A very short drive from Broken Hill brought us to Silverton which was actually the first place silver was discovered around this area. However, once silver was found just up the road in Broken Hill the large operators set up there and Broken Hill became the big city leaving Silverton largely forgotten. 

Today Silverton is pretty much just a collection of a few art galleries and a pub in the middle of a vast expanse of red dirt. The art galleries are strange because, as far as I could tell, almost all the artists working in Silverton paint the same pictures of cartoon emus. Very odd, surely the person who thought them up first must get a bit miffed.
 Silverton is famous for something other than emu paintings and silver though, Mad Max was filmed there and it was easy to see why. There were almost no trees and the landscape looked pretty desolate as far as the eye could see. It was also hot, even though this was late autumn, with the sun beating down relentlessly on an area with very little shelter. 

When we were leaving the Royal Flying Doctor Service visitor centre in Broken Hill two coaches turned up from the Melbourne Probus Club. We patted ourselves on the back as we realised we had narrowly missed sharing our excellent tour with about seventy old people but our luck ran out in Silverton. We were about to go into the Silverton Hotel for a coffee when the coaches pulled up again and seventy octogenarians filed in ahead of us filling the place completely.
We decided not to bother and I had to be satisfied with hearing Ian's tales of his last visit there when a horse pushed its way through the saloon bar doors and made itself at home while he was having a beer. He mentioned this in one of the galleries and the owner told us that the horse was called Misty and he used to visit the pub all the time.
It was time to move on to our next stop in the opal mining town of White Cliffs, 250kms from Broken Hill. We decided to go the cross country way so the last 200kms were on dirt road.

 It was the worst road I have driven on so far and we had to keep a sharp lookout for sudden potholes and bits of road missing altogether, as well as avoiding kangaroos, emus, sheep, cows and a fox. Apparently the makers of driverless cars are having a real problem with Australia's unique outback driving conditions. It is the way kangaroos sort of fly through the air towards a collision that is causing the most head scratching. I hope they manage to solve the difficulty because Australia has more single person car accidents than anywhere else in the world, because of falling asleep, so the driverless car would appear to be a useful introduction. 

Anyway, we bumped and clattered into White Cliffs and found the caravan park which was great. It had good, clean facilities but was divided in two so the people who needed power were over by the shower block while those who didn't need power were over the other side where it was all red dirt surrounded by eucalyptus trees and felt more like camping out in the open. The other enjoyable bit about being in the non powered section was being able to watch the Serious Travellers set up. We just arrive, roll out the awning and chuck a couple of chairs outside and that is us set up but not so the Serious Traveller. They have complicated campers mounted on trailers with hydraulic lifting bits and endless, neatly organised plastic storage boxes in the back of the ute. The Serious Traveller always insists that their rig is incredibly quick and easy to set up but we sit with a glass of wine and watch them wherever we go and have yet to see any set up their camp in less than an hour, then they spend all evening going back and forth to the plastic boxes to get things before settling down for the night. The other bizarre thing we have noticed is they only ever seem to stay one night so the whole rigmarole is repeated in reverse as they pack up while we are having our breakfast.

 White Cliffs was a great stop. Some of the people live underground and we went to have a look at the famous underground hotel. It was fabulous, I don't know what I expected but the rooms were lovely and cool and somehow peaceful. I would recommend a flight up to Broken Hill, a drive to White Cliffs and a night or two in the underground hotel to anyone wanting to experience a different side of Australia to Sydney and the Barrier Reef. 

Opal mining towns seem to be a good place for people to go if they want to disappear, I am sure nobody would ask any questions if a new miner turned up and started working on a claim. Unlike in Lightning Ridge where the mining community were in evidence all the time usually having a jolly time in the pub, we didn't see many opal miners at all, even when we drove around the tourist route among all their little mines and homes, maybe they were meeting up underground somewhere. They did have a golf course though and, because it was just in the middle of the dirt, there was a little box positioned at the start containing information about the course and a little square of grass for driving the ball! 

 It was a bit of a wrench to tear ourselves away from glorious Menindee Lakes but the next planned stop was somewhere I had wanted to see since primary school - Broken Hill, home to The Flying Doctors and The School of the Air.
Broken Hill is a long way from anywhere in far west New South Wales. It is very close to the border with South Australia, so close in fact that it operates on South Australia time and is half an hour behind the rest of NSW.

 We arrived on Saturday afternoon to find the place pretty much shut as we might have expected an Australian city to be in 1982 but it came as a bit of a surprise in 2017 so we went off in search of a caravan park. There were two in the city (Broken Hill is officially a city but really is the size of a smallish town by UK standards) and we chose the friendlier of the two, Lake View. It should really have been called scrapyard view but it was ok if we didn't look in that direction.

 Broken Hill came to be because silver was found in the area and miners headed there to make their fortune. It is known as Silver Town and the roads were all named after minerals, Bromide, Sulphide, Kaolin, Beryl etc. and, because it is so far from anywhere, houses were originally built from any materials that were available and some of them are still standing.It is also home to the Big Ant and the Big Bench, there are a lot of ants there but I failed to grasp the connection with the bench. 

There was a huge mine at the back of the town with massive heaps of tailings piled up behind the buildings, as someone who remembers the Aberfan disaster, I found this a bit alarming but I am sure with present day health and safety regulations it must have been safer than it looked. We drove up to the mine visitors centre (shut) and had a look at the miners' memorial which was a splendid structure made of rusty metal with the names of all those killed while working in the mine and the manner of their deaths. Looking at the sheer numbers and bizarre ways in which they perished certainly reminded us what a tough life this was. In the early 20th century, if a miner was killed a siren would sound and a black flag was raised for the people of the town to see, so all the families of the miners must have been worried sick it might be their loved one until news filtered down naming the victim!

