Unfortunately, Australia has a lot of places like this. The American West does too, and has had them in the past as well - all those ghost towns, after all - but fortunes here were usually better, with more opportunities, and the climate was more forgiving:
Terowie grew up on the margins of viability in a heartbreak reach of rural Australia, straddling the railway and Goyder's Line, which was what used to separate the country that people could make something of from that which would support little more than the odd bedraggled sheep, saltbush and weeds.
The trains stopped running years ago when the railway between Broken Hill and Adelaide was rerouted.
Abandoned shops -- boarded up or with faded lace curtains drawn -- in the main street are a sad reminder of what was once a hub of farm trade.
What little rain used to fall has dwindled away as the worst drought anyone can remember tightened its grip. Last year's rainfall was half the already low historic average of 347mm.
In Terowie, population 200 (one-10th of what it once was), and 200km north of Adelaide, people are asking themselves: can we still make a go of it?
It's a question that resonates as never before in rural Australia.
This week, Labor's spokesman on climate change, Peter Garrett, backed a national audit of the nation's productive land to determine whether some historically marginal farming and grazing areas had now slipped over the edge of viability and should be abandoned.
Unkind souls are now talking about a "Garrett Line".
...Mr Mattey, whose family property started 130 years ago with 12 milk cows, has progressively bought departing neighbours' blocks, and now holds 44,000ha.
"We have had an exodus of people off the land over the past 10 years," he said. "When you have only got eight or 10 families left, and you lose two or three of them, it's quite a big impact."
The Terowie primary school -- with 25 students, none from farming families -- uses a bore for taps and toilet water and buys drinking water from the general store. Last week, they ran out of water.
Kay Matthias, manager of the South Australian branch of the Rural Financial Counselling Service, said: "The family farm as we used to know it in those areas no longer exists. Mum and dad fight it out until the end but the young ones move away."
Locals say the rainfall drops an inch (2.5cm) for every mile (1.6km) north of the road between Jamestown and Hallett, in South Australia's mid-north. Some say growing the region's traditional staple of cereal crops is now a waste of effort.
"Absolutely," Ms Matthias said. "I couldn't support that any more. That is a reality. That will happen. Governments can't continue to prop them up either."
Traditionally, stoic cockies have shied away from seeking the kind of help she offers. Not any more. They are coming forward because the next-door neighbour has seen a counsellor, or the man across the road, or the bloke at the pub. About 40 per cent of farmers in the region already get by with the help of Canberra's "exceptional circumstances" assistance.
"Things are so tough that people just don't see it as welfare any more," Ms Matthias said. "It's a very emotional thing. I mean, farming's in the blood. But a certain amount will leave the industry, not just in that area, but across the state."
Goyder's Line, the 1865 boundary drawn by then South Australian surveyor-general George Goyder, notionally divides cropping from pastoral land, but locals fear the combination of drought and climate change has shifted the marker south, making the country unviable.
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