Copper made Nymagee, beginning around 1880, and for a few decades the mine drove everything. At its height the town held more than 2,200 people, an extraordinary crowd for such remote country. Close to half were Chinese migrants, drawn like so many others to the diggings of inland Australia, and they made up a substantial part of the workforce and the community that grew around it - men whose labour helped build the town even as the wider colony too often treated Chinese arrivals with suspicion and exclusion. The ore was real and rich, but copper prices were never dependable, and a town built on a single seam lives and dies with the metal. When the mine finally closed in 1917, the foundation simply went out from under the place.

Among those who stayed was a market gardener named Tong Mow, who worked a garden at Nymagee until ill health forced him to give it up in 1920. It is a small detail, easily skipped, but it carries weight: in a hard, dry, isolated town, somebody coaxed vegetables out of the ground for his neighbours, year after year, until his body would no longer let him. The Chinese gardeners of outback New South Wales were a quiet institution, feeding mining communities that had little else fresh to eat. Tong Mow's garden is the kind of ordinary persistence that rarely makes the history books and almost always made the difference between a bearable life and a brutal one.

About 32 kilometres southeast of Nymagee lies a sheep station called The Overflow - and that name carries one of the most beloved poems in Australia. In 1889, the bush poet Banjo Paterson published "Clancy of the Overflow," the daydream of a city clerk imagining a drover roaming "the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars" while he sits chained to his dusty office. The poem famously grew from a real exchange: Paterson, then a solicitor, wrote to a man at a station called Overflow and got back the immortal reply that Clancy had "gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are." The Clancy of the verse is a romantic invention, a composite, more dream than documentary - but the country that inspired it is exactly this: the wide, sunlit, plains-and-stars expanse that surrounds Nymagee, where a townsman's longing for the open road feels entirely understandable.

Ghost towns do not always stay ghosts. In 1999 a handful of locals decided that the way to bring people back was to throw a party, and they launched an outback music festival. The first one drew 600 visitors - a startling number for a town that the census measures in the dozens - and it has been credited with lifting tourism and even nudging the permanent population back up. For a place that spent half a century living on hopes and memories, it is a fitting second act: not a mining revival, not a boom, but music carried across the plains for a weekend, drawing a crowd back to a town that simply refused to disappear. The copper that built Nymagee is long gone. The reason to come is now the country itself, and the people who never stopped loving it.