Australasia > Australia > New South Wales > Broken Hill > Articles > Of Art and War on Broken Hill

'Stinking rotten damn place!' You can tell Ron Schipanski's in love. After 37 years he's still enamoured of this tunnel 130 metres beneath Broken Hill. Ron's entitled to bad-mouth Delprat's Mine, having spent half his life down it, first as a miner and then as a shift boss. Once he retired from digging Ron went straight back underground as a tour guide. He has since rattled and railed at over 55,000 visitors on some 2000 underground tours.

We've descended with him in an old cage lift that grinds and lurches down a shaft sunk in 1885. Leading us through the drives and 'stopes' (drilling chambers) of the disused mine, Ron brings the early days of hand drilling, candle-lit ore faces and a merciless employer to life. Although Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd left town in 1939, it was long remembered for its harsh attitudes to its workers. Ron's a good showman. After two hours in the bowels of this industrial catacomb hearing his tales of dynamite, floods, cave-ins and heroism, as the old lift creaks back to the surface, I realise he has had us thinking about everything but claustrophobia and entombment.. He has tactfully refrained from mentioning how the 807 men who lost their lives since the first shaft was sunk at Broken Hill in 1884 were suffocated, mangled, blown up or crushed.

'The Hill' (population around 22,000, down from a high of 37,000) is 1165 km from Sydney, so far west that it might as well be in South Australia. In fact, its watches and clocks act as though that they are, set 30 minutes back from Eastern Australian to Adelaide time. As every history book tells us this great mineral lode was discovered - on a ridge described as 'a broken hill' - in 1883 by Charles Rasp, boundary rider and amateur geologist.

For a town with such an uncompromisingly horizontal landscape, the real action in Broken Hill is vertical: below my feet are three kilometres of zinc, galena, azurite, malachite, silver, lead and stolzite - to mention just a few of the 50 minerals found here - in one of the richest ore bodies on earth. The most striking visual feature of Broken Hill town remains its Line of Lode, the dramatic black escarpment that Rasp discovered. Having found a lump of silver ore on this rocky outcrop, Rasp pegged a claim that later gave birth to Australia's largest company, BHP. So far the eight-kilometre-long lode has yielded more than 150 million tonnes of ore and has given the town its subtitle, the Silver City.


'War in Broken Hill ... The Chase of the Murderers ... Riddled with Bullets ... Both Pay the Last Penalty ....' yelped the headlines of the day. What many history books miss is that the only armed hostilities to occur on Australian soil during World War I happened in a most unlikely place, Broken Hill. Today the tale sounds almost farcical. On New Year's Day 1915 a trainload of picnickers was attacked by a rifle-wielding ice-cream vendor. The assailant and his accomplice were variously described as 'Turks' or 'Afghans'.. In fact, ice-cream seller Gool Mahomed and butcher Mullah Abdullah were neither Turkish nor Afghan, but members of a camel teamsters community that had originally been brought to the Outback from northwestern British India, today's Pakistan. As Moslems they were sympathetic to Turkey, which was at war with Australia.

The assailants attacked an open train carrying 1200 picnickers from Broken Hill to nearby Silverton. In the ensuing battle four people - including the attackers - died and seven were wounded. That night a mob burned down the town's German Club, in lieu, I suppose, of an Afghan Club. Amid a quiet patch of scrub known as White Rocks on the outskirts of Broken Hill I find a metal replica of Gool Mahomed's ice-cream cart, along with a plaque that recalls the Chase of the Murderers and how they were Riddled with Bullets as they Both Paid the Last Penalty.


'The sky is the roof of our school' is the motto of that Australian institution, the School of the Air. Visitors are welcome to attend morning 'on air' classes broadcast from the school's Broken Hill studio. This can be either a studious or hilarious occasion, depending upon the subject. We sit in on a music class, in which teacher Geoff Brown leads a piano singalong of farm kids scattered over some 800,000 sq km of western New South Wales via VHF radio. 'Snakes in the Ceiling' is the morning's song. As 85 separate youthful solos trail in from across the mulga, the resulting cacophony causes the studio audience to break into chuckles. 'Please don't laugh, or they won't sing,' Geoff requests, explaining that we are on a two-way connection and that the kids can hear our laughter in Broken Hill as clearly as we can hear their singing.

