Wanderung 20

Australian Walkabout

May - June 2009

Thursday, May 28th, 2009, Broken Hill

Bob:

Although it was a bit hard to pry ourselves out of bed in time for the 8:00 a.m. breakfast provided by our motel, it was worth it. The breakfast, delivered directly to our door, was a typical British "fry-up" of fried tomatoes, sausage, and English bacon (American: "back bacon" or more like a pork loin) plus baked beans and a poached egg on toast. Unlike U.S. bacon, the English bacon had easily separatable meat and fat, so by careful trimming I could keep the fat content to a minimum. That gave us enough energy to spend the morning walking up and down the main streets of the central business district of Broken Hill.

We arrived at the information centre shortly before 10:00 and checked in with Broken Hill Sightseeing Company that had an office there. Unfortunately we had missed the start of the all-day tour that included Silverton, a semi-ghost town some distance from Broken Hill and a tour of the Daydream Mine. Even more unfortunately, the tours were only offered on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, so there was no way we could take the full-day tour. We settled on the half-day tour leaving that afternoon and set off for a basic walk around the city.

The population of Broken Hill is around 22,000, but the town is very spread out and in fact has two sections: a large main town and the smaller section called South Broken Hill. Streets are basically in a classic grid pattern, but the grid in Broken Hill is cocked at about a 45 degree angle off of true North, and even the street grid for the main town and the southern section are not aligned together. Having two different cockeyed street grids in the same town reminded me very much of Burlington, Wisconsin, and when trying to navigate around town it gave me exactly the same kind of headache!

Monika:

We started our first day in Broken Hill by having breakfast delivered to our door, and a proper breakfast it was. We had opted for the full cooked version, which included orange juice, a poached egg on toast, English bacon (the type where you could easily cut off the fat) a sausage, baked beans and, of course, a tomato. A hot water heater and instant coffee as well as milk were in the room. Thus satisfied, we decided we could face the day. We first went over to the Tourist Information center to (a) find out where we would have to catch the bus back to Dubbo and (b) to figure out what to do in Broken Hill. We found out there was a half day sightseeing tour which included a visit to the base for the flying doctors, a trip up to the sculpture garden, and a couple of art galleries. This sounded fine, so we purchased the tickets for the afternoon. We also were told that a 2 hour walking tour of the city would be available the next morning. Thus our days were partially planned.

We had several hours before the bus tour, wo we decided to walk the city by ourselves. This is not too difficult, since the city is layed out in a grid. However, to Bob's horror, the grid was not aligned with the cardinal compass points but rather with respect to the first mine that towers above the city. Indeed any city map you see will have a nice grid of the city, however, up is northwest rather than north. This made navigation easy for me, since I am not good with points of the compass but rather with streets. All streets were named after a ores or minerals: there was Bromide, Kaolin, Berle, etc. Our hotel was on Argent, the major street through the old section of the city.

Bob:

Still, the Nuvi 270 GPS with its Australia streets chip worked fine, and together with the nice map from the Visitor Information Centre we could wander around without any fear of getting lost. Our hotel, the Daydream Hotel, was just about a block from the Visitor Information Centre and on the edge of the main downtown section. Many of the streets in Broken Hill are named for minerals, no doubt due to the town's mining heritage, and our hotel was on the corner of Kaolin and Argent streets. We walked up Argent, one of the two major streets in the downtown area, and saw some very pretty old hotels, a Court House, and the Police station.

We passed several art galleries and very nice outdoor sculptures done by Aboriginal artists. A small forest of brightly decorated posts was right beside an intricately carved canoe with a face at either end. The face on one prow was European and the face on the other prow was Aboriginal. The arms of each figure trailed back along the canoe to where the hands clasped. It was a marvelously well executed piece, but for me the message could equally well have been either peacable cooperation of the two disparate cultures or the unending struggle and contention between very different ways of life.

Monika:

The downtown area seemed to be vibrant and alive with many stores, food places, and art galleries. It was about a 5 block long stretch with our motel at one end. Beyond it was ordinary living, with a foodstore and several dimestores. There were also several second hand stores, like St. Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army stores in the U.S. We bought rolls, meat, and cheese at the IGA Foodliner and headed back to the motel for lunch. We decided after two days of sausage rolls and meat pies it was time to get back to some reasonably low fat living (breakfast dosn't count). We found out that alcoholic beverages could only be purchased in "Bottle Stores" and when we passed one on our way back to the motel, I stopped and found for $10 a 4 liter box of wine. This was cheaper than any smaller bottles and I figured, we would think of something clever come packing time. (By the way, it was a remarkably good white wine). Thus laden we went back to the motel for lunch during which I tried to make some inroads into the wine.


 


 

Bob:

Wandering back on Blende street past more restaurants and hotels plus the library and the trades hall (union center, I presume), we returned to our hotel room for lunch and a short rest before it was time for our afternoon tour. Our driver had worked in the mines underneath Broken Hill and told us fascinating details of the huge underground excavations that are well over a kilometer deep in some places as he drove us around the city.

Our first stop was the Royal Flying Doctor Service out at the Broken Hill airport, where we saw a movie and toured the facility. The movie was a vivid slice-of-life documentary on the flying medical service upon which the folks at remote outback stations depend for their entire medical care. Very vivid vignettes that had apparently been filmed live were quite dramatic, like a rodeo bronc rider who had been kicked as he was bucked off the horse and had his arm broken.

We also got to see the plane in the hangar ready for the next emergency call, a Beech Twin-Air with two turboprop engines. It could haul up to two stretchers plus doctor, nurse, and pilot and was really a miniature but fully equipped Intesive Care Unit. We also saw the dispatch center that coordinated the activities and communicated directly with the affected patients via radio in the old days and more recently by satellite phone.

