Broken Hill

After getting the car serviced in Walgett, we made plans for our excursion to Cameron Corner.  This involves nearly a thousand kilometres of dirt road and a couple of things concerned us, I.e. Breakdowns, tyres, dust, heat and FLIES.  I am almost convinced that the flies are more attracted to me because of my face moisturiser. However can't see myself not putting cream on my face in the mornings.

Before leaving Walgett we visited an Aboriginal fish trap in the Namoi River.  This site is recorded as the oldest man made structure on earth estimated to be 40,000 years old.

Bourke is one of the nicest outback towns we have stayed at.  There is so much history tied up in this little town and probably only outdone by Broken Hill.

Dr Fred Hollows is buried here and his headstone cannot be missed as you drive in the gate of the Bourke Cemetery. 

 

While here we stayed at the Mitchell Caravan Park as again the flies and heat drove us to use the air conditioning.  This is run by a young couple who for a small fee put on a meal each afternoon of the week at the camp kitchen.

 Our friends Peter and Maree Cottrell were heading back from WA and so we stayed a few more days in Bourke to catch up with them.  Always a great couple of days with these two.

After checking with the tyre place regarding our Tyers before starting our western run we were told not to do anything til we got back from Cameron Corner.  We got 80 klm out and did a tyre so turned round and back to Bourke.  This time Stuart wasn't running any risks and got a full set of tyres and a spare rim.  So on Friday it was Cameron Corner here we come - take two.

Bourke is very soon going to have an abitour.  Apparently predominately for an overseas goat carcus market.  For the first 20 Klms or so there were goats fenced in both sides of the road.  Interspersed along the way by family's of emus.  We even saw a mother and 4 half grown chicks, and this mother and a tribe of babies.

Now we can say we have been to the back of Bourke

 We got to Tibooburra after driving on a dirt and slightly corrugated road all day we had dislodged quite a bit of stuff inside the van.  It didn't take us long to realise that Cameron Corner could wait til next time and we headed in the opposite direction to Broken Hill.



My favourite Australian wild flower - Sturt's Desert Pea

Sawn Rock, a rock formation between Bingara and Narabri

Magnificent Wedge Tail Eagle we saw on the side of the roaed

It was almost like being on the Nullarbor the road was so flat and straight

Along the road between Tibooburra and Broken Hill off to the left was a huge salt lake.  We were apparently on the edge of the Lake Ayre Basin

Just across the road from the salt lake was a large body of water

Along one stretch of the highway we came across a runway, complete with air sock which can be seen halfway along the road to the right. 

Broken Hill is the hub of Western New South Wales with a population of about 18,400.  It is steeped in history, with silver and lead being found in close by Silverton in 1883.  In that same year a "Syndicate of seven" was formed when silver was discovered in Broken Hill and so BHP was formed and is now one of the worlds largest mining companies. The company began mining the massive ore body containing the worlds richest source of silver, lead and zinc.

Looking across the town of Broken HIll

Looking along the "Line of Load" which is what the mine site is called

 

Stuart on a big boy chair on the hill overlooking Broken Hill

We had a day out at Silverton (about 20 Klms from Broken Hill) and visited some of the old iconic places still standing;  like the Catholic Church,

The old pub which appears to let just about anything in for a coldie

 

The Mad Max Museum

 and lots of old iconic "Stuff"

 

 And lots of art and photo galleries.
Silverton was the scene of the only enemy attack on Australian soil in World War 1.  Just four months before the ANZACS fight the Turks in Gallipoli, a Silverton bound train was fired upon by 2 men in an icecream cart flying the Turkish flag.   Both men were killed in the fray.

"The Brushmen of the Bush"  was a group formed in 1973 of local artists who shared a love of painting and the Australian bush.  They consisted of Jack Absalom, Pro Hart, Hugh Shultz, Eric Minchin and a well known Mackay man John Pickup.  They exhibited their work for the next 25 years and during that time raised over a million dollars for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Besides them there are many other artists who call Broken Hill home and have set up Studios in the town.

This beautiful lady graced the entry to one of the many galleries in the area.  This was entitled "Born into this Landscape" Painted by Wendy Martin and is her artistic response to the situation which confronts women who have been diagnosed with cancer and live in isolated communities of outback Australia.

We visited a  few of them but one very memorable place was one that had a very unique painting.  This was painted by Peter Anderson.  It was a canvas which had to be bought in from Italy and was set in a circle 100 metres in circumference and 12 metres high.  As you walk into the centre of the circle on a raised platform there is about 3 metres of replicated bush land complete with trees, rocks, saltbush, red dirt, rocks, animals, snakes and birds from the base of the platform to the base of the painting.  The difficulty is seeing where three d bush ends and 2d painting begins.  We got the feeling that we were a bit like Alice and had dropped into the middle of Wonderland only this wonderland was the Australian bush.  Only once before have we seen something similar but not as spectacular and that was my n Also Ce Springs where a European by the name of Guth had painted a similar painting which was destroyed by fire in about the early eighties.
 

I realise this is a bit hard to imagine but this is the painting in its entirety.  Picture it as a round panorama with the bottom half as rocks, brush, animals trees etc and the top half as a painting.  I hope I have conveyed a little of the magnificence of this work. 

We also visited Pro Harts studio and Jack Absoloms studio and met Jack who are is now in his Eighties.  Neither artist had paintings for sale that reached within our budget but we still came away very happy with our purchase.

