Broken Hill
"Broken Hill is a city that makes sense once you stop expecting it to look like anything else."
A city at the end of a very long road in the far west of New South Wales, Broken Hill announces itself on the horizon as a smudge of colour against the flat — headframes and water towers and the long silver-grey ridge of what locals call the Line of Lode, the silver-lead-zinc ore body whose discovery in 1883 turned a barren plain into one of the richest mines in Australian history. I drove in from Adelaide, nine hours across featureless red flat, and arrived in the early afternoon to find a city that looked like it had been dropped from a different country. The streets were wide. The buildings were solid. There was art on almost everything.
The streets of Broken Hill are broad and mostly quiet. The buildings are solid sandstone and brick from the 1890s boom, and many of them hold art. That is the surprise of Broken Hill — that it became, over the course of the twentieth century, a place where painters wanted to live. The flat light here, the quality of the silence, the way the red plain surrounds the city on all sides and enforces a kind of concentrated intensity, drew artists from the 1940s onward. Something about being this far from anywhere produces a particular kind of looking.
The Pro Hart Gallery on Wyman Street holds a substantial collection of the miner-turned-artist’s work — his paintings of outback life, mining mythology, and biblical scenes executed with technical confidence and occasional genuine emotion. The gallery is installed with the cheerful excess of a man who painted because he could not stop. Silver City Mint on Chloride Street holds work by Hugh Schulz and Jack Absalom, the other members of Broken Hill’s “Brushmen of the Bush” — artists whose work emerged directly from this specific flat red light and whose paintings read differently once you’ve stood in it.
The Palace Hotel on Argent Street is painted floor to ceiling with Aboriginal motifs and desert murals by artist Gordon Waye, commissioned in the 1990s, and is worth visiting for the bar alone — a room where cold beer on tap coexists with murals running fifteen metres up to the ceiling. The publican when I was there had been at the Palace for twenty-two years and delivered my beer without looking at me, which felt appropriately western.
I walked the Line of Lode interpretive trail at the southern edge of town, which passes the old headframes and gives a view over the city and the plain beyond. The scale of the historical mining operation is comprehensible only from here — the city exists because of what lies below it, and the below is visible in the mountains of mine waste that flank the ridge. The wind off the plain was dry and warm and tasted of dust, the same taste the whole nine-hour drive in had been building toward.
When to go: April through September is ideal. Broken Hill sits in semi-arid country and summer heat regularly hits 40°C. Winter is cool and clear — nights can drop to 5°C — and the light in June and July on the red earth and pale headframes is extraordinary.