534 McGowan Street, Broken Hill by Robert G Barnes
After a month or two in a shared household, it was time to
find our own place. I had been transferred to Broken Hill as a geologist in the
Geological Survey of New South Wales. I had expected to be in Broken Hill for a
few months. Little did I know that my term would extend out to eight years and
that I would learn to love this “city”, this iconic but ramshackled place, this
place steeped in history.
Coming into BH is a shock. Nearer to the coast and around
most inland cities and towns, you approach through a transition, a transition
from farmland through a gradual increase in houses and roads, traffic and signs
and end up in suburbia, travel past parks and lawns, playing fields and
factories or shopping centres and eventually you wend your way to city centres.
Not so with BH.
Having spent many hours driving west across relentless
semi-desert you cross a bridge over the Darling River and enter Wilcannia. Once
a river port, the town has several impressive historical buildings, but its
glory days of a place to send the wool to market downstream have long since passed.
Wilcannia was a place to top up for fuel until the service station burned down.
In minutes your journey across the plains continues. Another couple of hours to
go.
The transition onto the Barrier Ranges is rapid. Very low
rises, then hills, not high, but hills none-the-less. And with the hills come
the creeks, some lined with splendid gums. The creeks are the sandy pathways
leading to the mysterious hills. The creeks, for the most part, are dry, but
piles or leaves and branches on the banks mark the peak of flows which
occasionally drench the landscape and keep the majestic gums alive.
It is common to be approaching Broken Hill driving into the
sunset for many will have broken their journey from the coast at Cobar, a small
town surrounded by rich copper and gold mines. Having left after breakfast,
eight hours or so later you glimpse the first hints of Broken Hill, perhaps as
a few twinkles on the horizon. You will have already passed the old Mount Gipps
hotel and the former School of the Air at the old Royal Flying Doctors Base
adjacent to the highway. With a keen eye you may have spotted a hint of old
diggings in the adjacent hills, but you would have to be keen.
On a sweeping and rising curve, you pass a Welcome to Broken
Hill sign. After cresting the hill, you are immediately into suburbia and
driving along the main road which leads directly to the centre of town, the
road aptly named Argent Street.
Surprisingly it was difficult to find a house for rent in BH
at the time – 1975. Mining activity was in full swing, but the town was
starting a transition. The recognition that the mines could not last for ever
had meant that there had been little growth or investment over many years. (By
contrast, by the 2020s the place seems to have developed a new vibrancy and new
industries and artistic endeavours, many related to tourism, have sprung up).
The team I worked with had been sent to Broken Hill with the
expressed aim of helping understand the geology and mineral deposits of the area
with a view to assisting a new mineral discovery. Mining in the district
started in 1874 and in BH in 1883, so we arrived just on one hundred years
after the area was opened up by Europeans. Mining continues in the 2020s but at
a much reduced scale, picking away at remnants left by earlier mining. Unfortunately
no major new discoveries have yet been made.
The city flanks the massive orebodies which rose as a prominent
ridge from the desert. Early on, after rich silver had been discovered, a grid
of streets was surveyed on each side and aligned in parallel with the “Line of
Lode” at a bearing of 60 degrees and 330 degrees. This was quite unlike many
other inland towns in Australia which are oriented with roads bearing to
magnetic north. Many of the roads are very wide, wide enough for a bullock team
to turn around. Many areas have small lanes at the back of the block for
removal of sanitary waste.
After some time looking, we were presented with a small stand-alone
cottage/house in north Broken Hill. So, this small house, built with the dominant
building material in the town, corrugated iron and related pressed metal, was our
first home Broken Hill home.
Out front was a small veranda supported by two large Greek
style concrete pillars, very much out of proportion to the scale of the house.
These pillars seemed to have been a fashion item at one time. The house comprised
a largish loungeroom, two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a small back room with
a toilet and shower. Out in the yard were the vestiges of what, in times past,
had been a productive space. A small shed contained a small work bench and
space for washing. In the yard was a large, mature mandarine tree which
produced an abundance of sweet, delicious fruit. Beyond the shed was a tangled
mess – this large space had, at one time, been an extensive set of chook pens.
Time had taken its toll and when we arrived, they could not hold anything. At
the back of the block was a laneway which gave rear access.
Laneways are common in BH as originally there was no sewerage
and waste was collected from the back lanes. It is hard to imagine what stench
there would have been in summer. After some time, the owners agreed that we
could remove the pens, a considerable task, and make the space available for a
garden – veggies and such. My wife, forever the gardener, soon had an abundance
of vegetables growing out the back including some magnificent artichokes.
A striking characteristic of the house was evidence of how everything,
even simple things, appeared to be valued. In the back shed I found a tin full
of old bent nails. Why would anyone keep these old, bent nails I often wondered?
I was later to learn from our neighbour that the lady who lived there with her
miner husband would pick up any nails she could find on her walk to the shops
and bring them home. “They might be useful one day”.
And then there was the side fence - nothing wasted – created
from flattened kerosene tins. There was also evidence of thrift, or was it
poverty, in the house. When we moved in, we swept accumulated dust out of the
house. It was centimetres deep in some corners. In doing so we uncovered
multiple patches of linoleum of multiple types and sizes, each patch carefully tacked
down. I counted seventeen different patterns in all, some covering most of a
room, some covering just a square foot or two.
One surprise awaited when we were clearing the loungeroom
floor. We came across what seemed to be a trap door, secured with screws.
Curiosity took over as I unscrewed and opened a door which had clearly been
closed for a very long time. A set of stairs led down into an underground
“room” simply dug out of the earth and about half the size of the loungeroom
above. There were no defined walls or reinforcement. The space was filled with
all sorts of paraphernalia – some old wooden trunks, ancient wood working tools
and various bits and pieces which were hard to identify. The “room” had been
flooded to waist deep and mud, now dust, covered most things. I managed to recover
a few items and still have a wooden travel chest with an original sticker
marking Broken Hill as the destination. It is lined with a decorative floral
“wallpaper”. It now sits in my garage as an enduring memory of this house.
The house had no air conditioner or ceiling fans. Apparently,
the underground cellars were used by miners on shift work to sleep in relative
cool during the days and hot summers. We soon bought a small evaporative cooler
on a trolley- It worked quite well in the low humidity if you were straight in
front of it. Air was drawn though a frame of damp straw-like material moistened
by dripping water. It needed to be regularly “topped up” with water and cleared
of salty water now and then.
We stayed at McGowan Street for a couple of years before
buying our own small home in Thomas Lane, near the Broken Hill hospital. I
revisited the McGowan Street house several times over the years as it went from
being abandoned, to used, abandoned again but now looking well looked after and
renovated.
We never did find out who originally lived in the house. The
relatives had left some memorabilia in a small storeroom and later cleaned it
out. Amongst the items were numerous framed photographs which had hung on the walls.
I asked to keep a few but they wanted everything to go to the tip. I felt an
ache as part of the history of the place disappeared.
