Broken Hill road trip

It does take a long time. But after lunch you drive west, away from the crowded east coast and soon you are over the hills barely worth calling the Great Dividing Range and descending onto the vast inland plains. Towns become more spread and instead of minutes you count hours between settlements. The sky opens and widens as you pass. Scattered along the way small places hang on ferociously. Some are mining towns, some places with past glories of wheat and wool, some just melancholy.

You travel 1200 km and still you have barely travelled a fraction of the way across vast Australia.

The pictures which follow are part of a recent journey to Broken Hill and back.

Ivy Rocks

East of Gilgandra

Mendooran

Between Narromine and Nyngan

Café entrance, Nyngan

Bogan River, Nyngan

Canbelego

Abandoned playground, Canbelego

Cobar

Cobar open cut

Mining Heritage centre, Cobar

Mining Heritage, Cobar

Darling River, Wilcannia

Wilcannia

Wilcannia

Wilcannia

Lake Woytchugga west of Wilcannia. History of past occupation covers the ground.

Small mimics large in a fractal landscape

Central time zone

Stephens Creek

Browns Shaft, Junction mine, Broken Hill

Old North mine, northern Broken Hill Main Lode

Browns Shaft

Broken Hill miner's cottage

Old South Mine, Broken Hill

Empty hall, Broken Hill

 The sculptures, Living Desert Broken Hill

Waiting for sunset

Many meals eaten here in the 1970's, now closed

Heritage building, former hardware store, now the Art Gallery

A local at the Sundown Nature trail off the Tibooburra road

Landscape north of Broken Hill

The Daydream smelter produced silver from the surrounding Apollyon Valley mines

Umberumberka silver mine near Silverton

Umberumberka hills

Umberumberka mine

Mundi Mundi plain

Mundi Mundi plain

Darling River, Menindee

Maidens Hotel, Menindee.

Old stockyards, Lake Mungo

Road across Lake Mungo

In these sand dunes, remains of some of the oldest ritual burials in human history have been found

Lake Arumpo

Murrumbidgee River, Balranald

Across the Hay Plain

Head towards home

Old café, Rankin Springs

West Wyalong.

Sometime east of Broken Hill

A recent trip to Broken Hill and Lake Mungo reminded me of earlier journeys and times.

Sometime east of Broken Hill

On the cusp of future
And backward
Sand and space footprint
Time between toes
Waiting for the next flood.

Scratchings of love
Insult the ancient bark.
Cans, discarded arcs of rust
Carry memories of
Fishing and expeditions.

Hot days and cold stars.
In the smoke of change
Campfires glow
But the cold seeps from 
behind.

Stone circles and hands 
under overhangs.
Chippings by ghosts of ancestors
Gift a picture
To new arrivals.

I bus to a bony landscape.
Lakes of saltbush and skeletons.
Blown and exposed
Dusty and unforgivably
Old.

Another small step.
The past dragging
Like a blanket on my shoulders
wiping out my footprints.
A puff of dust marks my passing.



(c) Robert George Barnes
 25 August 2002

Dad, dear Dad

Dad, dear Dad

I found my father

Standing tall with his faded hat slouched
rabbit rifle on the farm
and a cheeky grin,
in the box, under the others.

And smiling by the sepia fence
near the bountiful orange tree
where the garden grew the beans for the kids
and I mixed mash for the chooks.

And in the shop, with the curled edges,
where chairs were reborn
with flock and tacks,
masterful movements,
and a fabric of care.

I found my Dad today
in my box
under the others,
under the stairs.

Robert G Barnes
9 November 2013
For George Henry Barnes 1924-1978