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Published: June 21st 2009
Victoria in winter
We're leaving chilly Victoria behind and on our way northBroken Hill - god-forsaken-hole or artists’ paradise?
Everyone told us, “Oh you have to stay at Broken Hill - there’s so much to do!” After having been here for a week I tend towards the ‘g-f-hole’. The constant drizzle might not have helped - we’re applying to the Federal Minister for the Environment to fund the rest of our trip, as everywhere we go it rains - we’ll go wherever needed to break the drought.
Broken Hill was the richest silver, tin and lead mine in the world at the height of production in the 19thC and is very proud of it. BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary) is now part of the biggest mining company in the world. Maybe this is why you have to pay for all the “things to do”.
I was looking forward to viewing the Miners Memorial - you can’t avoid its brooding presence on top of the huge mullock heap of mining debris that dominates the town. But you can’t get close unless you go through the restaurant-cum-souvenir shop sharing the slag-heap lookout. And pay. We presume it must be a corporate memorial rather than a public tribute.
You have to pay to
Broken Hill Living Desert Sculpture Park
Under the Jaguar Sun by Antonio Nava Tirado (Mexico) get into the Living Desert Sculpture Symposium and gardens, so we did and spent several happy hours wandering around the dozen large sculptures and arid flora and fauna reserve. The rain had freshened up the flora, causing the Sturt’s Desert Pea to flower - quite spectacular.
You have to buy the small brochure for the historic walk (free elsewhere) and for the art galleries that don’t charge at the door, there is a ‘donation’ box in a prominent place.
Broken Hill markets its galleries very aggressively, but other than the quite good regional gallery, most are private galleries of the ‘bush artist’ school, which is not particularly to our liking. The big star is the Pro Hart Gallery which you have to pay to get into, so we made a stand and didn’t. We did however have a lovely experience at the Horizon Gallery which is owned by Albert Woodroffe and has his, but also other artists work. And no entry charge.
While admiring his night time scenes of the mining town of Silverton, ‘Woody’ popped his head around the corner, introduced himself and proceeded to chat away to us for quite a while, taking us into
Moon Goddess
the sculpture, not me. his studio in the back room to view his latest work. We went back two days later, not being able to get the work out of our heads - as you do - and while we were trying to find something we could both afford and carry in the caravan, he rummaged around his cluttered studio and produced a test giclee detail of his latest series, dusted it off with a large brush, signed it and gave it to us, saying he wouldn’t sell it so we could have it.
He was a very un-arty artist, looked like a plasterer (that’s what he was in his previous life), obviously business minded but delightfully dishevelled and unpretentious. He was the only Broken Hill artist whose work we liked - to check it out go to; www.horizongalleries.com.au
Woodroffe’s art mainly focuses on Silverton where he lives, which is now almost a ghost town. When mining deposits in Broken Hill, 30 km east, proved to be far richer than those in Silverton, people literally packed up their homes and took them (stone houses included) by dray or train and re-established them there. What remains has the surreal air of an English
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view of the plains through the Jaguar Sun village visited by aliens who took some of the houses and all of the vegetation. But left the donkeys.
From Silverton there’s a view forever across the Mundi Mundi Plains which had a starring role in Mad Max 2. We heard talk about scouting for Mad Max 4 around Broken Hill. I hope it happens - not so that Mel Gibson can earn more money for nursery furniture - but to keep spirits up in the outpost of civilization that is Broken Hill.
Despite the weather we did have a very social time in Broken Hill. (Hi guys we met there!!) Happy hours have been rare this year, after being a regular occurrence before the school holidays last year. Grey Nomads go to ground when school breaks up, they spend Christmas as home with family and it’s too hot to travel in January and February. So they wait, usually till after Easter, to get back on the road. Now the weather is wintery all over the southern states and they’re on the move north.
