About Parallel Places
And Resurgent Memories of Broken Hill
Since I began writing seriously in 2009 and started to veer from my legal career, I have always written about similar things in different places.
Sometimes, the “this reminds me of” similarities spontaneously come to me, and other times, I need to be reminded of them by others, in this case, Margaret Price, a kind woman I met 14 years ago in the Australian Outback in the mining town of Broken Hill.
In response to my recent posts about partially overlaid landscapes in New Mexico—e.g., old roads and mining towns—Margaret commented on similarities. She asked from afar whether Broken Hill, Australia, was even more unusual than the Land of Enchantment.
She also wondered if I still had a record of my visit and suggested that I include Broken Hill photographs in my musings and provide some universal lessons learned.
That’s spot on, Margaret.
I’d never written about Broken Hill or the 710-mile drive across New South Wales from Sydney, which included the Blue Mountains and a stay in the White Cliffs underground motel (a harbinger of climate change accommodation in its own right.)
Indeed, in exploring the Turquoise Trail’s living ghost towns this Fall, I relied on the subconscious foundation in Broken Hill, Australia’s longest-operating mining town.
A visit tells a familiar story—a boomtown legacy, a foreboding landscape, a history of water shortages, migrants from afar, and slag piles converted to tourist venues, observation points, and restaurants.
Madrid, Golden, and Cerrillos, meet Broken Hill.
In a parallel world, a company town had a Jewish fire chief in 1888, and an elegant small synagogue still stands. Its internal Sephardic configuration (bima in the middle) is almost identical to those I saw in Morocco earlier this year.
Not many think about the flight from Cossack pogroms as a migration to the east rather than through Ellis Island. Still, it is probably how Samuel Solomon ended up leading firefighters in a mining town in then-sparsely populated Australia.
It is clear to me now that the Australian frontier and the American southwest are not so different, driven by mineral extraction and resulting in dramatic landscape change, taking place on indigenous lands without regard to aboriginal history.
Now, they rely on new spins and traditions, a sort of intellectual gentrification.
Today, monuments and museums, wayfinding, and memorabilia from movie sets grace many of these places.
Funky and provocative events draw new attention, such as the Broken Heel Drag Queen Festival this past September, which celebrated the 30th anniversary of filming The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in Broken Hill.
Thank you, Margaret, for reminding me how humble mining towns—local or far away—retool into parallel places of curiosity.
Fascinating photos and history, Charles.