SYDNEY - HALLS CREEK TRIP 2007

SYDNEY - HALLS CREEK TRIP 2007
Tuesday 15 May to Monday 21 May
Sydney to Broken Hill
Blog 1

We left Sydney after a busy morning and both of us immediately started to relax as we headed west to Bathurst. We stopped for afternoon Devonshire Tea at Blackheath. It was a lovely stop and the autumn colours made the mountains even more beautiful. The smell of the country air was wonderful.

We spent the night at the same caravan park we had been a few times before and in the morning stopped at the beautiful little Bathurst Art Gallery. There were some paintings by Barbara McKay who spent a month at Hill End to do the paintings. It gave us a taste of where we were heading.

Our drive took us through beautiful countryside to Sofala which is quaint little old gold mining town. We walked around enjoying the old buildings and then continued on unsealed road to Hill End. We stopped at the visitor centre where Mike managed to stand in an ant nest and had ants crawling up his pants and up his legs. They were tenacious little buggers and we had quite a job getting them of him. He took off his shoes and pants in the street and we still had trouble getting them off. Once we were ant free we set up camp, collected fire wood enjoyed the beautiful King Parrots eating the pine cones in the trees as we sat by the fire.

The History Hill Museum had collections of artefacts from the area during the gold rush and showed lifestyles in Hill End from the 1850s. The largest nugget was found in the area by Louis Beyers and Halterman which made them very wealthy. Beyers planted an avenue of trees along the main street of Hill End which is still spectacular particularly in autumn.

We then headed off to the lookouts in the surrounding areas starting with Beufoy Merlin Lookout. The day was windless and the view was beautiful. It certainly was a 4WD “road” to get there and the gums in the surrounding bush seemed relatively young. You got the feeling that most of the area had been mined and that the land was regenerating growth on old mullock heaps. The lookout was named after the photographer who took photos of Hill End Township in its hay day in 1872 when it had a population of 7000 people with 34 pubs and all the shops and structures needed for a bustling growing town. The glass plates of this fantastic record were only rediscovered in 1950 in a garage in Sydney and now the photos have been placed along the streets of Hill End to show what used to exist. Now Hill End has a population of 100 with most of the buildings that existed in the 1850s to 1900 gone.

Bald Hill Lookout was next and gave us a view of Hill End. We then drove to the other side of Hill End to Golden Gully which is where the original alluvial gold was mined. It is a fascinating area with quite deep gullies gauged out by the once fast flowing Tambaroora Creek although it had no water in it when we walked along the river bed through the Arch that the river had once carved out.

We walked Hill End enjoying Merlin’s photos along the streets.

It had rained overnight and as we left Hill End there was water flowing through Golden Gully where we had walked the previous day.

We headed north to Mudgee and enjoyed the countryside with plenty of water in the dams, in the paddocks and along the side of the road. At Mudgee we stopped for the compulsory country morning tea, bought petrol at Dubbo and stopped for the night at Nyngan.

We continued heading west along the Barrier Highway to Cobar and saw literally hundreds of healthy looking feral goats. We also saw a lot of kangaroos, emus, Major Mitchell cockatoos, kites, ravens and of course sheep and cattle. The countryside was really looking fresh after the rain.

Cobar, also known as the Copper City, is a town best known for its copper mine which still has 3 operational mines today. It is. It is located on the crossroads of the Barrier Highway and the Kidman Way.

The Great Cobar Heritage Museum was excellent in recording the town’s history. Reverend Stanley Drummond one of the towns early clergy founded the Far West Children’s Health Scheme in 1924 by transforming train carriages into mobile health clinics to travel to remote areas to treat those needing medical attention. His work revolutionised children’s health care in western NSW even though it wasn’t realised at the time.

In the early 1920s the population of Cobar went from 10,000 to 1200 after a fire in the copper mine burned for 6 years and the mine closed down. Three pioneering men, Charles Campbell, Thomas Hartman and George Gibb noticed green and blue rocks. They collected the samples and showed them to a friend Sidwell Kruge, a Cornish woman who had worked as a bal-gal sorting copper ore in Cornwell. The group established a partnership with businessman Joseph Becker in 1870.

We crossed the Darling River on the way into Wilcannia and it was heart breaking to see just the trickle of water at the bottom of the deep banks where once a mighty river obviously flowed.

We arrived at Broken Hill and set our watches back ½ hour to South Australian time.

Even though we had explored Broken Hill in depth the last time we were here in 2000 we still managed to find a new gallery, the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery in Argent St. The building was a restored building from the late 1800s. There was some great art work including some work from Chris Trotter who built things out of scrap metal. Really great things.
We decided to revisit Silverton to see if the Silverton Pub was still open.