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Published: March 4th 2008
Mundi Mundi, NSW
That's it - no more paved road and about a thousand km of nothing straight aheadThe original plan was to boot it down to the Great Ocean Road from Flinders and yet when we looked at the map and saw 'Broken Hill' just a few nice easy squares away the plan was ditched and off we went, bidding a sad farewell to the Kangaroos that we hung out with in the caravan park and expecting to reach there around lunch-time.
It was one of those days when the sun is shining, you're both in flying form, singing at the top of your voices and finding everything hilarious, particularly the hand-made signs one farmer had spent endless hours painting on sheets, the first mysteriously reading 'LEAVE MY FENCE ALONE' and then a second one a few kms down the road more contrite to start but with a sting in its tail: 'STEADY ON, YOU BARSTARDS' (sic).
Australians seem to have a fondness for transporting all manner of enormous things on vehicles and that morning we passed a humungous digger, the size of three Georgian terraces of houses, flanked by numerous vehicles saying 'LARGE LOAD', a ginormous lorry with huge coils of plastic and finally a immense truck carrying would you believe it, an actual house.
In Hawker we stopped to fill up the tank and Alan chatted with the Gas Station Attendant until he saw a Ute pull in and said, 'I just gotta go check in on Bob' and strolled over to clean Bob's windscreen and catch up on the gossip. We stocked up on Minties, a delicious Milky-Moo type sweet we've grown partial to, some Solo (lemon drink for me, reminds me a bit of lemon juice in South-East Asia) and Iced Tea for Alan and drove off into the dust, singing Midnight Oil and gunning Bruce on, he bouncing over the empty road eagerly. We were waving at the occasional car going the other way and all was good in the world.
By lunchtime however our mood had changed. From passing many vehicles we found ourselves practically the sole thing on the road and the landscape had changed dramatically, huge winds and dust devils blowing across miles of flat arid orange soil. 'How far is it anyway?' I asked Alan. He consulted the table at the back of the road atlas and we both wept, we were hundreds of kms away and the petrol was dwindling slowly, but not slowly enough.
Werner's Roadhouse
On the SA-NSW border in Cockburn, population 10.
Us: 'so you must know everyone in town?'
Werner (sternly) 'No, mate.' Of course being the polite well-brought up woman that I am, I moderated my cursing as Alan nodded and told me that it would be alright. Eventually we passed through a town, but it was a ghost town, empty with nothing to see but a pile of 'FOR SALE' signs on sad looking wooden buildings that had seen their heyday years ago. A hundred or so kms further and a vehicle loomed in the rear window. We were bombing along, and were surprised to see the ease at which the lorry caught and overtook us. Soon we only saw it away in the distance.
In an effort to entertain me, Alan resorted to that old game of thinking of someone famous and then I had to guess who they were. 'Godzilla' and 'Ghenghis Khan' were easy, but 'Gerard Depardieu' and 'Cheri Blaire' took me longer - apparently the former is a comedian (Pardonez moi, I don't think so) and the latter wouldn't be famous in her own right (yeah right) - I was swizzed is all I can say. Still fair dues to him, he kept our spirits up. At one point we spotted a diner type place and
Sulphide St, Broken Hill
Near to Bromide, Chloride and Radium Streets! stopped, three jolly ladies working there made us up the most enormous delicious sandwiches. After leaving the diner though it was back out into the heat, it was pounding down at that stage and even standing outside the campervan waiting to open the door involved baking like a cake.