Flying to The Hill, across a sandscape that's as red as a drunk's complexion, complete with spinifex stubble, we had looked down on the pockmarks of abandoned mines from the 1930s. Their names reflect the quixotic dreams inherent in mining: Rising Sun, Homeward Bound, Consolation, Rupee Tara and so on. 'It looks like the capital of Mamofa,' announces Rob Woodburn, a fellow travel writer. We're standing on a desert rise six kilometres north of town overlooking a sea of shining gibbers and crow calls that's known as The Living Desert. 'The capital of where?' I ask. 'Mamofa,' he explains. 'Old African term - Miles And Miles Of Fuck-All.'

The living and dying desert surrounds The Hill, sliced by roads that run from nowhere to forever, sometimes giving rise to visions. It is said that from the Great Fuck-All prophets come - and if not prophets, how about a mob of artists? Broken Hill has hosted more than its share of the latter, including the dozen sculptors who gathered in 1993 on a hilltop site now known as the Living Sculpture display - a great distance from their homes in places like Damascus, Mexico, Bathurst Island and ex-Soviet Georgia. They laboured here for months to carve their visions in sandstone boulders that now frame the desert silence.

The most recent local visionary was a bloke called 'Ando' - Peter Anderson - who in 2001 hitched his muse to a tractor on Eldee Station and with the help of some deft GPS-assisted drafting carved the world's largest artwork - a smiling stockman known as Eldee Man, whose massive features can be admired from outer space or an Airbus window seat at 10,000 metres. Art mutates in many ways around Broken Hill. In the 1970s painters like Pro Hart, Jack Absalom and Hugh Schulz - part of the collective known as the Brushmen of the Bush - portrayed the Outback in an unsentimental sort of Mulga Expressionism. (Examples of their best work can still be found in the bar of the Broken Hill Musicians Club on Crystal Street.) The second generation of these brushmen is well represented in the city's dozen commercial art galleries, although their blue suede heavens and 'lonesome-drover-tall-in-the-saddle' imagery has little of the directness of their predecessors' work.

Meanwhile the three-storey art gallery on Wyman Street owned by Pro Hart remains astonishing. Pro is perhaps the Ken Done of Broken Hill, but his display of some 275 works by other artists includes a roll-call of names like Picasso, Turner, Whiteley, Utrillo, Tucker, Roberts, Dali and Rembrandt... not to mention numerous Pro Harts. It looks a bit like a jumble sale at the Louvre curated by Steptoe and Son and shouldn't be missed.

'Hell, West and crooked,' is how a local woman describes the Barrier Ranges' desert that surrounds The Hill. Keep driving, though, and the scenery can suddenly become so flamboyant that it rivals the drag costumes in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which was filmed around here. Priscilla wasn't the first flick to come to town. One of the first was the early 1970s movie Wake in Fright, which portrayed a thinly disguised Broken Hill as 'The Gabba', a desert-moated Gomorrah of toxic ockers, chronic inebriation and endless two-up sessions. That era has passed, but the movies have remained.

The ghost mining town of Silverton (24 km northwest of Broken Hill) and its restored 1880s stone buildings have slipped as subliminal images into the minds of Australian audiences. Movies shot here, among them Mad Max II, Hostage, A Town Like Alice and Razorback, not to mention scores of advertisements (including Coke's famous 'sky surfing' ad) have drawn upon the sere desert beauty of Silverton's surrounds. The old pub here is full of movie memorabilia, but for me Silverton's real scene-stealers are two old Volkswagens. There's a Kombi van buried nose-first in the earth. 'Why?' I ask. 'No one knows,' comes the answer. And why a white Beetle decorated with Vegemite? 'Well, why not?'

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