Day 8 Saturday 24th June

This morning we made our way out to the nearly deserted but not quite a ghost town of Silverton, 23 kms from Broken Hill. In the 1880’s it was a thriving town at once stage having a population of 3,000. Now days it’s population is around 60. It had a silver and lead mine but after the rise of the mines at Broken Hill and the decline of the Silverton mine many of the buildings were taken down and then transported to Broken Hill. The old stone and brick buildings remain like the school, churches, pub, council chambers etc and they are all used for different things now. There were quite a few art galleries, museums cafes and of course the pub is still operating. The pub has been used for quite a few ads and the town has been used for movies like Mad Max 2 and A Town like Alice. There was a museum dedicated to Mad Max and quite a bit of Mad Max memorabilia around the town. We enjoyed a stroll around the town and I visited the cemetery which had quite a few sad tales in it. Returning to Broken Hill, Rob did the shopping while I did the heritage walk of the two main streets of the main part of town. There are many beautiful old buildings still in the main part of town (over 40) and it shows how Broken Hill was flushed with money from about 1885 onwards due to the mines. The slag heaps from the mines overlook the main part of the town. I learnt a lot about the beginnings of BHP and how it was started by a syndicate of 7 men, including a station manager, boundary rider, bookkeeper etc. who all agreed to contribute £70 pounds each to start the leases. Broken Hill’s ore body is the richest lead-silver-zinc deposit ever found. The BHP mine was exhausted by 1908 and the company began to look elsewhere but the money from the operations at Broken Hill made the company wealthy. BHP left Broken Hill completely in 1939. In 1907 8,800 people were employed in mining at Broken Hill but in 2010 only 366 people were employed in mining.

One of the things I find funny about Broken Hill is the street names. I know that many of them are to do with chemicals to do with mining but I find, Chloride Street, Oxide Street, Sulphide Street etc. a bit strange!













Comments

  1. m&mJune 25, 2017 at 3:46 PM

    I thought you said that you were heading to the sun. You look cold to me!!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete

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