Bopping Around Broken Hill

God my feet are sore. And my wallet is too. But more on that later...

I've been in Broken Hill now for two days, and have covered a lot of ground. Yesterday I hoofed it around town on foot, with the goal of checking out as many of the town's art galleries as I could possibly reach. This didn't seem like a bad plan first thing in the morning, but the galleries aren't all strung along the main street and I know I walked at least 10-15kms as I explored. Fortunately it wasn't too hot out, and the flies weren't too bad (yes, Dad, I forgot the fly net you bought me back in Melbourne. Gah.). Broken Hill reminds me in many ways of Mount Isa, since they're both mining towns and they both have a huge mining operation looming over the cities. However Broken Hill shows off its wealth in ways that Mount Isa just doesn't. The architecture of the buildings here is superb. The parks are well groomed and tidy, even if there isn't much grass (not a lot of water here!). And there are art galleries everywhere!

Unfortunately, the Curse of the Closed Shop, which plagued Jen and I when we were exploring Coober Pedy, continued here. Only about half of the galleries I visited were actually open! When I started to get frustrated and re-read my travel brochures to check opening times, I found that some of the galleries that were closed were actually supposed to be open, they just weren't. Bah. Well at least I've got a good grasp of the town's geography now!

I did spend some time in the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, which is housed in an old hardware store from the turn of the last century. It's not a big gallery but it has some beautiful artworks, and their current temporary exhibition was on food. So they had all these different artworks representing various artists' interpretation of our relationship with what we eat. Some of the pieces were beautiful, and some were just... well... disturbing. Like the painting of the guy sitting alone at a table with a huge pile of steaming... something... for dinner. Or the five "death masks" of slaughtered pigs. Yummy.

My feet were so sore by the time I got out of the art gallery that all I wanted to do was stumble down Argent St. (the main drag) towards the hostel and find a little cafe where I could sit and have a cuppa. No such luck for me. It was only about 2:30pm, and it turns out that pretty much all of Broken Hill's downtown closes at 1pm on Saturday afternoons! Yikes! I finally manged to find a small takeaway place which was selling cold drinks, so I bought a coke, staggered back to the hostel, and took a nap.

When I woke up it was almost 6, and already dark outside. I didn't want to explore too much further, since my feet were killing me, so I wandered back down the street two blocks to the "Demo Club", one of the many clubs in town. I ate there on Friday night and the food was great, so I went back again. The club scene here in OZ reminds me a bit of Dave and Buster's in Toronto - in a typical club you have a bar, a restaurant, a games room, a pokie (slot machine) room, and much more. But the food was yummy and there were lots of people around, so this was definitely the place to be. I ordered a burger, and when it arrived, wow, what a burger! Here are all the toppings: lettuce, tomato, sauteed onions, BBQ sauce, pineapple, beetroot, shredded carrot, and a fried egg! A little strange (for the Canadian tastes, that is, this is quite normal here in OZ), but very good.

Today I realized I was going to have to rent a car, if I wanted to get out to Silverton and other places on the far side of Broken Hill. The only rental agency that's open on the weekends appeared to be Thrifty (I'd talked to the guy last night), so that's where I ended up. He had only one car left to rent, and it's a big 6-L Mitsubishi something-or-other. Don't ask me how much it's costing me to rent the blasted thing for two days. You don't want to know. The car has absolutely no headroom (and for me to say that, that's saying something; I don't even know if Dad would fit into the drivers seat!), but actually has a pretty smooth ride.

Today's adventures started with me driving out to the Daydream Historic Mine, about 20kms outside of Broken Hill - and a good chunk of that on unsealed road. I had to pass through two cattle gates that I had to shut behind the car, which was interesting. I began to feel like I was driving into the middle of nowhere, but then I finally made it out to the mine. The Daydream Mine was actually the first silver mine to operate in the Broken Hill area, before the big "Line of Lode" was found here. (No, I can't remember the dates). The mine was all cut by hand and all the ore was removed by hand - no mechanization here!

Let me tell you, of all the mine tours I've been on this year, this was the hardest one. The pathway we took down into the mine was extremely difficult to clamber down - and we had both hands free and a handrail! The miners would have entered the mine through the same shaft, carrying a lit candle in one hand and a pick axe in the other. YIKES. Wait 'till you see the pictures. The conditions in the mines were horrific, and many men didn't live past their mid-30's because of typhoid, silicosis of the lung or cirrhosis of the liver (from all the alcohol that was consumed to deal with the harsh conditions). Most miners also smoked opium as a way of dealing with the pain from their jobs. Boys as young as 8 were employed in the mine to haul carts and to gather ore after the blasting. Most of them would have been orphans and they could typically only work underground for a couple of years before their eyesight was so bad they had to be shifted to work above ground. At one point on the tour, our guide had us extinguish our headlamps and he lit a candle, to show us the low light conditions the miners would have worked in. No way I'd want to be doing that!

My next stop was the ghost town of Silverton, which is about 25kms outside of Broken Hill and just down the road from the Daydream Mine. I can only describe this place as a "bustling ghost town" - most of the buildings were moved to Broken Hill when that town boomed, and so there are only a few buildings left. Among them is the Silverton Hotel, which is probably one of the most-filmed pubs in all of Australia. It's best known from the Mad Max films and also A Town Like Alice. Outside the pub they have a replica of Mel Gibson's car from the Mad Max movies, so of course I had to get a picture with it. (I know I've seen the Mad Max films, but it's all blurry... I'm gonna have to add them to my list of movies to revisit in the coming year!). There are also several more art galleries in the old buildings, which I explored but didn't find all that inspiring.

My last stop of the day was out to the Mundi Mundi plains lookout, another 5kms down the road from Silverton. The plains were also used in the Mad Max films. All I can really say is... wow... those are some big, flat, desolate plains. I'm not sure the photos will do them justice.

I had one more stop before heading here to the library, and that was at White's Mineral Art and Living Mining Museum. What a find! They've got all these excellent displays on the history of mining in Broken Hill over the past 125 years. But what really makes the place fascinating is the artwork. The artist who owns the place has taken crushed powders of the different ores extracted from the mine and used them to make these elaborate, beautiful "sand paintings" that illustrate aspects of the town's history. They were exquisite.

Anyhow - I've gotta go - the library's closing in 5 minutes and I need to sign off. More to report on Tuesday, when I'm next back here!