Erik Skye Travel Blog

9 Jan 2012

Here’s the map (recommend clicking "satellite" in upper right corner):  Google Maps – Wizard of Oz

Car’s trip odometer:  4900 clicks (km)

So there I was, blasting down the highway in the dark when along I came upon kangaroos in the middle.  With no time to slow, I just hoped they wouldn’t jump around.  I zipped past them, wiggling the steering wheel back and forth in anticipation, but they just stood there peering.  I barely missed one on each side and realized then just how blind they are in the headlights.  Their raction was to become statues. 

“…a boundary-riding cowboy named Charles Rasp came upon a huge boomerang-shaped ore body on a craggy rise known as the Broken Hill.  Thinking the ore body was tin, he and some partners pegged it out.  Only later did they learn that the 280-million-ton mass was galena-sphalerite ore, unimaginably rich in silver, lead, and zinc.  It was the grandest mother lode ever found – before or since…”^19  That was in 1883, and by 1915 a boom town with 35,000 inhabitants and grand architecture was on the map.

They’re still working that mother lode today, but Broken Hill is now a stable community of around 20,000.  The economy includes tourism and artists and the film industry who are attracted to the clear air, brilliant outback colors, and sunny weather almost year-round.   Commercials (i.e. for Pepsi & BMW), movies (i.e. Mad Max and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), and music videos (i.e. for INXS) were filmed here.  I noticed a project to convert lofty, abandoned power plant facilities into filming studios.  Visiting the Miners Memorial (located on top of the giant slag heap overlooking the town), I noted it felt a little like the USA’s Vietnam Memorial with a wall of names, which included the deceased’s age and how killed; i.e. ‘hit by steel drill’, ‘run over’, ‘caught in conveyor belt’).

Before I left Cobar this morning, I paid a surprise visit to see my friends Denis and Patsy who own a little café in town where I had eaten two years before.  About 15 months ago I received an email from them asking for help with a community contest they were entering.  The objective was to get a picture of their tourism magazine from a place the furthest away.  So, naturally they thought of me up in Alaska.  Here’s the story (the bottom photo is on their "Wall of Fame"):  “In Cobar”.  I learned Denis and Patsy are selling their business with hopes to travel a bit, including coming to see me in Alaska.  I told them to be careful as traveling can be addictive.  They assured me they could handle it.

I stopped to walk the main streets of Wilcannia, photographing the historic architecture and old center lift bridge spanning the Darling River, which dates to 1884.  It must have been a vibrant community once, but now looks and feels like a ghost town except for the aborigines milling about aimlessly.  They seemed slightly out of place on these streets, however this is their ancestral homeland, and the town does seem as if it’s returning to (aboriginal) nature. 

The landscape of northwestern New South Wales is flat and barren, reminding me of areas of the Southwest United States.

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Footnotes:

19.  Roff Martin Smith, National Geographic Traveler (National Geographic Society, 2010) p. 116.