A visit to Broken Hill. Would not be complete without going to see the School of the Air and the Royal Flying Doctor.  At School tomorrow f the Air we sat in on a real lesson and watched the kids interact with their teacher  who was sitting in the room beside us via Internet and as it was the first lesson of the day a couple of the kids dos still had their jamas on.  The Flying Doctor service was started in 1928 and is synonymous with the man who started it Dr John Flynn.  It covers an area of over 80% of Australia and is the lifeline for the health and the difference between life and death for those families  who own and work on the remote stations of outback Australia. Transporting patients back to hospital of treating on the spot patients who have rolled their. While, been thrown from a horse or about to give birth.

Another must see apparently, are the 10 sculptures on a hill just out of town.  Each had a significant meaning but neither Stuart nor I understood what that meaning was.



 



This is the one that had all the cameras clicking



Sunsets in the west - beautiful

We did however stay til sunset to photograph the western sun setting as viewed through the eye of one of the sculptures.

After a week in Broken Hill we said goodby and headed back to Bourke via Cobar.

I think I mentioned goats earlier.  There were thousands of them both wild and farmed. From Broken Hill in the west to Bourke in the East and all places in between.

Christmas this year will be in Canberra and then we will start our long run from Mt Kosciusko in the east to all places west along the Mighty Murray River as west as possibly where it meets the sea. 

Lightening Ridge at Last

We are at last heading for lightening Ridge.  We have been trying to get there for about 4 years and something always crops up and stops us. 

We had 4 days at the property of Peter Black, the son of friends of ours Lindsay and Judith Black,  at Inverell.  He runs a bush camp where for a small fee people can stay and pan for sapphires.  The camp is very basic but has a toilet and hot shower and the resident permanent (a lovely old gent named Bob) will give prospectors tips on panning for the elusive gem or just knowledge on the surrounding tourist attractions.  Although facilities are basic people came in in droves and left with " We'll be back to find the big one ". Thank you Judith, Lindsay, their son Peter and wife Nicole for your hospitality.
We only travelled a few hours along the Gwyder Highway to Bingara.  Just out of town is a lovely free camp that is grassed to the edge of the river which is just a trickle but with plenty of fish (catfish I think) jumping and heaps of bird life.   On our last evening as we sat around the fire eating dinner and enjoying a glass of wine we spotted a Spoonbill Crane sitting in the overhanging dead tree. 
 

 

Another interesting site was all the small birds which would swoop down onto the surface of the water and pluck insects sitting on the surface of the river.  We counted about 21 vans here when we pulled in.
We ventured up onto a little lookout which was very steep and a nightmare to turn around on but a magnificent view of the town of Bingara and the huge valley in which it sits.
Just at the entrance to our camp spot is a marker.  One of many along the road marking the trail of Alan Cunningham as he explored the area making his way across the country.  On another of his explorations he found a crossing over the Mountains west of Brisbane which was later called Cunningham’s Gap.
Not far out of Narrabri we came across another rock formation called Sawn Rocks.  These reminded me of the rock formations on the west coast of Ireland at the Cliffs of Moher and also the west coast of Tasmania.

 

On our way through to Lightening Ridge we stopped for the night at Burren Junction. This was our first experience of Bore Baths. The water was quite hot and of course full of minerals.  The bore baths are over 2 million years old and the water is being forced to the surface by geothermal heat from over a kilometre below the earth’s surface.

At the turnoff to Lightening Ridge is the iron sculpture of "Stanley". Standing a magnificent 18 metres high.

 First day we went to the one place that we had heard was a must and also a winner of the NSW Hidden Jewel Award - The Chamber Of The Black Hand.  It is the Second most unmissable attraction in "outback Australia".  We travelled down 85 hand carved steps onto the mine floor where we were lucky enough to strike the owner as our guide.  He described how miners dug the gem out of the ground in the early days, and how it is done today.  He even chipped a small piece of Opal and gave it to one of the children on the tour.  After this he left us to our own devices to wander through the shafts where he said there wasn't a lot of the much sort after black opal and so he carved people and animals both real and fictitious into the walls and roof of his mine.

 This isn't peak season out here but by the look of the number of people on our tour and the one before and after ours his fortune wasn't in the mining of the beautiful gem but in the entrance fee of the tourist seeking knowledge of the mining of it.  His pocket was also lined with the profit from the sale of Opal Jewellery in all forms and the actual stone which the buyer can have set at a later date.  These range from the little bottle of chips for about $20 to rings and pendants and earrings from $90 for triplets which I learnt was a stone made up of a very thin sliver of opal glued between a black base and a resin top to upwards of $10,000 for a solid black opal stone set in many different ways.  I did get my long awaited Lightening Ridge Black Opal Ring but it wasn't in the top price bracket or anywhere near it - but I love it.    

 We did a few self-drive tours of the area marked out by the colour of the car door showing which tour you do.

I really couldn’t live out here with the heat, dust and flies but a lot of people do and love it.  It is the outback of Australia where you really see the characters that define our brown land.

A craft shop in the middle of this Opal field complete with a "husband chair" and someone for him to talk to while waiting for his wife inside.

While there we also did a trip out to 3 pubs in the middle of the scrub at another Black Opal Field.

In the middle of all the heat dust and flies was the welcome relief of a glass of Guinness.

We called into one of the little “Villages” to get a cold drink and we got the feeling that there wasn’t a large police presence out there.  Very few vehicles were registered and at least one driver wouldn’t have had a license as she looked about 13.

Road signs were large and easy to read also

It was like driving on a lunar landscape with mounds of rubbish dirt bought to the surface to find the elusive black opal

There seemed to be a few very big claims there by the look of the mullock heaps which are the dirt and rock taken out of the mine while searching for the seam of opal.

We also had a dip in the hot baths which are nearly across the road from our caravan park. 

Didn't stay in too long and took about 10 minutes to get in as it was about 43'. It must be extremely hot down in the bowels of the earth from where it originated.
We are either going to have to go east soon as Inland Australia is getting too hot for us.