Blogs from Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia, Oceania - page 9

Blog8 Christmas Greetings to all our readers. And so we arrive in Blackall on the Matilda Highway, this town was discovered by Major Thomas Mitchell in 1846. Mitchell was appointed surveyor- General of New South Wales in 1828 , he did not conceal his jealousy and annoyance that Sturt was chosen to command expeditions to solve the river problems. He was keen to attain fame himself as an explorer , fragments of streams found by one explorer after another and marked in thin disconnected streaks were becoming linked up, he was instructed to find out whether the Darling was the same river as Sturt had found flowing into the Murray. His jealousy made him hope Sturt was wrong , but before he reached the point he realised that indeed the one did flow into the other ... read more

At last, we are at the Louth Races. For those of you who are saying, “where the hell is that?” It’s a little place on the Darling River between Bourke and Wilcannia. You might still be saying, “where”? Suffice it to say it’s in Western NSW about 400km East-North-East from Broken Hill. 200km of bitumen then 200km of dirt. As with a lot of town’s in Australia it grew up around a pub. It was originally a watering hole for the thirsty crews of the paddle steamers and the town grew up around it. Today it has a population of less than 50 but in the late 1950’s someone decided to hold a horse race, which lives onto today on the second Saturday in August. As with most of these trips a whole group of people ... read more

The first day of our outback adventure, we started out from the Adelaide Hills at about 8am. First stop on the journey was the old copper minining town of Burra, where Luke, Esther & I promptly found the Burra Bakery and put in our orders. Then Dad went in for his feed, followed by Luke going in for seconds. All up we had: 1 sausage roll 1 meat pie 2 bushmans pies 1 kransky 2 pasties 1 apricot & walnut bun 1 custard tart 1 tropical fruit box No wonder the laides in the bakery said it was a busy morning! Next stop was Olary, just to check the load. We saw a truck carrying some huge tires for some mining trucks, and saw the old Olary train station. You could be waiting quite a while ... read more

Im re-writeing a previous post that was lost when the town i was in got struck by lightining frying the internet caffe i was in. Ariving at Arrowfeild in the Hunter Valey gives me stange feelings of De Ja Vu, its gently undulateing curves, brown dry land patchworked by vivid green irragated feilds and the vines in rows on every East faceing slope. It remids me of tuscany with bigger roads and stripmines, even the olive trees here seem very happy, with the horse stud next to Arrowfeild it feeles a bit to familiar. We spend our time at the wineary prepareing of hard camping in the bush, we work out a packing system that just fits all out stuff in Betty. We check maps and talk to the farmers, paticuarly Tony (a very nice, late ... read more

We were up early to have a brief dip in the pool before we went to collect our car at 9.15am. First we went to the tourist info centre to pick up a key for the sculpture Symposium, just outside Broken Hill, for our nightime excursion. We got our lovely car, Toyota Corolla, automatic and headed to our first destination, Umberumberka Reservoir, this was not very exciting. From here we went back to the Mundi Mundi plains lookout. This was cool. You can see so far that you can see the curvature of the earth! You can see for miles and it's so quiet. (we didn't see any cars) Next was on our tourist day was an old outback historic mining town called Silverton, which used to be bigger than Broken Hill but is now just ... read more