If you’ve brought your own milk and can find a bowl in the workers’ kitchen upstairs, you can enjoy a symphony of shapes and colours beyond the wrought iron as you hoe into a complimentary sachet of Just Right on the balcony of the Palace Hotel in Wagin. But it may be wise, initially, to refrain from acknowledging (and thus disturbing) the wiry sadhu-like resident with the long beard who sits crossing himself in the morning coolth then slowly rolling a smoke as he acknowledges each and every road-train driver passing below him down the main street and across the rail line.
Wagin is a rural service town in the WA wheatbelt which takes its name from the Noongar word meaning ‘place of the emu’.