First up this morning was the Broken Hill Visitor Centre where we bought the walking & driving guide to the historic buildings & sites around town.  We started out with the walk around town & were very impressed with the Court House, the Town Hall Façade & the Trade Union Hall.  There are a few very good old hotels made from stone that are still in great condition plus a number of other immaculate buildings.  We called in at the old Tramway Station that is now a railway museum & had a climb over the old steam trains & through the old carriages.  They do have a lot of interesting old stuff there, including an original early quad bike that would be ideal for our friend Sue.

We had an early lunch then headed out on the self-driving tour around town.  Our first stop was on top of the tailings heap that dominates the town, where a lookout has been built & a restaurant plus a memorial to the hundreds of miners who have died while working in the mines.  Tereza found a park bench that was just right for her plus an inquisitive emu in the restaurant.  The lookout does have a great view over the town.  Tom Keenan (a unionist) lookout was next & it offered great views looking towards the tailings heap & where we had just come from.

Our next stop on this tour was at the white quartz outcrop where two Afghans where killed after starting an insurrection on 1 January 1915 by attacking a picnic train & shooting dead four people & injuring a number of others. The 2 Muslim men were sympathisers of the Turks & weren’t happy about the Australian diggers fighting against them.  This was the only gun battle fought on Australian soil in the 1^st World War.  There isn’t really a lot of cover there if you had to shoot it out with a load of angry townsmen.  One thing I didn’t know, an angry mob burned down the German Club that night.

There sure are a lot of old corrugated iron houses in Broken Hill, interspersed with some old stone houses.  Some of them have great character, some of them don’t.  Most of the churches are impressive stone buildings.  The newer houses are typically on the outskirts of town & look similar to any other anywhere.

We called in to the Geo Centre, an interpretive display centre on the structure & formation of the primary mineral deposit of Broken Hill, plus a display of a lot of the different types of minerals that have been found in the mines.  A lot of these minerals are unique to Broken Hill due to the way the ore body has been formed over billions of years.  On display was the “Silver Tree” an amazing sculpture created in the late 1800s & once owned by Charles Rasp, the person that found the ore & registered the mining claim.  A 45Kg nugget of raw silver was also an impressive display in its own right.  Out the back of the Geo Centre an old miner’s cottage has been set up as a static display, complete with all of the outside necessities of life.

The Desert Park was next on the agenda & we walked firstly through the Desert Garden part, protected by an electric fence (to keep animals out) with a track around a hill covered in all different varieties of wildflowers.  One thing that did spoil this was all of the irrigation pipes running above ground to keep the plants alive during drought.  The plants in flower are beautiful & the view from the hill over the desert is superb.  We walked up the long hill to the Sculpture Garden & came across a few great displays of magnificent Sturt Desert Peas.  The sandstone sculptures are right on top of Sunset Hill, some are OK, some are not my cup of tea (but who are we to criticise art).  The view from the top of this hill is even better than the Desert Garden.   We had the place to ourselves until almost sunset when a lot of people come up to view the sunsets, hence the name I guess.  We liked the wildflower displays on this hill far better than in the Desert Garden.  The desert is so green & full of lovely flowers after all the rain.  Apparently they were to start shooting the next Mad Max movie around here but it is too green, so they have put it off until March.  On the way out we drove very slowly as it was getting late & we came across two separate kangaroos with joeys right on the road.  They all stopped & looked at us for a little while.

Refuelled & shopped at Woolies on the way back to the caravan park before Tereza cooked up a storm with Mexican style pancakes (no red).

Yesterday we lost ½ hour after crossing the border, now we are back to home time (Canberra), but in Broken Hill they are using South Australian time even though it’s in New South Wales.