It’s easy to strike up conversations everywhere, but there’s one topic of conversation where I still have to bite my tongue - the
Corrugated Church
everything in Broken Hill is corrugated iron dark cloud always hovering somewhere ready to taint the burning Aussie sun - “the Abo’s”. The problem is that it’s seen as an insurmountable problem - something that’s not the fault or responsibility of the ordinary Australian and they wish it would just go away. There is often a sense of embarrassment when “blackfellas” are mentioned and it’s known we are NZ visitors.
“You don’t want to go to Port O’Gutter says Richard, ex-army good guy travelling with the Ulysses Motorcycle Club and camped next to us in a tent in chilly Peterborough, South Australia.
He’s referring to Port Augusta, at the apex of the Spencer Gulf and the town everyone has to go through when travelling north from Adelaide, west to WA and east to NSW and Victoria. We’ve also heard it referred to as Port Disgusting and everyone recommends we keep on going and find somewhere else to camp on the road. The reason? “It’s full of Abo’s mate”, perfectly reasonable people tell us.
All through our trip we’ve spent many a happy hour with all kinds of people, intelligent, educated, fun, but then this issue crops up and I hear the saddest things come out
Sturt's Desert Pea
flowers after rain of their mouths.
Even the tour guide who took us to the Mungo National Park did a mild tirade on the way home about his son being beaten up by a ‘young Abo’ who didn’t get the punishment he deserved.
This after he had spent all day showing us the remains of Aboriginal fire places and tool quarries that were 40,000 years old in an area listed as a World Heritage site for being the longest known continually inhabited locality. Until it was taken last century as a pastoral lease - dispossessing said inhabitants.
“They bring it on themselves,” continues Richard the biker, talking about how he has watched the local indigenous people get their welfare cheques and go straight to the pub to exchange it all for grog.
But what about the little fact that they had their land taken, children stolen, families slaughtered, food sources obliterated, lifestyle and cultures destroyed?? “People of our generation don’t look at it that way” said Richard, looking a little uneasy. Whaaaaat?
His general niceness gave me the false sense of confidence to continue. What we so often hear is that they are “given” everything - houses, money, health care,
Miner's Memorial
crowning the slag heap that dominates the town and they just “throw it away”. There is a definite sense of injustice from white Australians - “they get more than we get...they get given everything...they are just lazy...you give them a house and they don’t want to live in it...” a definite sense that they should be grateful and want to live like the whitefella. But, I said to Richard, when they’ve had 40,000 years of living here in their own way, isn’t it a bit much to expect them to become like us in the space of 200 years?
There was a nanosecond of uncomfortable silence then his cell phone went. We were both relieved.
I’ll still have these conversations though - I’m looking for answers and solutions and no one has any - worse, they don’t even seem interested in finding any. At least Richard had the decency to admit that “Australia is a racist country”.
We did end up staying at “Port O’Gutter” on our way north and found it a perfectly pleasant place.
From wintery central Victoria we’d driven north via Swan Hill and Mildura which is famous for being transformed from virtual desert into a lush grape growing region. The Chaffey
miner's terraced cottages
made of corrugated iron of course brothers, Canadians, who were brought out here in the mid-19th C to help with the increasing drought problem, turned the Mildura region into an agricultural oasis through innovative and large scale irrigation drawn from the mighty Murray River.
Grapes are now mainly grown as table grapes or for drying... did you know that a sultanas comes from sultanas?? Raisins are dried red grapes, muscatels are dried muscat grapes, but a sultana is a dried sultana grape. And very delicious they all are.
The Murray River looks like a proper river here; tourist paddle steamers and privately hired riverboats ply up and down and there is a lock they have to go through which is quite entertaining even if it exists because irrigation has mucked about with the natural flow.
Although the area is in drought, we brought rain to Mildura and then to Broken Hill, so we carried on up to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, the driest state...where it is so hot and dry in summer they close the walking trails from the end of November to April to avoid losing people from heat exhaustion/fires.
