For ‘Crocodile Dundee’ fans the archetypal Australian Outback town is a place of hard work, hard drinking and a Paul Hogan look-alike propping up every bar in sight. You’ll find something along these lines in Broken Hill, although the guys at the bar usually look less like hunky Hogan and more like folksy Chips Rafferty, the quintessential and craggy Australian actor of the 1950’s. There aren’t many crocodiles around either; the surrounding landscape being distinctly unfriendly to anything that swims. In reality, all that moves in this vast red desert are the strange animals that have been here for millions of years. Kangaroos and emus leap and prance across a harsh land where civilisation constantly loses the battle against nature. Walk out of town and you may never return.
And it’s flat, flat flat!. Other than a few bumps in the landscape, there’s not a hill within sight of Broken Hill , but if there were it would surely be alive with the sound of movie-making. Welcome to Hollywood, New South Wales. For the past twenty-five years or so dozens of films and television commercials have been made in and around this old mining town.
When director George Miller was looking for a location for his movie Mad Max II, Mel Gibson’s 1981 “road warrior” classic, he sought a place devoid of any hint of civilisation and he found exactly what he wanted in the desert around Broken Hill.
In the opening scene of the movie, Mel Gibson in his alter-ego of Mad Max , is a reluctant hero helping a tiny post-apocalypse community defend itself against roving bands of crazies. Peering over the desert he sees a menacing convoy of outlandish vehicles moving across a dead and barren land. I saw the same vast red plain, but here emus pick at clumps of stubbly grass and prance away with their strange ungainly gait at first sniff of a human. Flights of brilliant birds flash across the sky so fast they are no more than a streak of colour. Kangaroos blend with the red ochre land until, disturbed, they leap and bound across the plain as if in joy rather than fright. It’s a strange, surreal, land.
There are surreal aspects of Broken Hill too, especially the 109-year-old Palace Hotel where, in the movie “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, Terence Stamp and the rest of his band of flamboyant performers raise their eyebrows in horror at the gaudy murals lining the walls and ceiling of the bedroom.
All this is a far cry from that day in 1885 when an itinerant boundary rider discovered a silver lode and eventually amassed a great fortune. After this, the Broken Hill proprietary Company (BHP) was formed, later to diversify into steel production and become Australia’s largest company, belching its black smoke over a town of more than 21,000 people. Early conditions in the mines were appalling, with hundreds of miners dying from lung diseases and lead poisoning. The workers lived in cottages made of galvanised iron which must have been like ovens in the 40-degree summers. Quite a few of these houses remain; the locals call them “tinnies”.
The population has increased to around 27,000 since the bad old days but there is still a feeling of the frontier about Broken Hill. Hard work and hard drinking are what life is about and a lot of the local males have three-day growths and cattle dogs at heel.
The Australian Outback is a place of extremes and Broken Hill is no exception. Situated in one of the harshest environments in the world it is truly an oasis in the desert. Bitterly cold in winter and intolerably hot in summer, it is surprisingly leafy and green thanks to the water piped in from a reservoir 110 kilometres away. As I stood on the shady verandah of the Palace Hotel, trying to brace myself for the smack of heat as soon as I stepped into the sun, a man with a young body and the face of a wrinkled brown prune paused to light a cigarette and gave me the all-Australian greeting, “G’day” . On hearing I lived in London he said “You must be a kangaroo short in the top paddock”. Which is Oz talk for “you must be crazy”. (Australians come up with some of the best expressions I’ve ever heard).
Maybe it is crazy to live in a big bustling city when one could live in a place where, only a short walk from the hotel is a landscape which is as still and quiet as it was a million years ago. Where, in nearby Mootwingee National Park, you can run your fingers over ancient rock carvings and clamber around gorges and rockholes carved by thousands of years of wind biting into the soft sandstone. There’s a monumental stillness about the place and it’s easy to see why for centuries it has been a place of pilgrimage for the Aborigines. Here they had a reliable water supply and because of this it became, and still is, a mecca for major aboriginal ceremonies. And when the skies darken and the stars appear to be within hand’s reach; when the air is scented with the perfume of the eucalyptus trees and the silence seems to penetrate one’s very soul, there is a sense of one-ness with nature.
When I told my pal in Sydney how I’d fallen for Broken Hill and the Outback she said, cynic that she is, “You can’t buy sushi there”. Which is her smart-alec way of saying it’s not exactly a centre of sophistication. Yet the first art gallery in New South Wales was opened here in 1904 and the town has become a major centre for Australian artists. There’s a plethora of galleries and even more at Silverton, a near-ghost town just 15 miles north-west of Broken Hill with about 70 inhabitants and a few camels. Artist Peter Browne says, “The community is so small we have to take turns being the town drunk.”
In contrast to the works produced by these “brushmen of the bush” you can see a very different kind of art just a few kilometers out of town. In 1993 twelve sculptors from countries as far away as Mexico, Damascus and Georgia were invited to create whatever they wished from huge sandstone blocks. What you see at the top of the small hill where they stand like a 20th-century Stonhenge, is remarkable.
Another movie in the Broken Hill repetoire is “Outback Bound”. Made in 1988 it tells the story of a down-on-her-luck Beverly Hills princess who roughs it in the Outback looking for her deceased dad’s played-out opal mine. From Broken Hill you can head off across the desert to White Cliffs where there are plenty of played-out opal mines. It’s more than a hundred years since the first opal mine in Australia was founded here and since this time the landscape has been reduced to something that looks like Planet Devastation. There are thousands of holes in the gritty white landscape where you can fossick for opals, but there’s hardly a house in sight – most of the population lives underground in dugouts to escape the fierce heat. But don’t let the word ‘dugout’ deceive you into thinking these people live rough. Far from it. Their underground homes are a real surprise, many beautifully furnished, with all mod-cons, and best of all a constant 21 degrees celsius all year round. Light filters into the rooms from windows set high above you at the end of whitewashed funnels carved out of the rock. The ‘windows’ rest on the flat ground in the real world above. It’s very strange to walk across the chalky landscape and see panes of glass inserted every few metres or so.
Many of the mines still operate. Everyone is looking for the big one, and occasionally someone finds an opal large enough to get the fever going. In the meantime, a real community is growing up around the diggings. There are close to 200 underground homes in all . Some are open for inspection and offer B&B accommodation.
Meanwhile, back in Broken Hill, my prune-faced friend is leaning on the bar rail at the Palace Hotel. The rays of the setting sun colour the room pink and purple. “Great sunset”, I say. “Aw, it’s nothing”, he replies. “We get one every night”.