The first art gallery in New South Wales was opened in Broken Hill in 1904 and the town has become a major centre for Australian artists.
The Australian Outback is a place of extremes and Broken Hill is no exception. It is situated in one of the harshest environments in the world with a surreal landscape that has made the area a venue for dozens of movies - one of the best being Mad Max II, Mel Gibson's 1981 "road warrior" classic.
Australia - Broken Hill - major centre for Australian artists
But apart from this Tinsel Town aspect, 'real art' has a firm place here. The first art gallery in New South Wales was opened in Broken Hill in 1904 and the town has become a major centre for Australian artists. There's a plethora of galleries and even more at Silverton, a near-ghost town just 15 miles to the north-west with about 70 inhabitants and a few camels.
In contrast to the works produced by these 'brushmen of the bush' - mostly depictions of the surrounding landscape and many of them very good - just a few kilometers out of town you can see a very different kind of art. In 1993 Broken Hill hosted an International Sculpture Symposium where sculptors from countries as far way as Mexico, Damascus, Georgia and the UK were invited to create whatever they wished from the local sandstone. What you see at the top of Sundown Hill, just a few kilometers outside of town, where they stand like a 20th-century Stonehenge, is remarkable.
The artists worked with uncut sandstone which was not quarried, being "floating boulders" free from the bedrock. In all, 52 tonnes of sandstone boulders - the largest weighed in at 8 tonnes - were transported 240 km to the site from the Macculloch Ranges In this harsh, unwilling climate it was a massive effort.
Almost immediately they encountered problems. Their cold chisels failed to dent the stone and they had to seek help from Broken Hill's former hard rock miners who turned over dusty corners of back yard sheds to seek out old tungsten carbide tools. The people of Broken Hill had been working with stone underground for over a hundred years and they knew what the sculptors were up against.
Australia - Broken Hill - Mootwingee National Park
Before setting to work on the stone they were taken to nearby Mootwingee National Park to see aboriginal stone works dating back over 30,000 years. For centuries this was a place of pilgrimage for the Aborigines. Here they held their major ceremonies and they left their mark in the ancient rock paintings and engravings which are scattered in the caves and overhangs.
There's a monumental stillness about the place which is echoed on top of Sundown Hill. And even though the Broken Hill Symposium was created only a few years ago there is still the same feeling of timelessness to the works. Each artist reacted to the landscape in a different way, yet the sculptures are as cohesive as a group of ancient Celtic stones.
Each chose to represent his ideas in abstract form, yet each has also imprinted his own culture on what he has created. Thomas Munkanome, a Tiwi from Bathurst Island, created a soaring work which represents a water bird, neck upright, catching a fish. Badger Bates, a Broken Hill Aborigine,used ancient legends to create a piece dominated by two rainbow serpents travelling north, representing the journey into the afterlife.
Syrian artist, Ahmad Al Ahmad, described the Symposium as a necklace for a maiden - the maiden being the strange and beautiful desert landscape around the mountain - a concept that Mad Max probably would not appreciate.
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