Broken Hill - 19 July 2014

We went to White's Mine first up this morning. Ted White used to be a miner and worked in the mines for 30 years. His interest was making pictures using crushed minerals. So when he finished in the mines, he set up a gallery next to his house to display his pictures. he also has a lot of old mine equipment and he displays those as well. When you enter, you watch a short film which goes through the history of the mines in Broken Hill, then you are taken on a tour by either Ted or Betty, his wife, who explains the gallery/museum. One thing Betty said was about the timber supports used in the mines. The main supports are really thick and come in 6 or 8 foot lengths and come from the States. But before they started doing their supports that way, they used the timber from the countryside. Once they backfill the part of the mine they have finished with, the timber gets left behind and is covered in rock. As there is no air and also no moisture, the timber doesn't rot and he had some timber that had been recovered and it looked as good as new. Ted had his gallery set up like the inside of a mine and it was very cleverly done. You actually felt like you were walking through a mine.

As to his artworks, he draws the picture first and glues cord on the lines. This cord separates the different colours. He crushes the rocks he uses. It depends on what colour he wants as to what rocks he uses. He doesn't colour the dust at all - it is the natural colour of the rock. He works on one colour at a time, but might work on 4 pictures at once.

He has also done pictures of the old buildings in town. They started knocking some of them down, which is what prompted him to start in earnest on his artwork. Thank heavens they stopped pulling the buildings down as there are some lovely buildings here.

Betty was a doll and bear maker and in another part of the Gallery, she had her dolls and bears on display. I'm not into dolls but she was obviously good at it. I did like her bears though.

From there we went to White's Reserve, where there is a memorial to the victims killed by the Turkish sympathiser during World War I. There were 1,200 people on the picnic so it was a wonder more weren't killed. As we left White's Reserve, we went past a house that had a cannon in the front yard. He wasn't taking any chances!

A lot of regeneration has been done on the land surrounding Broken Hill. They used to have tremendous dust storms due to the trees being cut down for the mines. This doesn't happen as often now, although there was a bad one in 2009.

We came back to the van for lunch and started talking to a couple of ladies in the van behind us. It was the same van as ours. Jenny and Sandra are doing a big trip up through the centre and across to Broome, down the west coast and across the Nullarbor. Jenny has a terminal illness so Sandra said 'Right. Let's go.' I think Sandra is either divorced or widowed and said to her kids 'We might be home by Christmas'. A very nice thing for Sandra to do.

I made a cake after lunch and then we went to Pro Hart's Gallery. I don't like his abstract paintings but the mining scenes I do. His cars are parked at the Gallery and I love the one that is all painted. John Lennon had one similar which we saw in Victoria on Vancouver Island, but Pro Hart had obviously painted his own.

I had my photo taken in front of his long photo, the only place I could take a photo. It was a great painting and covered from the beginning of settlement to Broken Hill mining history.

Today was our last day at Broken Hill. Tomorrow we move on to Silverton, which is only about 25 kms up the road. We could have covered it from here in Broken Hill, but decided to move out there and maybe see a bit further afield. The Mundi Mundi Plains are supposed to be lovely and they go out as far as the South Australian border.