The Outback town of Karratha had been a ghost of
itself since the last mine shut down. Now, with
a new gold strike reported under the old railway
line, it’s stirring again — but not everyone
wants it to.
Caleb "Caz" Harrow, a man with a
silver tongue
and a history of getting out before the dust
settled, rolls into town on a rusted Holden.
He’s there for the job, not the noise. But when
he finds a halfburied chest in the red dirt,
marked with a crest he doesn’t recognise, things
get sticky. The chest holds documents — land
titles, maps, and a name: McAllister. A name
that should have died with the last of the old
families.
The town’s mayor, a woman with a tight grip on
power and a past she keeps buried, sends her
enforcers after Caz. They’re not interested in
the chest. They’re interested in keeping the
story quiet. But Caz has a habit of making
trouble wherever he goes. He starts asking
questions, digging up graves, and talking to the
wrong people — like the Indigenous elder who
says the land was never theirs to sell.
Rules bite hard here. One: no one talks about
the McAllister legacy. Two: no outsiders take
what isn’t theirs. When Caz tries to sell the
chest to a collector in Perth, the deal falls
apart. Someone’s watching. Someone’s got a gun.
The town square becomes a battleground. The
mayor’s men, the local constable, and the old
bushranger legend all converge on Caz. In the
end, it’s not the chest that changes everything —
it’s the map inside. It shows a tunnel beneath
the town, carved by hands that weren’t white. A
secret that could rewrite the town’s history, or
bury it deeper.
Caz walks away with nothing but a few coins and
a reputation. The chest is gone. The mayor’s in
jail. And the town? It’s still Karratha, but now
it’s something else — a place where the past
won’t stay buried, and the future is written in
red dust.
