Senate investigators. Seismologists at the IRIS network later judged the most likely cause far older than any cult: the impact of a small iron meteorite, a stone from space falling, by sheer coincidence, on the strangest property in the outback.
Banjawarn Station lies near 27.70 degrees south, 121.61 degrees east, on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert about 350 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 150 kilometres northeast of Leonora. From the air the country is vast, flat, and sparsely marked: red mulga and saltbush plains threaded by the pale lines of four main creeks, with scattered salt-lake systems catching the light. The nearest town airfields are Leonora Airport (ICAO: YLEO) to the southwest and Laverton Airport (YLTN) to the south. There are no major landmarks, so navigation relies on the creek lines and lake patterns; the station homestead and its airstrip are the only human marks for a long way. Visibility over this arid interior is typically excellent. Best flown at low to medium cruising altitude to pick out the watercourses against the scrub.