On a flat-topped hill of discarded rubble on the edge of the Outback mining town of Broken Hill sits an iron monument.
Unveiled last year, the sculpture, which is shaped like a tunnel, commemorates the 833 men who have lost their lives working in the town's silver, zinc and lead mines during the past 120 years.
Each man's name is inscribed on a glass wall, along with his age and cause of death. Column after column record the horrific ways in which miners were killed while burrowing into the bowels of the earth: 'rock fall', 'premature explosion', 'lead poisoning' and 'suffocation'. Among young victims, 14-year-old Francis Stokes is listed as having fallen from a gangway in 1918.
Ron Schipanski worked down the mines for 36 years, during which time 120 of his colleagues were killed. Now he runs tours, and has taken nearly 20,000 tourists down his old mine.
'Listen to me,' he tells visitors assembled at the top of the mine shaft, 'or there'll be blood and guts all over the place.' We descend in a clanking steel cage and drop 130 metres, emerging into a broad tunnel littered with old mining equipment.
The miners often worked much deeper than this - up to 1.6km beneath the surface, enduring choking dust, long hours and searing temperatures.
Mr Schipanski gives a brief talk and then switches on an evil-looking machine equipped with a scoop mounted on a pair of rusted arms. He wrestles with the machine, guiding it by hand and making it pick up great piles of blasted rock like a monstrous subterranean creature, hissing and clanking.