 After all this deep thought we fancied a drink so went to Mario's Palace Hotel, featured in Priscilla Queen of the Desert. A previous owner, Mario, painted the whole of the interior with friezes based on old masters and the pub is now the hub for the Broken Heel Drag Festival. The pub hosts drag bingo once a month and there were a couple of people in drag having a drink while we were there. Of all the things I had thought went on in the outback, going for a beer in drag wasn't one of them. The pub was fabulous, apart from the friezes, the place was dripping with glitter balls and there were sparkly shoes and tinsel curtains everywhere. 

 Next stop was The Royal Flying Doctor Service. The visitor centre was excellent and we were taken on a tour by a very knowledgeable guide who was surprised we were familiar with their work in the UK. My vision of the Flying Doctors was all about them landing on remote properties to rescue injured farmers or deliver babies but, although they do that, the main part of their work is providing clinics to remote towns. The plane loads up with a couple of doctors, nurses, a dentist, an alcohol and drugs counsellor and family planning advisor and they set up for the day in a pub or church hall. All remote towns and farms have a medical box with the contents numbered for emergencies so they can phone the Flying Doctor centre and be talked through administering treatment until the doctor can get there.
The last visit in Broken Hill was to see the School of the Air.

 This can be seen in action but must be booked in advance, which we had not done, it was enough for me just to see where it took place though. I was fascinated by the idea of the School of the Air when I was a child and thought it would be wonderful to sit in my pyjamas eating crisps during my lessons safe in the knowledge that the teacher would not know.

 After we had waved goodbye to Willandra and our friends we had to backtrack to Griffith to retrieve Monty from the kennels before continuing on our adventure.
Griffith is a very large town and serves as the big, go to place for remote communities in this part of New South Wales. There is a huge poster at the entrance to the town boasting that one in every four glasses of wine produced in Australia comes from Griffith. That seemed like a bit of a bold statement but the first two wineries we drove past were Yellow Tail and De Bertolli so maybe not an exaggeration after all. 

Monty was mighty relieved to see us and we decided to stay a night in Griffith rather than pressing on further that day. There was not a great choice of caravan parks and we plumped for one right in the centre which was a bit on the trashy side but quite cheap, $20 unpowered which was pretty good for a town centre. We wondered about the big gates that were locked at nightfall and all the digital locks on the showers and toilets but didn't think much of it until it started to become apparent that the park seemed to be home to people the council could not find homes for - mainly because nobody wanted to live next door to them! We left pretty sharpish in the morning and carried on our way past cotton fields again heading for Booligal along a 50km dirt road. There wasn't much there apart from the Duke of Edinburgh pub so we pressed on because we needed to get some more kilometres under our belts in order to reach our next target destination of Menindee by the following night.

 The Cobb Highway took us through the Long Paddock where sheep, cows and goats just wandered into the road when they felt like it and past Mossgiel which had an information point so we got out to have a look. Mossgiel was once a boom town but, because of the combined pressures of drought, typhoid, a mouse plague and an egg shortage it all fell apart and now only one house remains. 
 Eventually we rolled into Ivanhoe which is the kind of small town which usually offers free camping. This little town didn't however and there was only one place to stay so we had to pay $23 for an unpowered site which was a bit steep for a town in the middle of nowhere. All was forgiven however, when we sampled the showers which were scorching hot and wonderful, very welcome as it became really cold there as evening approached.
The following morning we had a bit of an explore and found that Ivanhoe was struggling. There were closed shops including the most beautiful store with old fashioned cabinets and signs still visible on all the sections leading the customer to Haberdashery, Hats, Coats, Frocks, Mercery and Manchester! Probably the funniest of these terms is Manchester which is the name for bed and table linen but it is still used all across Australia and we regularly hear it on TV adverts. The most worrying closed shop though was the grocery store. This little town was in the middle of nowhere and there was not anywhere apart from the petrol station to buy food. The locals were trying to drum up enough support to start a community grocery store, I hope they succeed.
 The next 210km of our journey was along an unsealed road. Driving along dirt roads certainly keeps you awake, it was a very long, straight route with flat landscape as far as the eye could see so a tarmac road could be quite sleep inducing. We were driving alongside the Indian Pacific Railway but did not see a single train and we only encountered seven cars on the whole journey to Menindee Lakes. 
Once we arrived we headed for Lake Pamamaroo and set up camp for free on the edge of the lake. It was sensational, the most beautiful place I have ever camped. The lakes were full because it was a wet summer in far west NSW and there was an astonishing array of waterbirds. Spoonbills, herons, egrets, cormorants and even pelicans make their home there which I was stunned by because how did they know to travel inland to find this place?
 There were plenty of other birds too and the sunsets were to die for, we could not believe our luck.
Although we were free camping, a proper toilet was provided in the nearby Burke and Wills campsite, so named because Menindee was the last place Burke and Wills camped before they set off on their ill fated trek to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860.  They succeeded on their mission but perished on the return journey when they reached their camp only to find that their support team had given up waiting for them and left just 9 hours earlier.
 The town has a population of 900 and is a mix of beautiful and hideous buildings. They certainly make the most of the Burke and Wills connection as there are references to them everywhere and there was a big memorial on a rock outside the pub where they spent the night, presumably their last in proper beds. After a quick look around we headed back to our gorgeous camp on the edge of the lake and spent the next few days trying to get pictures of birds and sunsets.