On the morning of our southern Solstice I step out into the summer and the heat burns my eyeballs. December 21 in the Pilbara, a vast desert area in Western Australia, is a little hotter than the local average of 39 degrees Celsius. The temperature rises day by day, astonishment by astonishment. Tomorrow it will reach 45. A patient agrees: “Yeah it’s pretty warm up here in Newman. Not as hot as Telfer, but. When I worked out there it’d get up to sixty.”

My patient is a blaster. His job is to place explosive charges inside great rocks and blast those rocks into manageable lumps for the dump trucks. (The trucks are bigger than my two-storey house). My patient continues: “You can’t do that work inside a cabin with aircon. You have to get out into the sun and do it. It can be pretty warm work.”

At lunchtime I drive my vehicle – yes, it has aircon, but the black steering wheel doesn’t know that: it’s too hot to touch. I steer with shirtsleeved elbows – and I park in the shade. Bracing myself for the heat outside I look up and watch an Aboriginal group as it files quickly across the sunburned concrete. Number One wears boots, Number Two wears thongs, Number Three wears nothing on his feet. He moves fast, his footfalls are brief, his gait a skipping as he literally hotfoots it to the supermarket.

While working a few years back in another mining town, this one in the Flinders Ranges, they told me of a young man who drove up into the Arkaroola hills and went hiking in the heat of the day. He carried insufficient water. When they found his body a day later it had been cooked.