Broken Hill

From Mildura, we decided to take a long-weekend trip up to Broken Hill. Broken Hill is famous for its mining and where today’s largest mining company got started – BHP (initially stood for Broken Hill Proprietary).

Broken Hill is so named because one of BHP’s founders thought that there were resources to be found on a hill that looked ‘broken’.

Turns out the ‘line of lode’ as they named it was one of the largest silver, lead and zinc deposits in the world. BHP left Broken Hill in the 1940s, but mining is still active in the area.

Miners Memorial

There is a memorial to all the deceased miners up on the ‘broken’ hill which overlooks the town. It was sort of interesting (and depressing) to read the descriptions of how they died.

The views from the memorial and top of the hill overlooked both the town and mining present and past.

View of the ‘broken’ hill from the town with the memorial building on the top. As you can see, a lot of the hill has now been mined away…

Historic CBD

We followed the Heritage Walk around the CBD which explained a lot about the buildings, town history and significant events. I really enjoyed this walk and there were a lot of really nice buildings in town.

As you would expect, the town has a rich history of unions and ‘battlers’. One of the buildings was a newspaper that printed all the information about what the unions were doing and what bad things the mining bosses were up to.

There was also a building, sculptures and information dedicated to the founders of BHP:

We got some bread and lunch from the Sufi bakery. The bakery was run by a Turkish family and has been operating in the area for a long time. The mural on the side of the bakery building is a shout-out to the middle eastern residents and workers of outback Australia who worked on the Ghan and camel exploring.

We also spent a few hours visiting the very interesting Geology and Minerology museum. This museum was free and offered a lot of excellent information on the geology of the area and how the minerals were formed. It also had tons of mineral examples which were well categorised. Their display included a solid silver table centrepiece that belonged to the CEO of BHP in the early 1900s.

Racecourse and Music Festival

While we were in town, there was a huge music festival called Mundee Mundee just outside of town. This meant that we couldn’t stay in the caravan park that we originally wanted so we ended up camping at the Racecourse. The Racecourse had some old buildings and grandstands which was pretty cool. However, we were put into the ‘Hub’ shed which was interesting. We had only centimetres on either side of the van while backing in which was pretty nerve-wracking. 😬

There were two feral cats living under a wall near our shed and even though they were very shy, they took a liking to our van. And the kids took a liking to them.

On our first couple of nights at the racecourse, there were maybe about 30 or so vans parked and camping. But on our last night (the day the festival ended) there were about 500 vans all parked in the centre of the racecourse – including two groups crammed in next to us in the shed!

Silverton

On our last day in Broken Hill, we took a short drive out to the town of Silverton. Unfortunately, what we weren’t expecting was that the Mundee Mundee festival was located 20 minutes from Silverton, it was the last day of the festival when everyone had to leave, and 5,000 people had to come through the town of Silverton!

Silverton is an (almost) ghost town – there are now just a couple of buildings and art galleries dotted along the town. Recently the town has been used as a movie set for Mad Max, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and A Town Called Alice.