2019/11 Australia trip - Broken Hill minerals museum |
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November 2019
Dear All
Broken Hill looked to be the biggest place we had seen since Sydney. We drove in on Argent Street and passed Iodide, Bromide, Oxide, then Talc and Gypsum and Copper Streets. They are obviously very keen on their minerals and chemicals, not surprisingly as the mines are the reason for the city’s success, even its existence.
First on our list was a motel. The visitor’s centre was closed but supposedly it had a 24-hour display. It did, a screen in the window with a keypad attached to the window, but it only displayed a table of information for a couple of seconds before switching from motels to restaurants to attractions. We had to take a photo and then squint at the camera display to find the address of a motel. The Desert Sands sounded good, just a couple of streets away, and it turned out fine.
Because of its far western location in the state, Broken Hill has more commercial contact with Adelaide in South Australia than it did with Sydney, so it observes South Australia time, half an hour behind what we were used to. We got confused at times but luckily it didn’t matter.
I found a nearby restaurant, Mr Pickwick’s in the old Willyama Inn, that sounded like it might be cheaper with smaller meals; I was wrong on all counts but the teriyaki was good. Our last job for the day was to find the Coles supermarket and stock up on picnic supplies.
Friday November 15th
It was a sunny and warm morning and it seemed a shame to spend it indoors, but Sandie and I wanted to see the Albert Kersten Mining & Minerals Museum, also called the GeoCentre, located downtown in what used to be a warehouse for wines and spirits. It turned out to be one of the best museums we’ve been to. It told the story of how the ore-body was formed nearly 2 billion years by a succession of crushing and heating and cracking events. Interaction with hot fluids created rare minerals and crystals. The result was an enormous ore-body shaped like a boomerang perched on its ends. In our time, the top of the boomerang protruded from the plains as a “broken hill”.
In the 1880s a boundary rider, patrolling a cattle station’s fences, found what he thought was an ore of tin. He was wrong but that didn’t matter as underneath it was the world’s largest and richest silver, zinc, and lead deposits. Since then the “broken hill” has been mined away and some of the mines have closed, but others have opened along the “line of lode”, the direction of the boomerang. On display was a 90 pound nugget of almost pure silver.
The museum showed hundreds of minerals organized by crystal type, photographs from early mining days, and the 20 pound ‘silver tree’ made for the boundary rider who’d become a very rich man. 
Walking around a museum is tough on the back, but I think John and Edna enjoyed their morning.
Attached was a display of local art, definitely worth a look. 
At the back of the building were some enormous mineral boulders and a miner’s cottage, built from corrugated iron, the construction material of the British Empire. 
It is very hot in summer, and freezing in winter, but cheap and easy to ship around the world as a flat pack. 
Afterwards, we went to a local park for a picnic lunch and were joined by these friendly corellas.