The Living Desert

An extra day in Broken Hill, so we spent it looking at the town and its history from above. First stop was the Living Desert State Park, about nine kilometres north of town: a 2,400 hectare reserve with a flora and fauna sanctuary at its heart and a hill full of sandstone sculptures on its skyline.

The Living Desert State Park sign at the picnic area The Living Desert State Park. Picnic area, sanctuary, sculptures.

The trailhead sign for the walk to Sculpture Hill Twenty minutes to the top.

The walk up to Sculpture Hill is a signed 1.2 kilometre trail from the picnic area, through the sanctuary. The sanctuary is looking unusually healthy after the rain: green by Broken Hill standards, wildflowers in the rocks, and the locals out sunning themselves.

Why The Desert Needed Saving

The reserve is not just scenery. Broken Hill was founded in 1883, and between them the mine and the town stripped the country bare: timber went into the furnaces and boilers and onto household fires, cut for roughly fifty kilometres in every direction, and overgrazing did the rest. By the early 1900s the town was being buried. Dust storms rolled in off the denuded plains, sand drifts metres high piled up against houses, and people were shovelling their driveways clear or abandoning their homes altogether.

The fix came from Albert Morris, a mine assayer and self-taught botanist who had been arguing for regeneration reserves since the early 1920s. In 1936 the Zinc Corporation gave him his chance with a fenced trial plot, and the native vegetation came back on its own before the trees could even be planted. The mining companies and the council took up the idea and fenced a green belt around the city. Within two years the reduction in dust was obvious, and the project is now counted among the earliest examples of ecological restoration in the world. His wife Margaret ran the nursery and collected the seed, thousands of plants' worth.

The Living Desert Reserve, established in 1992, carries that work on. The sculptures stand on ground that was blowing away a century ago.

Silvery wildflowers with pink and white pom-pom blooms growing between rocks Mulla mulla, doing its thing.

A red Sturt's Desert Pea flower at ground level in red sand A Sturt's Desert Pea.

A bearded dragon on a rock A local, unbothered.

The sculptures on the hilltop date from a single event: an international sculpture symposium that ran from 2 April to 23 May 1993, organised by artist Lawrence Beck on Sundown Hill, in the centre of the reserve. Twelve artists came from around the world, from Syria, Georgia and Mexico as well as Australia, and each carved a large sandstone work, with the stone trucked in from Wilcannia. The results still stand on the skyline, and each has a story: Broken Hill artist Badger Bates carved Nhatji, the Rainbow Serpent, and Beck's own contribution is titled A present for Fred Hollows in the Afterlife. Between the marker stone and some cross-checking against photos of the original works, nine of the twelve are identified in the captions below.

An engraved standing stone marking the Broken Hill Sculpture Symposium The symposium marker, with the dates and the artists.

A sandstone sculpture of a horse's head on stacked boulders Horse, by Jumber Jikiya of Georgia. Hitching ring included.

A whale-shaped sandstone boulder balanced on a rocky rise Officially this one is Habitat, by Ahmad Al Ahmad of Damascus. To us, a whale.

Close-up of a carved sandstone face with a circular hole framing the sky Bajo el sol Jaguar (Under the Jaguar Sun), by Antonio Nava Tirado of Mexico City. The sky is part of the composition.

A carved sandstone slab with a spiral and creature motifs Tiwi Totems, by Gordon Pupangamirri of Bathurst Island.

A tall totemic hand-chiselled sandstone sculpture Angels of the Sun and the Moon, by Valerian Jikiya of Georgia.

A tall carved sculpture with a face medallion at its base Moon Goddess, by Conrad Clark of Katoomba. The face at the base watches the walk.

A tall flame-shaped standing stone on a rocky outcrop Thomasina: Jillarruwi, the Ibis, by Thomas Munkanome of Bathurst Island. The works blend into the rock they came from.

Rust-stained rocks and silver shrubs, plains stretching to the horizon The Barrier country from Sculpture Hill.

