Sunrise 5 - BROKEN HILL — fatpaparazzi.com.au

Broken Hill itself is a beautiful country town comprising streets you could drive a bullock train through with curved shopfront verandas reaching the kerbside offering respite from the blistering heat.

The streets are aptly named, among others, Bromide, Sulphide, Oxide in honour of its rich mining history, however, all the “ides” soon blended together, and having failed chemistry, it became a little confusing navigating through the city streets.

Today we photographed the renowned Line of Lode slag heap, the remnant of only 12 years of silver smelting looming within a stones throw of the town boundaries. Perched on top of this strangely resplendent pile, is the newly opened Miners Memorial. An architecturally designed edifice commemorating the hundreds of lives lost over the decades of mining in the region. Pleasingly, the name plaques have significantly reduced over the years as work standards and safety measures increased.

This was a difficult place to photograph with conflicting colours and textures - mostly metallic - bouncing the harsh midday light.

Back in town, apart from the craft and specialty shops, the Silver City Mint and Arts centre is well worth a visit. Locally crafted silver jewellery, kitch craft and souvenirs, and the Broken Hill Chocolate Company all fall under the one roof. For a meagre $8 you can also view a 100 metre, 360 degree mural depicting The Hill and its surrounds. As repulsive as this sounds, it really is quite mesmerising and after only 10 minutes you truly believe you are out in the bush. Foreground dioramas and piped bush and indigenous sounds complete the illusion to astonishing satisfaction.

Wishing to remain upbeat, we considered omitting the following from our blog, but it would be remiss of us not to mention the delightful Pro Hart gallery curating much of his work, a painted Rolls Royce and an original Norman Lindsay. However as the bloody place was closed the day of our visit, we can’t really tell you much more about it !

After a much needed swim, we packed up the camera bag and headed northward again to the Living Desert Sculptures and Lookout for sunset. Juggling a camera, tripod and 2 beers comes naturally after a few photo shoots, and we were glad to have perfected this skill as the outcrop was honestly the best place for a beer at sunset.

The weather gods looked promising for the first beer, but by the second the low level cloud dissipated so we adjusted our photo plans more in line with the conditions. Fatpap had for sometime conceived a specific image for this very stage, and while conditions weren’t optimal, we as they say – fake it till you make it – and pulled a frame that has since become one of our most popular social media captures. We guess the moral here is while you can’t control mother nature, you can control the image with a certain set of skills and the flexibility to adjust on the run. Photography is half skill, half planning and half luck. Don’t walk away from a shoot too quickly. Recompose and work the composition. Because even when things don’t seem right, more often than not, they turn out just as they should.

We stayed at the park until well after blue hour and the rangers were moving the last of us along. The short drive back into town through the rocky barren landscape on the cusp of nightfall was very special indeed and finished off a wonderful day in Broken Hill. Back at camp we had a late dinner and began editing some photos of the trip thus far. White Rhinos appeared, as had become the nightly ritual of the trip since leaving Dubbo, but not before a few gins, a wine with dinner, and a cheeky little dark and stormy. It was well past 2:00am before we joined Morrison for bed, but given the unrelenting heat of Broken Hill, it was wonderful just to spend the night outdoors recounting the past few days.

Sunrise 5 - BROKEN HILL

Sunrise 4 - COBAR to BROKEN HILL

Sunrise 6 - BROKEN HILL to MENINDEE