The Pilbara town of Exmouth was once a small slice of American military intelligence, transplanted onto the West Australian coast.

Imagine the scenario of a small coastal town where a man leaves work to head home.

He gets in his Cadillac and first drives past a bowling alley and on to a club where he has a quick beer, which he pays for with green dollar bills featuring George Washington.

He then heads to the local baseball field to watch a team practise as the Stars and Stripes flutters above the grandstand.

Then he steers his car for home, driving down the right side of the road.

It sounds like a scene that could play out in small US town. But it's also a scene that could easily have played out in north Western Australia, in the late 1960s and 70s.

Commissioned as the US Naval Communication Station North West Cape in 1967, the military base was renamed US Naval Communication Station Harold E Holt following the then prime minister's disappearance three months after the base was opened. The US was dropped from the name in 1974 with the advent of joint operation with Australia. ( ABC North West WA: Alex Hyman )

These days Exmouth is known for whale sharks and the Ningaloo reef, but back in the 60s it wasn't on the tourist trail and you would have been forgiven for thinking that you'd woken up in a remote part of the US.

Exmouth exists today because of the ANZUS alliance.

The town was built to support the Harold E Holt Naval Communications Base and stands as a monument to the cooperation between Australia and the US during the cold war.

Associate Professor Anthony J Barker has co-authored a new book with Michael Ondaatje called A Little America in Western Australia.

It provides a detailed insight into the birth of Exmouth as a town and how, for a few decades, it was a bit of Uncle Sam right here in Australia, and that influence is still felt today.

Before Exmouth there was Potshot

"The US Navy wanted to communicate, particularly with its submarines, and it had this amazing technology for communicating underwater with submarines," Professor Barker said in explaining why the North West Cape was selected as the site for the Naval Communication base.

"It needed access to the ocean, it needed some distance from big cities with conflicting radio transmissions, and so its very emptiness was ideal as far as the Americans were concerned."

Prior to the Harold E Holt base being established, the North West Cape was home to the isolated Yardie Creek and Exmouth Gulf pastoral stations, but not much else.

But the Naval communications base wasn't the first time that America had had a presence on the North West Cape.

"The Americans had a little bit of history there because it had been a drop-off point for flights in and out of Perth during the Second World War," Professor Barker said.

"It became known as Potshot, that area in the Exmouth Gulf where there was a kind of secondary base.

"Potshot actually got incorporated into the name of a famous pub in Exmouth," Professor Barker explained, highlighting just one of the early American influences that can still be found in Exmouth today.

Weeds have grown up around the communications base's church. ( ABC North West WA: Alex Hyman )

"It was the Australian government that particularly wanted a town," he said.

"They thought that if the Americans can be persuaded to build a base and actually integrate it with families living in the town alongside Australians, that this would be very good for persuading the Americans to continue, and in fact build their support for Australia," Professor Barker said.

"So, in that sense, it was a mixture of the two nationalities right from the start."

Just as the Harold E Holt Communications Base was growing and developing, America was becoming involved in what would become a very protracted and difficult war in Vietnam.

Conflict in Vietnam would come to dominate US foreign policy and for many US servicemen, a posting to the North West Cape was a chance to avoid Vietnam altogether.

"It counted as sea service but it was not as dangerous as serving in the waters of Vietnam as the Vietnam War took off," Professor Barker said.

"But of course some of the people there had been in Vietnam. It was a way of avoiding Vietnam and a way of escaping Vietnam for some."

Small town USA

At the peak of US influence on the town, Exmouth was like slice of America on the Pilbara's North West Cape.

US-made cars drove on the other side of the road, US currency was used, American food was shipped in, a large baseball pitch was built at the Harold E Holt base, and a ten pin bowling alley drew in a crowd.

American military architecture still features throughout the town today.

"What most people talk about was the way the American houses on the whole don't have fenced back yards, so people could wander around between," Professor Barker said.

"So it looked very different from a normal country town.

An abandoned baseball field on the Pilbara's North West Cape reflects a time when there was a little America in Western Australia. ( ABC North West WA: Alex Hyman )

The use of US currency was a point of contention for civil commissioner Ken Murdoch who was pushing to have full integration of the US services into Australian life.

"He got really annoyed in messages back to Canberra about how currency was being used and that this was a very bad thing that US currency was being used in the town," Professor Barker said.

"But it was unavoidable; it wasn't that everybody was flashing American dollars around, but it was quite accepted that they were being used."

On the whole the two cultures got on together and lived well but there were reports of occasional flare-ups.

"I interviewed some Americans, particularly one couple who denied there's ever been violence, but they were only there for a very short time," Professor Barker said.

"Other times people said, 'Yes, there were nasty incidents'. There were brawls around the Potshot Inn, the sort of things you'd expect in any kind of military town."

For many US servicemen, especially those from states like Texas, the open skies of the North West weren't completely unfamiliar, but the remoteness and isolation was a new and challenging experience.

"It was quite intimidating, the remoteness," Professor Barker explained.

"What amazed me is how little preparation they had. Again and again they arrived and were expecting to find a town, a city even, got off the plane at Learmonth and it was absolutely deserted," he said.

"They couldn't believe this was their final landing place."

"And there was evidence, interviewing one person, who was in a personnel officer role within the navy, said they did have to ship some people out with depression.

"They couldn't hack the isolation."

The US withdrawal from Exmouth

The bar where US and Australian defence staff once relaxed side-by-side. ( ABC North West WA: Alex Hyman )

With cold war hostilities thawing in the late 1980s, US involvement at the Naval Communications Base Harold E Holt was scaled back and eventually they withdrew from the base in 1992.

"Obviously the end of the cold war meant the end of such an urgent need for communication with its nuclear submarines, which were really the main strike weapon in the cold war as far as the US was concerned," Professor Baker said.

At a ceremony in October 1992, Captain Samuel Grayson Curry of the US Navy, formally handed over command of the Harold E Holt base to Captain Crispin George of the Royal Australian Navy.

Eventually the management and operation of the site was handed over to private contractors.

"Four or five years ago it was being run by Boeing, still with a kind of secret communication area," Professor Barker said.

"And then I think there have been two other contractors since then, but obviously it is much less important in international relations and American foreign policy than it used to be."