Australia - Explore the Dramatic Outback
Visit the Desert Town of Broken Hill and Mootwingee National Park
Sep 18, 2008
Broken Hill sits in a vast red desert, home to brilliantly coloured birds and unusual animals. In the nearby National Park there is evidence that people have been here for millions of years. Kangaroos and emus leap and prance across a harsh land where civilization constantly loses the battle against nature. Walk out of town and you may never return.
Broken Hill
Broken Hill is flat, flat, flat! Other than a few bumps in the landscape, there's not a hill in sight, and if there were it would surely be alive with the sound of movie making. Welcome to Hollywood, New South Wales. For the past thirty years or so dozens of films and television commercials have been made in and around this old mining town.
The population is around 22,000 but there is still a feeling of the frontier about Broken Hill. Hard work and hard drinking are what life is about and a lot of the local males have three-day growths and cattle dogs at heel.
Broken Hill: Mecca for Movies
When director George Miller was looking for a location for his cult movie Mad Max II, Mel Gibson's 1981 "road warrior" classic, he sought a place devoid of any hint of civilization and he found exactly what he wanted in the desert around Broken Hill. Mel Gibson in his alter ego of Mad Max peers over a vast empty plain - a strange, surreal land.
There are surreal aspects of Broken Hill too, especially the 109-year-old Palace Hotel where, in the 1994 Oscar-winning movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Terence Stamp and the rest of his band of flamboyant performers raise their eyebrows in horror at the gaudy murals lining the walls and ceiling of the bedroom.
Broken Hill : A Place of Extremes
The Australian Outback is a place of extremes and Broken Hill is no exception. Situated in one of the harshest environments in the world it is truly an oasis in the desert. Bitterly cold in winter and intolerably hot in summer, it is surprisingly leafy and green thanks to the water piped in from a reservoir 110 kilometres away. The first art gallery in New South Wales was opened here in 1904 and the town has become a major centre for Australian artists.
The population is around 22,000 but there is still a feeling of the frontier about Broken Hill. Hard work and hard drinking are what life is about and a lot of the local males have three-day growths and cattle dogs at heel
Broken Hill: Mootwingee National Park
Visit nearby Mootwingee National Park where you can run your fingers over ancient rock carvings and clamber around gorges and rock holes carved by thousands of years of wind biting into the soft sandstone. There's a monumental stillness about the place and it's easy to see why for centuries it has been a place of pilgrimage for the Aborigines. Here they had a reliable water supply and because of this it became, and still is, a Mecca for major aboriginal ceremonies. And when the skies darken and the stars appear to be within hand's reach; when the air is scented with the perfume of the eucalyptus trees and the silence seems to penetrate one's very soul, there is a sense of being one with nature.
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, will come to life again when the stage musical version opens at London’s Palace Theatre in March, 2009. The story is about two drag queens and a transsexual crossing the Australian Outback in a battered bus. It has been a smash hit stage musical in Australia since 2004.
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