Imagine you're on an adventure on the other side of the world. You're robbed on a tropical island, and instead of going home defeated you decide to stick it out, get a job for a few months and earn some cash so you can continue your travels. You sign up to a program that sends backpackers to remote pubs. You're told you've signed up to work a stint at a pub in a mining town, a minimum of three months. You think that's fine, because you need to work long enough to save the money to finish your "dream trip".

But then you arrive, and the first thing you see is a huge sign advertising "new girls tonite". On your first shift, you're ogled and propositioned by the local men who have no qualms in announcing the game is on to see who'll "bag" the first one. Your boss berates you from across the bar, and describes you as "fresh meat", laughing along with the leering men. At the end of the night, you go home in tears to your new living quarters. Except those quarters are not your own home – they're upstairs at the very same pub, where over the next few weeks you'll have to fend off drunk and often menacing strangers who are hell bent on following you into your bed, and can't be made to leave.

There's no escape. You're in Coolgardie, a mining town in outback Western Australia, 40 kilometres west of Kalgoorlie and a six-hour drive to Perth. You don't have your own car and are relying on the same locals who've made you fear for your safety in the pub in order to go anywhere else.

It sounds like the beginnings of a horror movie, and in many ways it is. But the story is real.