2019/11 Australia trip - Line of Lode |
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We wanted to take a look at the mine site itself so we headed back into town and the Lone of Lode lookout and miners’ memorial. The lookout 
is at the top of a gigantic pile of tailings that the locals refer to as a hill of mullock. The tailings divide the town and the GPS had us going part way around the hill and then a u-turn to go around the other side. We drove up to the top where we had a view of all of downtown Broken Hill.
The Miners’ Memorial attempts to capture the narrow, dark, and damp environment of the mine’s tunnels. It lists the names 
and ages and dates and reasons for the miners’ deaths on the job. As expected the older entries have reasons like “crushed:, “fell”, and “rock fall”. But the newest entries have a surprising number of “heart attacks” with victims in their teens and twenties; odd and a little suspicious’
There was a strange story about a terrorism incident during the First World War. It was a holiday and picnickers travelling on a train came to an ice cream cart and the two vendors waved a Turkish flag, pulled out guns, and opened fire killing four people The men were Afghans, not Turks, and their actual motive was unclear, but it lead to Turkish and German nationals being interned in Australia.
The memorial gave us a view of some of the original mining pits and mullock hills. The hill’s summit was ringed with mining equipment, including this underground train.
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Broken Hill (2.30) |
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It had been a long day. We drove up and down Argent Street looking for a regular restaurant but ended up at the Barrier Social Democratic Club, where an Indonesian chili stir fry went down very well. Along the way we found this Aborigine art project: a non-functional canoe carved from bloodroot.
The road north from Broken Hill leads only to Sturt National Park and some marginal 4wd tracks, and the southwestern route would take us into South Australia which had its own fire problems, so the plan for the morning was to head south towards the state of Victoria.