Broken Hill

Just got back from a short trip to Broken Hill, in the far west of New South Wales. Well, "short" may not be the right word - the roundtrip drive from Canberra was about 2200 km (1350 miles). We thought Canberra was dry, but as we went west along the Hume and then Sturt Highway and then north on the Silver City Highway ("highway" in most of Australia being a two-lane road connecting increasingly distant small towns) we saw real dryness.

We did the drive out there in one long, butt-numbing eleven-hour drive. The last hour or so was kinda harrowing - it was dusk, and that's when the kangaroos come out to play. As we covered the last 200 kilometers or so to Broken Hill, we saw more and more 'roos (and goats, and emus - but it's the kangaroos who don't understand traffic that we were worried about). At one point a big kangaroo stood directly in our lane and only finally hopped off after I started blowing the horn at him (her?) when we were within thirty feet of him. Then it began to rain - a rare event in that part of the world - and the sun went down, and the last 50 km or so were kinda scary. Hitting a kangaroo at 100 km/hour (60 mph) will do a world of hurt to your car.

But finally, we crested a hill and saw Broken Hill glittering in the dark dark desert like a miniature Las Vegas.

Broken Hill is in the outback - it is surrounded by desert scrub and red earth. It only exists as a significant population center (about 25,000 in the town proper) because of the huge silver-lead-zinc deposits discovered there late in the 1800s.

The mining stuff is still key in Broken Hill. The center of town is dominated by a massive slag heap - what was once the "Broken Hill" has been mined away over the decades. On top of the slag heap is a really cool visitors center and the Broken Earth cafe, and then the Mining Memorial. It looks from the outside like a red and rusty miniature version of the Sydney Opera House. Inside the memorial, made from metal and wood like a mine shaft and open to the elements, is a list of the hundreds of men who have died in the mines of Broken Hill since mining began there in the 1880s. Various unpleasant deaths are listed for each of these guys - scalded; heart attack; explosion; coal dust on lungs; crushed by machinery; suffocated; crushed in mine collapse. Mining was - is - a very dangerous line of work. And the memorial is really effective. There were deaths for every year between 1885 and 1992 except for 1981, and the two most recent mine deaths were in 2002.

It is still a mining city - the weekly free newspaper "Barrier Miner" is full of news about what's happening in Broken Hill's mines. But there is more to Broken Hill than just mining. We spent one day hiking around a really cool nature preserve/desert park that the city of Broken Hill runs called the Living Desert, with some desert artwork. And lots of kangaroos, wallabies, weird birds, snakes, lizards, etc. We picked a good time - it was relatively cool (about 75 fahrenheit), because it can get really hot. Oh, and there was one other form of wildlife - flies.

Flies are incredibly annoying in much of Australia. They swarm all over you. They really go for the face and try to get up your nose, in your ears, at your eyes. They are looking for moisture, so if you're sweating you are an even more interesting destination for your average thirsty fly.

We also visited Silverton, a tiny settlement about 15 miles from Broken Hill that was briefly a mining boomtown in the late 19th century. Now it has a couple of dozen residents running various art galleries, inns, and other tourist attractions. It's a pretty cool place and you can get a mean vegetable soup and damper bread at the town cafe; the rain water (a precious commodity there) costs $2 for a bottle.

If you have seen Mad Max II or III, or Priscilla Queen of the Desert, you have seen parts of both Broken Hill and Silverton. The old hotel in Silverton even has one of the cars used by Mel Gibson's Max character parked out in front of it. Pretty cool. There's something about those rural roads that makes you want to drive like Mad Max and the rest of those lunatics in those movies. Unfortunately, the hotel with the copy of Venus on a Half Shell (aka, "The Birth of Venus") painted on the wall that featured in Priscilla had recently closed, I think for renovations, so we had to make do with peering thru the windows.

Broken Hill also has a flourishing art scene. Lots of artists, whether locals like the late Pro Hart, or people who have moved to the area, doing a lot of work depicting the dry red desert, or the mines, or doing work based on aboriginal art traditions.

One other odd attraction is a milk bar called Bell's. It's been around, first as a candy shop, since 1892. It's a cool place, very much out of the 1950s in style. But be warned, if you go there - a "spider" is in fact an ice cream float. And what Australians call a "milkshake" does not meet the American definition. The milkshakes at Bell's were really tasty, but were more an ice cream float made with flavored milk than the thick thick drink we knows as milkshakes in the US of A.

It's a pretty cool town and the countryside around it is stark, desolate, and beautiful. You'll definitely get to see all the kangaroos you would want. My only advice - bring your own water. Broken Hill's water is safe to drink, but it is really a very HARD water. It tasted like metal to me!