One thing you shouldn’t miss in Broken Hill is an underground mine tour. You can do it right in town at the disused Delprats mine, or further out at the Daydream Mine. At Delprats (tours Mon–Fri 10.30am, Sat 2pm, more during school holidays, arrive 15min before start; 2hr; $23) you don a miner’s hat, boots and a heavy belt with batteries for your helmet light, before descending in the miners’ cage – jammed with thirty or more people – 130m below the surface. Here, former miners working as guides will take you on a tour through the system of tunnels (stopes), describing and demonstrating how miners used to work in the bad old days, and how the work is done now.
The Daydream Mine (daily 10am–3.30pm; tours on demand; 1hr; $10), which operated between 1882 and 1889, is 20km out of Broken Hill on the Silverton Road – turn right at the sign and follow the thirteen-kilometre dirt road; tours here are similar, but half as long and a little tamer. Both tours can be booked through the tourist information centre, but without your own transport, you’ll need to go on a bus tour for the Daydream Mine.
If you can’t face going underground, it’s now possible to take an overground tour of the old South Mine which commenced operations in 1888 and closed in 1972. Accessed via Eyre Street in Broken Hill South, the site is being developed for visitors with a $4.6 million Federal Government grant. Ambitious plans include a miners’ memorial site and cable car to go right across the old open cut workings, with the majority of the work to be finished by 2001. For the moment, however, the tours offered – which concentrate on the old ambulance room and BHP’s rather horrific safety record – are rather haphazard and not particularly value-for-money (tel 08/8088 6000 or the tourist office for details). If you’ve proven your interest in mining history by making it out to South Mine, you might like to combine it with a visit to the nearby Photographic Recollections, also on Eyre Street (Mon–Fri 10am–4.30pm, Sat & Sun 1–4.30pm; $4). This privately-run but not in the least amateurish exhibition provides a pictorial history of Broken Hill, with over 600 photographs accompanied by well-researched and -written text which delves into mining, union and social history. The location itself, in the former Central Power Station, tells a story of the city’s very Outback past; from the 1930s Broken Hill produced all its power here until as late as 1986 when it finally went on the national grid.
There are three other mining related attractions in the city. A visit to the bizarre but wonderful White’s Mineral Art Gallery and Mining Museum, 1 Allendale St (off Silverton Road; daily 9am–6pm; $4), might well be the next best thing to going underground. The art section is pretty extraordinary, consisting mainly of collages of crushed minerals depicting Broken Hill scenes – mining, historic buildings and the Outback. And at the back there’s a walk-in underground mine, re-created so convincingly that it genuinely looks and feels like the real thing: inside, you’re given an entertaining lecture, with videos and models, on the history of Broken Hill and its mines. A shop at the front of the museum sells minerals, opals, jewellery and pottery. The Railway, Mineral and Train Museum (daily 10am–3pm; $2), opposite the tourist information centre, which features an extensive mineral collection as well as old railway machinery and memorabilia including the fittings from the bedroom of the Maidens Hotel in Menindee where the explorers Burke and Wills stayed on their ill-fated expedition. Finally, the Geocentre, in a nineteenth-century bond store on the corner of Bromide and Crystal streets (Mon–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat & Sun 1–5pm; $3), looks at Broken Hill’s geology, mineralogy and metallurgy. At the back is an example of a tin miner’s shed – you can imagine what the heat must have been like in summer, or experience it yourself if you’re foolhardy enough to come out here at that time of year.
Mining and unionism in Broken Hill
In the early years, living and working conditions for the miners were atrocious. The climate was harsh, housing was poor and diseases such as typhoid, scarlet fever and dysentery – to say nothing of work-related illnesses such as lead poisoning, and mine accidents – contributed to a death rate almost twice as high as the average in New South Wales. The mine and the growing town rapidly stripped the landscape of timber, leaving the settlement surrounded by a vast, bleak plain. Dust storms were common. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Broken Hill was at the forefront of trade union development in Australia, as the miners, many of them recent immigrants, fought to improve their living and working conditions. It was their ability to unite that ultimately won them their battles, above all in the Big Strike of 1919–20, when, after eighteen months of holding out against the police and strikebreakers, major concessions were won from BHP. Not that the trade union movement at Broken Hill should be viewed through too-rosy glasses. The union, which effectively ran the town in conjunction with the mine companies, was also a bastion of racism and male supremacy, though the interpretive boards at the tourist information centre glorify this as “mateship”. Non-white persons were not tolerated in town, nor were working women who happened to be married. Even now, these attitudes have not altogether disappeared.
Despite the life left in Broken Hill’s mineral deposits, the future is none too certain. With modern mining technology the ore is removed faster, and the numbers employed are lower. Between 1970 and 1975, about 4000 people were employed in the mines. By the early 1980s this number had been reduced to 2500, and less than 700 work there now. The population continues to gradually decrease and every few years another of the city’s many pubs closes down.