23 July – Around and about in the Silver Town

I did not surface this morning until 0900. It is a rare event for me to be late up. The day was fine and sunny though a light wind was keeping things cool. The Church Stay is very well appointed – probably the best equipped kitchen we have seen. The maintenance must be difficult. There is a crack in the corner at the front that is replicated outside and which I suspect will need some fortification. I expect they will have to put one of those long bolts through the building to keep it together. There are already similar bolts in the middle and at the rear.

Serious cracks in our abode will need some work done soon

Foundation stones laid by some of Broken Hill's great and good. Bet they thought they were cheeky chappies in 1911.

I breakfasted late and then The G set off to do our own thing for the day. We started by looked for the Silly Goat Café which is Argent Street off Bromide Street. The streets seem all to be named after chemical compounds. The Silly Goat was indeed everything we had hoped for; in short, good coffee. The G took a quandong slice but I stuck to coffee.

Abundance by Linda MacAuley

Argent Street was not exactly humming with shoppers on a Saturday morning but we ambled along and found the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery. The G and I are partial to an art gallery and so we went in. There are two floors to the gallery: the upper floor houses a permanent exhibition. The ground floor was home to the entrants for the 2016 Pro Hart Outback prize. To say we were gobsmacked by the quality of the entrants for this prize would be understating our impression. You could take any of the works on display and give it to me and I would be happy to hang it on my wall or otherwise display it at home. As it happened we were drawn to a couple of the works in display: one by an Adelaide artist called Linda MacAulay based in Victoria (in a place called Eltham which is near Melbourne and doesn’t sound very outback) and the other by Polly Lyn Kimmorley who lives west of Bourke on the banks of the Darling. We have an annual art budget which ran out in January but we plumped for the Linda MacAuley. Mind you looking at Polly Lyn Kimmorley’s work I am feeling somewhat avaricious about it.

Pro Hart painting with flying saucer.
Of course.

The pictures upstairs in the gallery were also good. There were a number of Pro Hart pictures with a decidedly surreal aspect. One was a twilight forest scene, with a river flowing through, with groups of people enjoying the day. It looks to all intents and purposes like any idyllic riverside scene except for the flying saucer. I was taken by surrealism in 1967 or 68 when there was a surrealist exhibition at Plymouth Arts Centre with pictures and movies (very weird). But Magritte and Dali got me. So a flying saucer is just what I would expect.

The G said we should go into the Tourist Information Centre to see what was what. This is difficult for me; men do not read instructions and they don’t go into Tourist Information Centres. It was a good thing we did as we were directed to a number if exciting opportunities. We went to a retro shop just up the road from where we are staying where The G bought a tea towel, for $2, that had been made in Czechoslovakia (so we reckoned would have been retro) and I talked to the woman who ran the shop about P J Proby (as she had an LP by him).

Two doors down is Bell’s Milk Bar which is well-known and it had been recommended to us. Theor website says that “Bells is a Broken Hill icon where you can explore our fascinating social history and experience a rare insight into Australia’s unique milk bar and cafe culture.” I don’t remember milk bars in the UK but The G remembers them in Australia. We had a milkshake each and then went to look at the big slag heap in the town.

Bell's Milk Bar

A happy chappy with milkshake

Somewhat worryingly, there was what looked like a bullet hole in the men's room at Bell's Milk Bar

Broken Hill the town is situated next to a vast heap of rocks, rubble and slag that dominate the town. It is not particularly attractive, indeed it is bleak in outlook, but in some ways I can see that it defines the town. Broken Hill is so far from anywhere that the community is bound to be pretty strong. Mining is a tough profession which probably doesn’t have time for the more delicate touches of life. So there are few delicate touches. We cannot, for example, find an artisan baker. And that defines us I suppose. Artisan bread is not very important when you are making a living hundreds of feet underground.

I struggle with this. When it's all dug out there will be no town anymore. What will they all do? Where will they go?

We drove up to the top of the heap. I cannot say whether there was a hill there before and whether the original hill has been added to or whether the hill is entirely the result of stuff being scooped out of the ground. As we drove I reflected on the amount of heavy machinery lying about. Mining needs big machines and a hundred years ago these were made of iron. Plates of iron were riveted together. There are valves and handles. This machinery has served its time and been discarded. As we have moved from one mining area to another I have been struck by just how much iron has been discarded.

Either a big seat or The G has been drinking the same stuff that Alice drank.

At the top of the heap there is a view of the town on one side and of the distant bush on the other. There is also a monument to those who have worked in the mines and more particularly to those who have died. There is a list, year by year, of those who have died. The numbers decrease year by year but not as rapidly as you might suppose. The real decrease is really only in the last 25 or 30 years. The last death was 2007.

The view over Broken Hill from the top of the slag heap.

Memorial to the miners who have been accidentally killed.

We made our way home. Dinner was at the Palace Hotel. We took a taxi. There are two taxi firms in Broken Hill: one has 17 cabs and the other has 3. We were with the 17 cab firm; the same driver took us to the Palace as brought us back. I had though that Uber had made it to Broken Hill but it seems not. The Palace restaurant was packed out. They served good hearty food and we much enjoyed our night out.

A hearty and honest dinner at the Palace. Note the Battle of Bosworth Puritan Shiraz in the background. We had two of them. It's one of our favourites.