Travel

Sydney travels - discover Broken Hill, a town like no other

Just a 2.5-hour flight from Sydney, the oddly-named Broken Hill is full of surprises

AUSTRALIA'S first heritage-listed city, Broken Hill, is a 139-year-old mining town with its own quirks and charms. It is located a good 2.5-hour flight from Sydney, and not many city folk visit it. 

Yet, for various reasons, film crews have picked this corner of the vast Australian outback for the backdrop of their passion projects, so the place has starred in, for example, the Mad Max films and The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.

Broken Hill's rugged red expanse. PHOTO: TOURISM AUSTRALIA

Perhaps, it's the road names that caught their fancy: Argent Street ("argent" means "silver" in French) cuts across the city, flanked by Bromide, Oxide, Chloride, Sulphide and Garnet streets. Running parallel to Argent are Cobalt, Beryl, Wolfram, Mica and Boron streets. 

More than half the streets here are named after metal, mineral and compounds. So the running joke is: "No kid ever grows up in Broken Hill and fails chemistry."

The city got its strange name in 1844: The early European explorer Charles Sturt had chanced upon an odd-looking hill in the area that looked divided, and noted it down in his diary as "broken hill". Then in 1883, a boundary rider Charles Rasp discovered silver ore on the hill, which, upon further digging, showed up to be only the tip of the world's largest single source of silver, lead and zinc. 

The Living Desert sandstone sculptures. PHOTO: HELMI YUSOF, BT

Soon, people flocked to the site from all over the world to make their fortunes, turning this far-flung corner of New South Wales into a bustling settlement. 

But look past its mining culture and one finds a city filled with small pleasures. For a place with just 16,500 people, Broken Hill has a disproportionately high number of art galleries - over 2 dozen, in fact - as if the miners always knew they needed art to cushion the harsh and dangerous realities of their work. 

The 1950s-inspired Bells Milk Bar. PHOTO: HELMI YUSOF, BT

Charming cafes such as the Silly Goat Café and Bells Milk Bar line the streets. The former has tasty smoothie bowls and an array of sweet treats; the latter is a milk-and-ice cream parlour inspired by the 50s, with its retro furnishings and bubblegum dispensers.

Meticulously-restored, 2-century-old town houses have been turned into boutique hotels, fine-dining restaurants and watering holes, such as the Astra Hotel and the Broken Hill Pub. Many of these 2- to 3-storey buildings have spacious upper-floor verandahs to retreat to with your cocktails and watch people go by.

One of the must-visit sites - if you don't snag a stay there - is the delightfully eccentric Palace Hotel, made even more famous by the cult 1994 comedy, The Adventures of Priscilla. Here, dizzyingly kitschy décor and wall-to-wall murals compete for attention with riotous karaoke sessions and drag bingo at night.

The Palace Hotel, with its kitschy décor and wall-to-wall murals. PHOTO: HELMI YUSOF, BT

But the most spectacular attractions of Broken Hill may be what lie outside the city limits in the vast outback. Nothing compares to the rugged red land that stretches on forever under the immense canopy of blue. There's the spectacular Living Desert Park and its alluring circle of sandstone sculptures.

There's Mutawintji National Park with its creeks and gorges, home to Aboriginal people for millennia. And there's the Mundi Mundi Plains which looks so much like the ends of the earth, it inspired filmmakers such as George Miller (Mad Max) and Ted Kotcheff (Wake In Fright) to shoot their blockbusters there. (The nearby Mad Max 2 Museum is worth the trip if you're a fan.) 

Outback Astronomy, a dark-sky location 10 minutes outside the city, provides you with the equipment to see every constellation and nebula. PHOTO: OUTBACK ASTRONOMY

And when the sun goes down, the perfect place to complete your Broken Hill experience is Outback Astronomy. It is an attraction just outside the city that provides you with the high-tech equipment and information to view all the stars dotting the sky. 

On a pitch-dark night, it's as if a hundred glitter bombs had exploded in the celestial expanse. You see every single constellation and nebula you've missed gazing at all these years living in a metropolis. 

The writer was a guest of Tourism Australia.

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