Wide open spaces

As you drive out east out of Broken Hill, there’s not much of anything on the lonely road to Mutawintji National Park except red plains, silvery saltbush and the occasional bewildered bird. The hot, dry landscape splinters like a smashed pane of glass. The sky is immense, indeed the sheer size and scope of the New South Wales outback is both humbling and exciting beyond belief. 

After a while, the rucked folds of the faded-orange Bynguano Ranges add a third dimension beyond the windscreen. As you turn off the highway, an eruption of trees appears and kangaroos and flustered emus lurch across the landscape. Mutawintji’s rugged gorges cup permanent waterholes whose chilly waters are deep, black and mysterious. The water and wildlife have made this place the perfect campground for Malyankapa and Pandjikali people for over 8000 years and the red cliffs are covered with their hand stencils and artworks, defiantly human in the immense emptiness.

Hike through this national park and you’ll have it almost to yourself. The rocky red landscape is punctuated with hardy cypress pines and split into compact, rugged gorges. Mulga parrots cavort in flashes of emerald among towering river gums. Corellas hang upside-down on branches, ogling you with blue-rimmed eyes. Mutawintji is a place to renew the spirit and absorb the splendours of our big brown land.

Unless you’re prepared to camp, you’ll have to return to Broken Hill or head onwards to opal-mining town White Cliffs, most of whose motels and artist studios hunker underground. Grizzled outback characters live here amid orange dust and rusting machinery, perennially hoping to hit the motherlode. From here, you could loop back to Broken Hill via Tibooburra and Milparinka for more outback tropes brought to life – bony red landscapes, eye-squinting horizons, oddball locals with tales to tell, propped at the counters of colonial-era pubs.

Yet this region doesn’t only supply happy stereotypes. A thriving arts scene, good dining and a surprisingly progressive community spirit demonstrate that remote Australia is evolving, and becoming a much more nuanced destination for visitors. Exhibit A is Broken Hill itself, whose bars and restaurants see grey nomads, tattooed miners, travelling families and (in the case of the Palace Hotel, immortalised in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) gloriously garbed drag queens meet.

Don’t expect contemporary architecture in the outback? Broken Hill has Line of Lode Miners Memorial, which sits like the lovechild of Uluru and Sydney Opera House on a mullock heap of splendid outlooks. Good museums? The Albert Kersten Mining and Minerals Museum explains geology from the moment the universe was created – there could hardly be a bigger story. Meanwhile the Royal Flying Doctor Outback Heritage Experience relates the fascinating work of the RFDS in innovative ways, and lets you track medical emergencies in real time.

Then there’s art, of course. Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, the oldest regional art gallery in NSW, has fine collections of Aboriginal, colonial and contemporary Australian art. Pro Hart Gallery remains a big drawcard, 15 years after the celebrated artist’s passing. You’ll see murals and sculptures by artist Geoff DeMain in public spaces around town. The outback city’s art scene, which took off in the 1960s, is vibrant as ever, as resident artists celebrate the bold colours of the surrounding landscapes.

You don’t have to go far to see what attracts artists to the luminescent outback. Menindee, an hour southeast of Broken Hill, makes for an easy day trip. 

It was the first European settlement in western NSW thanks to its prime position on the Darling River, and is graced with handsome Victorian-era architecture. Nearby are the Menindee Lakes, full to overflowing from recent rains. Brolgas strut through the mud, pink cockatoos swirl in giant flocks and battalions of pelicans paraglide overhead. Get out for a river cruise or paddle among dead gum trees that themselves look like grand art installations.

Just outside Broken Hill, Silverton is favoured by painters for its ruined colonial-era buildings, train tracks to nowhere, and burnt orange plains that bend on the horizon. The landscape featured prominently in Mad Max 2 – don’t miss the museum dedicated to the 1980s movie, crammed with props, old cars and costumes.

At its height during the silver rush of the 1880s, Silverton was home to 3000 people, a story told at the Gaol Museum and by touring Day Dream Mine. Now there are only a few artists and recluses and the occasional film crew in town to take advantage of the flamboyant outback setting. Sunset over Mundi Mundi Plains is a superb and quintessential Australian moment.

Even better for sunset, though, is Living Desert and Sculptures on a hillside 10 kilometres north of Broken Hill. Here the sun sinks down behind purple hills and rocky ridges and illuminates huge contemporary sculptures.

As the sun fizzles on the horizon, all eyes turn to the sculpture Under the Jaguar Sun created by Antonio Nava Tirado, a Mexican artist with Aztec heritage. Stand in the right place and the last rays of light slant through a stylised jaguar’s mouth in a magnificent sunburst. Broken Hill is a few cubes of concrete in the distance, completely overwhelmed by a magnificently mellow landscape where the only sound is wind and the discordant croaking of magpies.