A QUEST TO FIND THE REAL OUTBACK COVERS A VAST SWATHE OF NSW, FROM BROKEN HILL TO LAKE MUNGO AND MUTAWINTJI NATIONAL PARK, BLINK-AND-YOU’LL-MISSTHEM TOWNS AND ENCOUNTERS WITH THE COLOURFUL CHARACTERS WHO LIVE THERE AND IN BETWEEN.
High in the Border Ranges north of Broken Hill are 12 massive sandstone sculptures roughly arranged in two columns linking this iconic region with distant Bourke, where eye doctor Fred Hollows is buried. One work is dedicated to Hollows. When it was carved in 1993, its creator Lawrence Beck said: “Only Fred and I truly know what the sculpture really is.”
In a land laden with contradictions, Broken Hill, whose main thoroughfare, Argent Street, runs parallel to the line of the copper, lead and zinc lode that made Australia rich, is a standout example. The town with its tough industrial reputation actually has more art galleries than pubs. Like a pariah, it’s on Australian Central, not NSW, time. Broken Hill jeered and stoned the departing volunteers for WWI, then welcomed them home as Anzac heroes. Suburbia in the outback, it’s been called.
But the outback is enigmatic itself. What is this place? Where does it begin or end? Does it even exist? Might the legendary ophthalmologist, whose work in ending avoidable blindness is carried on around the world to this day largely through the Fred Hollows Foundation, have been able to explain that … as well as the meaning of the sculpture on the hill?
Once, I had asked the provocative Australian historian Manning Clark if there was one outstanding achievement of Europeans in Australia. He replied promptly, as though all Australians should know: “A cold beer west of the Darling.” The outback is as confusing, and as perversely profound, as that. So, camping gear checked, we stock up and set out to stir some red dust, flex some diesel muscle, to try to discover why it’s said that once you’ve crossed the Darling to the land of bloodshot, spilt-ink skies, you’ll never want to leave. There are so many stories out there, stories back to the Dreamtime, too many, too big for any canvas, even for Broken Hill’s 100-metre tourist attraction, The Big Picture.
The jewel in the area’s crown undoubtedly is Mungo National Park with its weathered Walls of China stretching into a hazy infinity. Its Mungo Man and Mungo Woman tracing human occupation back 50,000 years and evidence of the oldest recorded cremation anywhere in the world. We pitch the tent watched by curious kangaroos. We could have stayed in shearers’ quarters here or at Mungo Lodge on the outskirts of the park. The next day, we drive the 70-kilometre discovery circuit on a rocky, unsealed road.
A dreaded heatwave is forecasted over the next three days. The following morning, however, heavily sunscreened and protectively dressed, black clouds threaten ahead. We hear the thunder before the lightning strikes. Soon the rain pummels us. Headlights blazing at high noon, windscreen wipers whir into high-speed outback action. It was supposed to be 45 degrees. Instead it’s 20. Kangaroos shiver suicidally on the warm road.
We shelter from the storm in Broken Hill, dropping in to see an exhibition at the Regional Art Gallery and visit Pro Hart’s eccentric legacy. Things have changed in Broken Hill since the days of bitter industrial battles, two-up, grog shanties and larrikins such as Snakejuice. The recipe for the drink from which Charles Carl took this name was revealed by the Barrier Miner of 1892: Decant half a keg of rum, brandy or whisky and replace with water … add two sticks of tobacco, one bottle of Worcestershire sauce and one bottle of Perry Davis Painkiller to give colour and kick.
It’s the day after, and the weather forecasters were finally right. We take that fabled cold beer west of the Darling under the awning of the nearby Silverton Hotel, famous for Mad Max and the other movies made in what was once a ghost town but now is a thriving artists’ colony. The beer isn’t cold for long. Even our road atlas sheds its spine like a snakeskin at 46˚C. For the first time in my life, I find myself setting a car’s climate control to a comfortable, cool 36 degrees.
In that searing heat, I climb to the top of the hill known as Sundowner to the sculptures, which have become the destination for pious pilgrimages to its summit. “My work is an extension of the strata of the hill,” Lawrence Beck once said. “All matter is love, even hard Wilcannia sandstone.”
We soon head north-east from Broken Hill to Mutawintji National Park. Dominated by the Bynguano Ranges, whose vibrant red colour dramatically captures changes in the light, this outback park is home to the famous hand stencil art of local Aboriginal communities, as well as many other important cultural and historic sites.
Stop to gather information from Mutawintji Visitor Centre, pitch your tent at Homestead Creek campground and choose from easy walking tracks such as Thaaklatjika Mingkana track, or more challenging options including the Rockholes Loop track and the Mutawintji Gorge track. Book a cultural tour conducted by a traditional owner and visit the Mutawintji Historic Site, which boasts one of the best collections of Aboriginal art in New South Wales.
It’s back on dirt roads to get to the opal-mining town of White Cliffs, whose landscape — not unlike a World War 1 battlefield — can be hard to love. It once had a population of more than 5000. Now it’s about 200, more than half of them living in underground dug-outs. Sipping cold beer on the balcony of the dispersed town’s hotel, a local observes that there’s no better opal than what you’ll find round here. “Trouble is,” he adds, “government regulations make it so hard to do any mining, you’d be lucky to find more than four or five blokes working.”
Somehow we go onto the subject of the Darling. “Had a wife called that once,” he says.
The first excavations for what became the Underground Motel were dug into Poor Man’s Hill by a lone miner in the early 1900s. In the monkish white cell, the temperature was a lovely 22 degrees. And there it stays, regardless of dust storms and 50-degree days or below-freezing nights outside.
The lure of the Darling takes us back on a sealed road to Wilcannia, the notoriously barred, no-go town, which visitors usually drive straight through, not stopping even for petrol. Dilapidated colonial buildings vouch for its former grandeur as a river port. As coffee culture invades the nation the way cane toads did before, it’s worth noting that the latte from the Wilcannia Cafe 2836 was the best of the whole road trip. AC
