Broken Hill Broke Time

Tom loves deserts. He has loved them ever since living in Saudi Arabia many years ago, when he crossed the ‘empty quarter’ with some friends. He loves the heat, the muted colors, the dryness, the sparse flora, the clear air and starry nights.

I guess his love of these arid places is not surprising since there is nothing even remotely resembling a desert in Britain. So when we decided to go to Australia, he insisted on working a trip to the outback into our itinerary. I reminded him that we’d be there in summer, when the heat might be unbearable, eliminating any thought of going to the interior.

I told him I thought we could probably manage a trip to Broken Hill and then across northeast NSW to give him at least a taste of the landscape ‘back of Bourke.’  

He was keen on the idea as he absolutely adores the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, partly filmed in Broken Hill, so on the itinerary it went. I only hoped that it would satisfy his desire to experience the ’real outback’.

We had originally planned to break our journey at Mildura and spend only one night in Broken Hill, but changed our plans when the weather promised to be a bit cooler than normal and drove all the way from Bendigo to Broken Hill in one day. It was about an 8 hour trip, during which we passed through some farming country dotted with painted silos, which are a thing all over Australia apparently.

They are actually quite cool, and once you’ve seen a couple, the sight of an unpainted silo seems like a lost opportunity.

We stopped in the town of Sea Lake to get some coffee and enjoyed the architecture and the mural we saw on the main street.

Just before Mildura, we took a detour to the Red Cliffs Lookout over the Murray River.

We passed through Mildura (not unhappy that we’d decided not to stay), and made a short stop a little further along in Wentworth, at the confluence of the Darling and Murray rivers, which were flowing quite high after all the recent rains in Australia.

After Wentworth, the scenery became more spare and treeless, and it was on this stretch that we spotted our very first emus in the wild—a novelty that would soon wear off over the next few days.

Approaching Broken Hill at dusk, it was easy to see it was an active mining town, with a massive slag heap and huge mine works dominating the landscape but the main street glowed in the early eveing sun.

We’d made a reservation at a motor lodge near the center of town, but when we arrived there it looked a pretty desperate and run-down place and there was no one at reception and no instructions on how to get into our room. We called the numbers posted on the office door but got no answer.

After a couple of other guests tried to reassure us that the receptionist would return soon, we waited for about half an hour and then called Booking.com to explain the situation. They tried calling the property to no avail and informed us that if they had not heard anything in the next 30 minutes, they would cancel this reservation, refund our money and help us find an alternate accommodation.

As we were none too keen to stay at the original place, we sweated it out for the next half hour, but luck was with us and the reception never responded so we were able to find a much nicer, cleaner and altogether more suitable motor inn down the road. It had a full kitchen and was clean and roomy, so it all worked out for us in the end, and Booking.com were great in helping us resolve the issue.

We spent our one full day in Broken Hill by setting out early for Silverton, the small mining town, almost a ghost town, where Mad Max was filmed.

There is not much there, but it is picturesque, in a dusty, western kind of way.

We were especially taken by the dry creek beds at the edge of the town, which had recently had flash floods and now glistened with bright red mud and some still standing pools of water.

We wandered through the old cemetery, with headstones dotted here and there among the desert scrub, like something out of an old Western film.

Then we drove out to a lookout point  beyond Silverton to take in the vast emptiness that is the outback

..and circled back into Broken Hill, to walk the main street, admire the nineteenth century buildings and read the historic markers that dot the center of town.

Late in the afternoon, we set off on a 3 kilometre circular walk in the Sundown Hills (part of the Living Desert State Park) that was absolutely magical in the sunset and twilight.

We saw only two other people (and a couple of kangaroos/walleroos) and spent plenty of time enjoying the desert dryness and the array of earth-toned colors around us.

The only thing that marred our perfect enjoyment of the evening was the swarms of ever-present flies. We spent the entire hike doing the distinctive ‘Australian Wave’ as we tried to keep them from landing on our eyes and faces.

We barely made it back to the car before nightfall, but were happy to have had the experience of a sundown hike in the Sundown Hills.

One of the reasons we nearly left ourselves too little time to complete the hike before nightfall was our confusion over the time while we were in Broken Hill. The town inhabits a weird half-hour time zone between two ‘regular’ time zones, and none of the many timepieces we had around us seemed to agree on what time it was.

There were two clocks in the car, each with a different time, and we had between us two smart watches and three smart phones, none of which were in sync with one another. It seemed that we were always a half hour off. It was so odd and a little disorienting not knowing what the real time was.

But in a way, time didn’t make that much difference, as the whole place had a kind of timelessness about it. So, while Broken Hill brought us a broken reservation and broken time it definitely was not a place of broken dreams, as it more than fulfilled Tom’s outback longings and surprised us both with its charm and scenery.