In the wide streets of the ghost town of Gwalia, 230 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, the silence is broken only by the careful footsteps of the occasional tourist, venturing through the rusting tin shacks.
In Bob Mazza's memories, the town is filled with laughter, silenced by the last whistle of the Sons of Gwalia Mine.
On a late December night of 1963, the town lost 96 per cent of its residents, who took what they could carry to the next mining town.
The last train out of town on that day blurs in Mr Mazza's memory, but the picture of old Gwalia is sharp: the mine, the wood line and the streets dotted with the native everlasting flowers he sold to bachelors by the bunch.
In his youth, the town was not the museum it is now, but a playground for him, his five brothers and the other sons of Gwalia.
An outback Huckleberry Finn
Bob Mazza will celebrate his 100th birthday on September 7.
He now relies on a wheelchair and doesn't travel far from his South Perth nursing home, but, as a boy, he roamed around the bush, the town and up and down musty-smelling mine shafts.
Speaking to historian Criena Fitzgerald in 2003, he described himself as "a bit of a Huckleberry Finn".
"I don’t think anybody in Australia today would have the lifestyle we had as kids," he said.
They were "free agents": free to go into the winder room, where they egged each other on to see who could get the closest to the pistons without getting their heads knocked off.
It was not their mothers who worried about their whereabouts, but the rabbits in the shadow of Mount Leonora.
"I'd shoot anything, anything that was edible," Mr Mazza whispers with a mischievous grin.
Mr Mazza's granddaughter has heard his hunting stories before.
"There was a saying that a flock of birds wouldn't go over Gwalia, they would not get from one side to the other, remember pop?" she asks.
"Life at bush was great, catching birds was great," Mr Mazza smiles.
Sausages, weeds and cabbages
Bob Mazza spent a lot of his spare time shooting rabbits and birds with a .22 rifle he borrowed "off a chappy out at South Gwalia", but being part of a large Italian family, he was always well fed.
The Mazza brothers' favourite was cotechino, a fat pork sausage that would have done more to keep them warm on winter days than the thin tin walls of the shacks.
"It was good tucker, oh yes," Mr Mazza says.
His and other Italian families used to make and sell 500 pounds of sausages a fortnight.
As his mother was busy cooking for her six sons and the miners at the boarding house she ran, the Mazza brothers trimmed meat off the bone.
Leaving school to become a travelling butcher seemed a fitting choice for young Bob Mazza.
He drove a horse-drawn cart around, taking and delivering orders. The women came out with their plates and he cut them fresh meat at their door.
Mr Mazza's love of shooting was only matched by his passion for gardening.
His first memory was his uncle Vic's garden, on the other side of Mount Leonora, where the Mazzas grew cabbage, lettuce and cauliflower.
The brothers were regular visitors to their uncle's place and as they were old enough to identify what weeds were, they were put to work in the garden.
In 1963, in the midst of one of the busiest pre-Christmas periods the Mazzas had ever experienced at their shop, the mine suddenly closed and the family store followed soon after.
He dismantled the boarding house, including the jarrah floorboards, and moved it 800 kilometres away to his brother Jim's farm in Badgingarra, where it was rebuilt. Mr Mazza reinvented himself as a farmer, before retiring to Perth in 1985.
Gold and precious memories
Mr Mazza still has a keen interest in the stockmarket and — perhaps unsurprisingly, considering he spent his formative years in Gwalia — gold prices.
"Market's not good," James Mazza announces, greeting his father in his South Perth nursing home.
"Gold price is all right though, it's going up," he adds.
Only one of the Mazza brothers, Renzo, worked in the mines, but the industry's boom and bust dictated the fate of the Mazza family and of Gwalia.
Mining took his hometown; farming claimed the tip of his finger.
But Mr Mazza still has all his teeth and his precious memories.
He thinks of the mines where he used to play, the garden in Gwalia, and then the one he watered every day in Perth. It was the most beautiful on the street. It had a coffee plant, with beans.
"It's probably not up to scratch today," he says.
Editor's note 25/03/2023: This story has been amended to correct errors in how many years the Gwalia mine has been closed.
