There's an eerie silence in Ninga Mia. It's palpable, like a heavy fog.

The paint on the playground in the centre of the village has started to fade — the overgrown grass gives an indication of how much it's used.

Wrecked cars, stripped to their bones, litter the landscape.

Front porch lights and fresh tyre tracks suggest some people still live here.

But it feels hollow compared to what was once a thriving place, according to those who once called Ninga Mia home.

"There was a lot of people living here — over 100 people — we had vegetables growing here, we had about 50, 60, 70 houses here," Geoffrey Stokes says.

The Wongutha-Ngadju-Mirning Elder speaks with a sense of longing.

Ninga Mia is an Aboriginal reserve in Western Australia's Goldfields region established in the 1980s as a go

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