Broken Hill reminds me of Edinburgh in one aspect only. Both are dominated by imperious hills. Edinburgh has its castle overlooking the town, and Broken Hill has a huge slag heap with a visitors centre on top. Here the similarity between the two places stumbles. A sculpture on top of the slag heap is a good analogy for my impressions of the town. It is a giant park bench, designed to make adults feel what it is to be the size of children. I like the idea, but it feels redundant in a town like Broken Hill, where obselete mining equipment lies scattered around the town like a giant’s playthings. The mentality of the miner’s is summed up by a Pro Hart sculpture of a giant metal ant, for that is what these people were, burrowing away underground.
I left you last time on the outskirts of an old town called Silverton. For a ghost town Silverton has a disturbing number of active shops, but I know it’s a ghost town because my neighbour in Canberra, Barry McGowan, has written a book called “Australian Ghost Towns”. He describes Sliverton as a boom and bust mining town. In 1884 it went from nothing to a town of 4000. A reporter at the time described the population: “Every second word among the drinking men was an oath, and, subtracting the oaths and obscenity, I really believe fifty English words would cover the entire vocabulary.” Judging by the amount of broken glass littering the ground at the nearby Daydream Mine settlement, the inhabitants here enjoyed a good party as well, but not the cleaning up. Little remains of the place now but a few crumbling buildings and the odd collection of rocks, which at one stage must have formed four walls and a bit of metal over the top for a roof. Men came here for money, but while they waited they lived in ramshackle houses that have either been reclaimed by the desert, or were put on a cart and taken to Broken Hill, which soon became the premier mining town in the region.
As I mentioned earlier, Broken Hill is renowned for its art, mainly thanks to Pro Hart. I only know Pro Hart from an old ad did for a carpet cleaning company in which he did a painting on the floor with various foodstuff. This seemed cool to me when I was 10, but I wonder whether artists of previous generations would have done something similar. I can see Van Gogh doing something for the plastic surgeons association – “My ear looks like new”, Jackson Pollock could do some beer ads, and of course, Andy Warhol would sell soup by the truckload. Part of me can’t begrudge Pro Hart for trying to make some money, but the cynical part says he’s a sellout. My cynical part also has the impression that Pro Hart is an artist that people who usually don’t like art can wax lyrical about at a family BBQ and not get funny looks, unlike Monet, Manet, or Cezanne.
I was in two minds about whether to go to the Pro Hart gallery before I left town. My sleeping bag became a tossing and turning bag, and when I awoke in the morning, with a bright sun filtered through the fogged windscreen, I still hadn’t made up my mind about the matter. I tried to clean the condensation of the window with some toilet paper with limited success. I couldn’t see where I was going very clearly but I decided that it was too early for art and headed for the main road, when a sign for Pro Hart’s gallery caused my hands to jerk the steering wheel to the left, which I took as a sign that I had changed my mind. I was driving directly into the rising sun and could not see a thing. I took this as a sign from God that Pro Hart is overrated.
Dave out.
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