Bob:

After another "fry up" for breakfast in our hotel room, we wandered over to the Visitor's Center and spent some time browsing for appropriate gifts for ourselves and others. That turned out to be, of course, one of the most expensive half hours of our entire journey! Still, I found the game of "2-Up" that Neville had described and purchased copies to see what that was all about, plus a book of Outback poetry that I liked. We also found a beautiful desert sand rose and some place mats with Australian recipes for Monika and Sarah.

The walking tour at 10:00 a.m. started from the Visitor's Center and lasted about two hours. We circled the downtown area and our guide explained the significance of the local buildings, exhibits, monuments, galleries, and so forth. He was fascinating and a very authentic character, but Monika and I both had trouble understanding him, especially if he started talking fast and low in a strong Australian accent. The Australian accent on English is rather different than the American accent on English, so we had some trouble discerning certain vowels and, especially when he talked quickly, figuring out where one word ended and the next one began. He gave major pronouncements in a slow and distinct voice and we understood almost all of those, but when he told jokes or responded conversationally to audience questions we only understood about 1/3 of his comments.

Monika:

Bob:

One high point of our tour was the Union Hall, a beautiful building from the turn of the 20th century. The interior featured stained glass panels and many old union banners, signs, and so forth. Our guide discussed the really appalling working conditions in the mines from their opening around 1884 up through the institution of modern working conditions and safety precautions almost a century later. I had never realized, for example, that rats in a mine could serve the same basic function as canaries although in a slightly different manner: when the rats left the shafts the miners knew the mine was unsafe and would also quit working.

The fight of management against the unions appears to have been every bit as vicious and brutal as in the U.S. industry like the Pullman Railroad strikes or the steel mill union conflicts. In fact in 1909 there was a lockout on the part of management that lasted 18 months and caused untold hardship for the union rank and file. They were kept alive in part by trainloads of potatoes and onions sent in by outsiders, and what a monotonous diet that must have been! In one case downstairs they had the confiscated union ID buttons required of every worker. If I understood correctly, the badges were confiscated from members showing "anti-union" sentiment so that they effectively could not work in the mines any more. Attached to the back of the hall was a huge meeting room. The original paint had been uncovered in a recent renovation and it looked very grand indeed.

Monika:

Bob:

After our walk we returned to our hotel room for a quick lunch and then walked around the very new but very seldom used (1 train a week!) railroad station to get to the actual mining area. Our goal was a memorial to miners who had died due to working in the mines since their inception. The memorial is perched on top of a huge pile of old mine tailings that looms above the town of Broken Hill.

Monika:

Bob:

The walk up was moderately strenuous but rather short, so we had plenty of time to see the memorial and relax in the nearby restaurant while looking over the town below. The memorial was very moving. The names of each deceased miner were etched on glass panels along an interior wall, and visitors had placed memorial roses in the niches adjacent to many of the names. I was relieved to see that far fewer folks had died recently than from 1884 to 1984, so clearly mine safety had really improved. In fact, no one had died in the mines after 2003 and I sincerely hoped that trend would continue.

Monika:

Bob:

On the way back down was one more memorial, this one to two miners who had been buried in a cave-in in 1902. The monument consisted of two simple ore carts, one with a description of the accident that had caused the death of the two miners and the other one inscribed with a short poem. Apparently, the management had decided after the accident to simply fill in the shaft rather than excavate and retrieve the bodies, which sounded pretty callous to me. The nicely written poem on the other ore cart described what the last moments of those miners might have been like and expressed the fervent hope that some day their remains would be excavated and brought back above ground. I had to wonder if callous acts on the part of management like that had played a role in the pivotal 1909 strikes a few years later.

Unfortunately, the railroad and immigrant museum that I also wanted to visit in town closed for the day at 3:00 p.m., so after we hiked back down the hill we no longer had time for that. It was just as well as we had to shop for our dinner, return to our room for the meal, and then pack up for leaving in the middle of the night, or to be more accurate, extremely early in the morning. We had to catch the 3:45 a.m. bus back to Dubbo so that we could catch the Sunday bus and train down to Melbourne, the next big stop on our odyssey.

Monika: