The Big Bell Hotel opened in 1937, a large two-storey building in brick with the clean, confident lines of its art deco era - colonnades along the north and east faces, a graceful curved corner, a tiled roof catching the desert sun. It was the kind of building meant to tell a young town it had arrived. And it had a claim to fame that has outlasted the roof: the hotel was reputed to have one of the longest bars in Australia. In a remote mining town where the work was hard and the heat relentless, that bar was the social engine - the place where shifts ended, deals were struck and the week was washed away. The walls still stand; the legendary bar is long gone.

A town built around a single mine needs a lifeline, and Big Bell's was the railway. The Cue-Big Bell Railway Act passed in November 1936, after the Western Australian government struck an agreement with the American Smelting and Refining Company to build the line. The first train rolled into Big Bell on 6 January 1937, though the line was not officially opened until that August. Its history mirrors the mine's fortunes exactly. Services stopped in September 1944 as wartime priorities bit, then revived the next year as the war in Europe wound down and the mine reopened. The line finally closed on the last day of 1955, and a 1960 act formally struck it from the books. The rails came up; the embankment remains.

The gold here was first found in 1904 by Harry Paton, and a mine was quickly established, though ownership changed hands repeatedly before the Premier company gave the field its modern shape. Over its working life from 1904 to 1955 the historic Big Bell mine produced some 730,000 ounces of gold. When the mine shut in the mid-1950s the town emptied almost overnight, virtually deserted within a season. But the ore body was far from exhausted - once described as Australia's biggest unexploited gold deposit, it drew miners back in the 1980s and again in the 2020s under modern operators, the workings now run from a fly-in camp rather than a town with a hotel.

Mining ceased again in 2003, and by 2007 the processing plant was dismantled and trucked off to feed a mine near Westonia, hundreds of kilometres south. What it left behind is a townsite best appreciated from above. Not many buildings remain standing, but the original road grid is still etched into the ground as dirt tracks, so clear that the whole layout of Big Bell reads plainly from the air - the blocks, the streets, the shape of a community planned on paper and abandoned to the desert. The brick hull of the hotel anchors the pattern, a single recognisable landmark in a diagram of a town that used to be.