The road seemed endless and the distance signs seemed too far apart. Our games and conversation had dried up and we were sick of driving, in a way that never happens in Ireland as you simply run out of land. Last year in a loony drive Alan and I drove down to Dingle from Dublin and back up again in one day, probably longer distance in reality, but it was different, the landscape changed and you drove through town after town. On this drive we felt as though we were in the middle of nowhere, land that no man would live on for the most part. By the time we were only a hundred kms or so outside Broken Hill when we passed a small Roadhouse and even though the gas would probably have lasted we were desperate for something, interaction, I don't know, so we stopped. The pumps were
Broken Hill
The enormous mullock heap from the old mines dominates the town's skyline locked and we had to knock, to which a man shouted'yeah, I'll be roight withya' and fixing his trousers as he opened the door. A scrawny bearded man with a wizened face hobbled out to the pump and chatted away with us about his town Cockburn, and nodding at an indiscernable post in the mid-distance said 'see that post there? That's the marker.' We nodded at the empty horizon, not knowing what he meant. 'Draw a line from that straight through the middle of my property' and he gestured with his hand, 'that's the border, splits me roight in half.' It was the border between South Australia and New South Wales. Finally we felt we were getting somewhere on the journey. He yapped about the town we had passed fifty or so kms before and told it was a ghost town, 'just one old fellah left there, all on his own' he said. He told us about himself, it turns out he is actually Bavarian and came over to Australia in 1963, where he worked as a trucker until retiring ten or so years ago and wandering around the country for five years before buying his station in Cockburn. We
got the feeling, not sure if it's true though, that he wandered into Cockburn on his walkabout and saw the station for sale and just never left. His wife dragged him away and we paid up and left.
Broken Hill was fantastic, and we didn't have enough time at all there. The town enjoyed great success as a mining town, which still continues to today, although they are scaling back dramatically on it. However, it's real wealth and establishment dates back to the early 1900s and as such the buildings are amazing to look at, similar to Burra which we had visited days before, but on a much grander scale. As a consequence of its industry the roads are all called fantastic things like 'Sulphide Street' and 'Bromide Street', lots of shops are called 'Argent' and in the laundrette there are special notices about how to wash mining clothes. It's a really quirky town, lots of interesting types wandering around, men with straggly beards and battered leather crocodile dundee hats, cowboy boots, the whole nine yards. Even though it does go for the tourist dollar, you get the impression that they don't get an awful lot of us, and
Red bellied clouds
Along the Barrier Highway Alan taking photos of street signs resulted in cars slowing down and big waves for us. The town also has an artistic community, sporting both indigenous art and more modern varieties. The public spaces proudly display old mining equipment from the shafts, community art projects and signs with information about famous people from the town. It seems to have a real union tradition and it was fascinating to read about agitators who did so much for the miners of that community who appear to have worked in awful conditions when the mines were first opened.
The next day Alan was bouncing with excitement as we were going to Silverton, a tiny town outside of Broken Hill, famous for a few things including being the home of the car from Mad Max II. Sadly, I had never seen Mad Max, and so Alan eagerly filled in the gaps in my knowledge. Silverton used to be a mining town, and at it's heyday was home to thousands of people, but that was very brief and the miners moved to Broken Hill within a few years, leaving it as a very small town and to be honest with a lot of 'For
Sale' signs it seems set to become even smaller. That said the town was full of character and delightfully Mad Max had left his car outside of the Silverton Hotel, so we draped ourselves on it before heading inside for a coke and chat with the bar-lady. The walls of the bar are covered with information about that and other films shot using the village as a set. Afterwards we drove to the Mundi-Mundi lookout, where you can see the curvature of the earth and basically it is such a vast empty space that you can see that the earth is round. You also become aware how empty a lot of Australia actually is, and while part of me wanted to get a 4X4 and head into the bush-proper, part of me was eager to return from that emptiness to the highway and sign-posts signalling civilisation, even if it is a long way away.
If I thought that we were driving through emptiness the day before, this day was to prove that I had underestimated it. We drove 150kms from Broken Hill to a road-house, nothing really inbetween except nature, and talked to the lady operating the pumps who
told us they hadn't had proper rain for seven years. She also pointed out her neighbours and reassured us that it isn't really that isolated, but to us from Ireland, it really was. Then we drove a further 150kms through nothingness to Wentworth, a really charming little town, where we stopped for lunch and wandered around for a spell. In buying supplies of noodles and wine, we noticed that all the young men of Wentworth seemed to have blonde streaks of dyed hair, seriously, we counted five in one shop alone - although they were all working there, so maybe they bought one bottle of dye between them and shared it, I'm not sure.