A small weathered timber church with a teal door Not everything out here is a pub or a mine. This one caught my eye, it's not everyday you see a church made from tin.

Gothic-arched windows along the side of a corrugated iron church Gothic arches in corrugated iron.

Lunch at The Broken Hill Pub

Lunch was at The Broken Hill Pub, on the corner of Argent and Oxide Streets in the middle of town. It trades on its initials these days: The BHP, which is no accident in the town where the real BHP was born. The pub has been on that corner since 1886, which makes it the longest-running pub in Broken Hill. Over the years it has been The Broken Hill Hotel, The West Darling Hotel and The Freemasons Hotel, before coming back around to the straightforward name it wears now.

Inside the sports bar at The Broken Hill Pub Inside The BHP. Good lunch.

The Line of Lode

Broken Hill exists because of the Line of Lode: the line of silver, lead and zinc ore that runs straight through the middle of town. The waste from more than a century of mining it has been piled into a mullock dump running along the same line, and the top of that dump is now the best vantage point in the city, shared by a lookout and the miners memorial.

Rusted steel walls of the miners memorial from the access ramp The memorial from the ramp up.

The memorial opened in 2001: high walls of rust-red weathering steel, with freestanding glass panels inside etched with the name of every miner known to have died in Broken Hill's mines. More than 800 names, each with the year they died, their age, and how it happened. The records start in the 1880s and the early panels are crowded: falls of ground, rockfalls, explosions, men in their twenties and thirties. What stays with you is how quickly the names thin out as you walk through the decades, until the last thirty years hold only a handful. It reads like a graph of what improved safety actually means, written in the lives of the men who did not get the benefit of it.

Inside the miners memorial, dark steel slabs leaning toward each other Inside the memorial.

Panoramic view over Broken Hill from the Line of Lode lookout Broken Hill from the top of the lode, with a freight train working through.

The hilltop still wears its working past. A set of shaft cages stands on the skyline, the lifts that once took the men down into the stopes below.

Three rusted mine shaft cages on the hilltop Shaft cages, retired.

A small electric mine locomotive with crew cars A little yellow mine loco with its crew cars.

And below the lookout, the remains of the old leases are still standing, more or less.

A derelict corrugated iron mine building with a small headframe on its roof The old BHP mine, on the way up to the visitors centre.

Ruins of an old mine site with a headframe behind The surface remains of an old lease, being slowly taken back.

The whole crew sitting on a giant red bench at the lookout The whole crew on the Big Bench.

The Big Picture

We finished the day at the Silver City Mint and Art Centre, which does two things under one roof: it is a working chocolate factory, and it houses The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is exactly that. Local artist Peter "Ando" Anderson spent two years painting a single acrylic canvas that runs 100 metres around the room and stands 12 metres high at its tallest point. It is the world's largest acrylic painting on canvas by a single artist, and it depicts the outback around Broken Hill: lightning strikes, dust storms, mountain ranges and a saltbush plain, wrapped around you in a full circle. A sculpted desert floor runs out from the base of the canvas, so the real stones and spinifex in the foreground dissolve into the painted distance. Ando apparently kept count as he went: by one tally the finished work contains some 20,000 trees, 1,500 hills and 3,000 clouds.

The Big Picture panorama with sculpted desert foreground The Big Picture, from the viewing platform. The desert floor in front is real; the horizon is paint.

A desert diorama with red sand, spinifex, termite mounds and an emu in front of the painted horizon The sculpted foreground up close: spinifex, termite mounds and a few of the locals.

The desert floor stretching toward a painted backdrop of purple ranges, with a lone leaning tree Real stones and spinifex up front, purple ranges at the back.

A wallaby perched on a rock among spinifex and termite mounds, with cockatoos nearby Some of the wildlife is stuffed; the rest is painted.

Chocolates were acquired. Tomorrow we start heading home: Mungo.