Views of Australia No 22 Broken Hill, New South Wales by Susan MacDonald

Broken Hill was, throughout the twentieth century, the world's greatest producer of silver-lead-zinc, and a major contributor to Australia's considerable wealth. The ridge which rises unexpectedly from the dry, hot plains of western New South Wales was first investigated in the middle 1880s. By the turn of the century a town of considerable size had sprung up: a much larger town than that of nearby Silverton, an older mining settlement which had laid down its own private railway line before mining even began at Broken Hill. However, working conditions in the new mines were unpleasant and dangerous, and before the Great War Broken Hill was the setting for bitter and protracted industrial disputes, which sometimes came close to civil war themselves.

In the end the industrial unions gained control of the city's governance, and Broken Hill was ruled by the Barrier Industrial Council to a far greater extent than by the New South Wales state government, or the comparatively new Commonwealth government.

Today the ore is running out, and the mineheads look old and rusty. Broken Hill is no longer even Australia's biggest silver-lead-zinc producer: the Mount Isa mines in Queensland now produce more ore. But the city is not dying. The population have a peerless spirit and individuality, and their sense of local history is without equal. In the twenty first century Broken Hill is remaking itself as a centre for active and profitable artistic creation. But the name still carries with it an archetypal memory of grime, of hardness, of hell-heated back-breaking labour, and of ancient battles which have become a defining part of the Labour mythos in Australian history.

Most of the Australians think of Broken Hill as necessarily ugly. How could it be otherwise? But it is not so. I had never been there before, and I found it to be a place of austere beauty, a special starkness contrasted and heightened by its rococo and gargoylish public buildings.

The South Mine; storm approaching. The weather whilst I was there was overcast and stormy - I was very lucky, because it had not rained for several months, and skies like the ones in these photographs are very rare at Broken Hill. Further up from the South Mine, at the top of the 'Line of Lode' (the original ridge; now covered in mullock) is a memorial to the many miners who died at their work.

The Sculpture Symposium: 'Under the Jaguar Sun' by Antonio Nava Tirado In 1992, at the opening of an art show in Broken Hill, it was suggested that while Broken Hill had created its own school of painters, it had ignored sculpture in its unexpected resurgence as a centre of art.

In 1993 eight major overseas sculptors were invited to the city, and, together with some Australian sculptors, camped for more than a month on the top of a mountain, to which large slabs of the best Wilcannia sandstone had been transported.

The Symposium was a brilliant success, and this is the most photographed of the sculptures. It refers to a myth in which a jaguar holds the sun in its jaws during the hours of night, but there is also something about it which evokes the heavy industry of Broken Hill.

Once again, the weather gave me a wonderful photograph of gnarled, gothick gloom, with the scuptures almost looking like crooked gravestones. In books and brochures the scuplture usually appears against a cloudless blue sky (see Desert Art).

Sky at Dusk; Argent Street, November 20 2003. I was fortunate to capture this almost theophanic sky, which nearly made me think that God was going to descend from Heaven.

If He had done so, there is no doubt that the Barrier Industrial Council would have asked to see his union ticket.

City of Broken Hill

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