I enjoyed the ingenuity shown by several of the staff over the years. One of the first flying nurses had developed a body chart with numbered sections so that patients could unambiguously discuss where the problem was with the dispatcher. A bicycle-powered radio had also been developed to avoid reliance on storage batteries for communicating from the very remote settlements back to the dispatcher. For treatment, a box of carefully numbered medicine packets was provided for less severe ailments that didn't require transportation to a hospital. Each packet was to be taken only at the doctor's recommendation, but one story recounted how the doctor told a settler to take the required dose of Number 9 pills. A day later the doctor called back to check and the settler was doing better, but he mentioned that since his medicine chest had been out of Number 9 pills, he had simply taken a Number 7 plus a Number 2! No system is fool-proof, I guess. We found a stuffed koala bear pilot and kangaroo pilot on our way out, and as we are doting grandparents we bought those to take along for our granddaughters.

Monika:

We got back to the information center in time for our afternoon tour. There were 5 of us in a small tour bus and we had a good time. The only fly in the ointment was, that we were required to pay entrance fees to the Royal Flying Doctors and one of the Art Galleries. I was annoyed enough, not to give the driver a tip. However, he was actually very good in telling us the history of the town, the mines, and the surrounding area. Our first stop was at the Royal Flying Doctor's hangar, where we saw and introductory film, their communications room, the hangar with one of their airplanes, and a small museum. The flying doctors really provided an enormous service to the vast outback area. Their primary mission is flying out to any emergency. They also have clinics in different areas and one of them is always on call to give help over the telephone. For this purpose, each station in the outback has a medicine chest. Besides the usual first aid stuff, it contains a picture of the human body with all parts numbered, so you can tell the doctor where you are hurting by giving the number. It also contains several different medications, again all numbered, so the doctor can say "take a pill from bottle number 10" or something like this, Of course, there is the Outback legend of the guy at a remote station who was told to take a number 9, and when they called the next day said, he was indeed feeling better, but he had no number 9 left so he took a number 7 and a number 2.

The flying doctors had of course a gift ship and a little kangaroo and a koala doctor/pilot wanted to come back home with us for the grandchildren.

Bob:

We also toured the art galleries of Jack Absolom, who paints very fine outback-themed art in an impressionistic manner, and Kevin "Pro" Hart. Jack Absolom was there when we visited, and we were happy to get a small reprint of one of his works that he was willing to sign for us. I thought Jack Absolom did a wonderful job in capturing the different shadings of light that occur in the clear, dry, air of the Outback. That quality probably explains why Broken Hill, very much like Taos, New Mexico, in the U.S., has become in part a haven for artists.

Unfortunately "Pro" Hart had passed away, but we still could tour his original house and atelier and see a very thorough sampling of his work from the late 1970s up through 2003 or so. In contrast to Jack Absolom, who painted Outback themes mostly in one style, Pro Hart painted a wide variety of themes using painting styles that varied from fairly classical or realistic to cubist to completely abstract modern art. Predictably, I liked his classical work a bit better, in particular a large mural on two sides of one room depicting scenes from the early settlement of Australia. The cubist art I found somewhat less interesting, and the abstract art produced by a big air cannon shooting big paintballs onto a blank canvas really just did not interest me that much at all.

Monika:

From the airport we visited two art galleries of the most famous artists in this area, Jack Absolom and Pro Hart. Jack Absolom paints scenes from the outback, and Bob and I liked one of the scenes so we bought a print and since Mr. Absolom was standing right there, he signed it. Pro Hart is the even better known artist. Some of his sculptures are in the park across from the information center. His gallery showed the changes in his painting from rather stylized and realistic early on, to abstract in his later years. He did worry about the plight of the miners and there were several paintings addressing this.

Bob:

We ended up our tour at the Sculpture Symposium, a set of 9 or 10 pieces of beautiful sandstone rock that were located on a hill a couple miles out of town. Each piece had been carved by a different international sculptor, but all were designed or inspired by aboriginal themes. That was a great sculpture garden, and seeing the sandstone literally glow orange in the setting sun was just wonderful. If you do get to Broken Hill, you should try to see the Sculpture Symposium in the early morning just after sunrise or just before sunset because the sculptures and the surrounding Outback landscape have fantastic hues at those times.

Our driver kindly dropped each of us off at our hotels, which was very considerate of him, but we didn't have enough groceries for dinner so we had to walk back into town for that anyway. There are plenty of restaurants, pubs, and even carry-outs in Broken Hill, but finding a low-fat option was not so easy so we finally settled on Subway sandwich shop. Taking that back to the hotel we had a nice dinner and spent the evening writing like mad on our journals before turning in for the night.

Monika:

Our final stop was the Sculpture Symposium. Slabs of hard sandstone had been brought to the top of a ridge in the outback that overlooked Broken Hill. Then several sculptors from different nations set to work to create their vision of aboriginal thought and culture. The whole thing gave me an eerie feeling. Try to see it in the late afternoon or early morning with sun shining when the lighting is best. Sunsets are supposed to be fabulous, but this is also well known, and therefore the place is crowded when there seems to be a gorgeous sunset. We were there a couple of hours before sunset and when the sun peaked out from the clouds we got some beautiful pictures. What intrigued me more than the sculptures was the view of the outback that you had from the top of this little rise. You really could see forever, and the air was clear and cold. I wish I could have gotten a picture of what it really looked like, rather than the pale imitation my camera took. I also wish I had gotten a picture of the three Emus that were staring at us as we were driving up the hil or the kangaroo sitting on the roadside that was trying to act invisible. But these moments remain only in my mind...maybe I have to take up painting....


 

Copyright 2009 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Prolog Map of Australian Walkabout Epilog

May 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
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3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
June 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30

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