Twenty six kilometres north west of Broken Hill is the old silver mining town of Silverton. The environment is harsh, flat and unyielding, with enormous skies and uncrowded roads ..... a great dystopian film set in the making!
This is the tiny little township of Silverton today ........ wind farms working hard in the distance on this cold and windy day in the outback.
Silverton found a new focus in the early 80s, as the filming of the extraordinary Mad Max 2 film took over the tiny town and its surrounding roads and desert landforms. A number of Mad Max tragics have created this quirky little museum (for other tragics) in Silverton with artifacts and props from the film and all the stories behind the making of the film.
The Broken Hill and Silverton communities got right behind the film and provided great energy enthusiasm and expertise in getting the surreal Mad Max machinery and stunt scenes to be as ground breaking as they were. The dusty decaying evidence of all that is here in the museum.
Someone like me might think this is a yard full of junk but a Mad Max tragic would be transported with joy to see this stuff!
It's true that Silverton overall looks a bit desperate these days but this former Catholic Church (built in 1886) was looking quite gracious today with its new owners in residence.
We drove out to Mundi Mundi Lookout where key scenes in Mad Max 2 were shot (before the days of wind farms)............
.......... and met the town's friendly donkeys on the drive back.
Other parts of Silverton look like a film set at the ready .... including this apparently unused building kept in perfect repair.
We wandered through the Silverton cemetery with its many sad stories of tough times in the mining days (mine accidents, typhoid, death in childbirth etc etc etc).
And we crossed the "creek" getting back into town from the cemetery. It looked like water would have flowed through here quite recently. It was such a different landscape to the rest of town with its beautiful old river red gums, clay soils and leaf litter in evidence.
We were not enjoying the freezing winds by now so thought the timing was right to head back to Broken Hill for our token visit to the historic Bell's Milk Bar and Museum on the south side of town. Apparently it is the oldest continuously operating milk bar in Australia (circa 1956) still with most of its original decor.
As the weather worsened and rain started falling we did our last tourist duty in Broken Hill by visiting the Miners Memorial high up on the enormous Line of Lode that dominates the city.
There are over 800+ names of miners who lost their lives working on the mines over the last 130 years or so... such dangerous work.
The Memorial Lookout gave us a great view over the city, although we couldn't bear the wind and rain for long. The mullock heap over the line of lode is not pretty... but this is what the city is about - or maybe its part of what the city is about!
We'll leave this unique place tomorrow - very happy to have seen it and experienced its beauty, its harshness and its contribution to making our country what it is!
No comments:
Post a Comment