Now (June) is the peak of the season for
Emus
around the Menindee Lakes, which were totally dry walking in the spectacular scenery, which includes the Heysen Trail, named after the artist Hans Heysen who immortalised the area in his epic landscapes.
But, guess what? Yes, it was raining! Whatever the weather, this is a beautiful part of the country. Wilpena Pound is a fabulous natural circular escarpment that looks like the site of a meteor strike, but is the result of millions of years of weathering of the folded and uplifted layers of rock formed under prehistoric oceans.
Staying at the camping ground at the only entrance through the walls of the Pound, we were able to do several walks in and around the escarpments, through forested gullies, up rocky outcrops to stunning views. Kangaroos and wallabies were everywhere - one in the camping ground was so bold it came up to me while I was reading a newspaper and started nibbling the edges of the pages!
We also visited old mine sites - a copper mine this time - drove a hairy dirt road to view ancient petroglyphs, (rock etchings) drove an even more hairy rocky road along a fascinating “geological trail” and ate kangaroo, emu and camel salami at the Prairie Hotel in
Broken Hill
NSW Outback mining town Parachilna, one of many famous outback pubs.
It was high season - the Wilpena camp ground was full and plenty of people were really camping - in real tents - but it was dark by 5pm and about 2 degrees over night. Hardy, crazy people these Aussies, sitting round their campfires in their thermals, hats and gloves. We met a couple of vegan cyclists, older than us, who had just cycled the Oodnadatta track, 600km of dirt road from the Flinders Ranges to the Stuart Highway north of Coober Pedy. Rhys had wanted to take the caravan over this route, but with the recent rain there was the risk of road closures and warnings out on parts of the track.
So we decided to leave the freezing forested mountains and hundreds of miles of 4WD desert tracks to the masochistic Australians and take our home on wheels over safe sealed roads to Coober Pedy, world capital of opal mining and first step on the way to warmth.
We’d been to Coober Pedy before and loved its weird, alien landscape and multi- national culture, driven by a passion for finding glorious opals in the barren rocks. But I
had another reason for wanting to stay there this time. Lake Eyre, the remains of a once enormous inland sea and normally a huge dry salt pan, was in flood from all the rain over summer in Queensland - a once in a decade event.
Australians were flocking there for the rare sight of water in the lake, pelicans nesting, plants growing etc and since we were virtually passing (about 200km away - on the door step in Oz terms) it was too good an opportunity to miss. The only way to view the 130km x 80km lake is from the air, and the closest (therefore cheapest) flights were from William Creek, 165km over dirt road from Coober Pedy.
We booked an hour flight with a company that usually does one or two tours a week over the dry lake that was the sight of Donald Campbell’s attempt on the land speed record, but now has several pilots doing four flights a day to keep up with demand.
For me the flight was an hour of pure visual splendour as we soared over the glistening lake, now only 50% full after earlier reaching a peak of 70%.
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the biggest wooden mine heads in Broken Hill (Junction Mine) To see the ancient landforms of arid Australia flowing below like a continuous aboriginal dot painting was a sight that makes driving through it graphically tangible.
Unfortunately for Rhys it was an hour of stomach churning yukkiness , which I was completely unaware of, as I was tucked in the tail of the tiny 6-seater, glued to the windows.
Only after we’d landed and I was let out first, exhilarated, I noticed Rhys, pale and clutching a bulging sick-bag, stagger out after me. Well-- it was very windy out there in the outback and it was a very small plane.
Still - we’ve seen Lake Eyre in flood, a sight not many Australians have seen. And now we’ve reached Alice Springs - more or less the centre of this huge continent. And it’s sunny and warm! Yay!
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Andrea Duncan Green
non-member comment
Amazing visual journey that you paint, Hilary. I know I should be working but I'd much rather digest your journal and scan your photos. We have had a week of gripping frosts (-2) but stunning days, but Wayne and I are already planning our Rarotonga escape near the end of winter. Not exactly life-changing like your journey, but warm! Cheers, and hi to Rhys also. Mr & Mrs Green