On we drove, that frenzied madness that overtakes you when you are driving, and we passed by Mildura in a haze, although we noticed the ground went from arid to fertile almost as we crossed the border to Victoria, with grapes growing and everthing, but we didn't stop, and on we went until we were cream-crackered and stopped in a teeny town called 'Hopetoun', where I think we were the only people who used the camp-site in ages. It kindof operated on a trust system,
Yes!
Mad Max's V8 Interceptor! where you could place your seventeen bucks in a letterbox after using the site, but I think our arrival had the locals yapping as the caretaker rolled by an hour after our arrival and had a great chat with me (Alan was in the shower). He had no idea of my accent and his eyes literally popped out of his head when I said I wanted a 'powered site'. He hung around for ages, asked me if I was alone, so I told him my husband was in the shower (saying that even still seems so weird, it's Alan for God's sake). Then he asked how long I was in Australia and when I said six weeks he told me I wouldn't get to see anything. He asked where I had been and I told him, he said he'd never been to Flinders. I promised we'd come back to Australia and spend longer next time and that seemed to satisfy him so he left, slowly. That evening we walked around the town in the most glorious sun-set, waving at the locals who I think were genuinely surprised to have visitors to their town. The town was pretty normal, nothing special,
Silverton Café
On bustling Main Street and yet they had the most amazing swimming pool and tennis court. We wandered by the lake, sad to see that it was pretty dried up.
The next day Alan nearly died of happiness as we passed through Nick Cave's hometown of Warracknabeal. It is cool to have seen the birthplace of one of your idols. Still we weren't for stopping and on we drove from the heat into the wet, and into countryside that resembled Ireland to an alarming degree, making us feel a bit strange and wonder whether we were dreaming. It didn't help that a lot of the few towns we were passing had roads named things of Irish origin or that it started to rain, and this was so strange to us, hanging out with that woman in the Roadhouse who said she hadn't had proper rain in years, and then two days of driving later and the grass is fertile and the rain plentiful. It got dark, the rain splattered down heavier, and we wondered when we'd last seen rain, Thailand probably, but that is tropical storm rain, this is good old fashioned rain, maybe then Tokyo, where the rain had been so heavy
one day that we bought umbrellas. We drove and drove through the rain, we knew the coast was nearby, or so the map told us. And then, as in all journeys, we arrived at our destination, Warrnambool, the start of the Great Ocean Road. It was really weird, roads called things like 'Jameson Road' and 'Moore Street'. We found the campsite and could hear the sea but it was dark, wet and we decided to get comfy in Bruce and eat some noodles. To be honest we both felt a little underwhelmed and then a lovely thing happened, our neighbours called in with smiles, apples and a magazine for me. They turned out to be a lovely Australian family - grandparents, parents and grandchildren all packed into a caravan and tent, just finishing their holiday - it was a pity the weather wasn't better as we could have had a decent chat.
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Ronnie Mills
non-member comment
Feedback on Silver City comments
As an ex Broken Hillite it was great to read your positive comments on the Silver City. Over the years the town has coped a flogging mainly due to the strength of the unions. They talk about collective bargaining agreements now but we had them there 30 years ago. I worked underground on the Zinc Mine owned by RioTinto in those days. Bloody hard work. You should have had a look a whites musuem in west part of The Hill. He has scaled model of what undeground works look like. There was a mine shaft there for visitor tours (Delprats) closed up now due to mining in location I believe. I have been in Canberra since 1984 some twenty five years ,still cant get that red dust out of the blood. Still have faamily there but trips back are few and far between. Anyway you brought back some good memories with your photos. Before I left there i was a linesman. We built a power line out to Mundi Mundi station , back of Silverton . That was a bloody stinkin hot experience. Cheers