“I hope you don’t mind”, said the woman behind the Palace Hotel counter when we booked in for dinner. “We have some drag queens coming to dinner. I hope you won’t be offended.”
This was our introduction to Broken Hill. The town that put the BH in BHP. The place that was built by miners, a community nestled in high black walls of mullock from more than 100 years of digging ore out of the ground.
Anyone who has seen the Australian movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert knows the Palace Hotel. Its mural walls were made famous in the low budget box office hit, a place where three drag queens – played by Hugo Weaving, Terence Stamp and Guy Pearce – stop off on their outback tour.
The 2015 version of Priscilla – Queens of the City – is brought to us by Simon and Justin among others, the cast of Simon Sez Productions.
Six large miners in flannie shirts and work boots order their meals as “Simoana” and friends make their grand entrance. There is a certain trepidation as to how these characters are going to take to the showgirls, a real life reflection of a similar scene in Priscilla. The miners look around at their mates, grin and shake their heads. The younger ones are embarrassed. The older ones look delighted at the entertainment.
Simoana and her pink sequins take a seat in the biggest miner’s lap.
“What do you do darling?” she asks.
“I own a mine.”
“Ooh, you like a big hole then?”
The miners crack up and restaurant relaxes.
The cast are here to bring a bit of theatre to the outback and it is absolute serendipity that we run into them at the end of an 11-hour drive. It was one of those last minute road trips where we committed to nothing else but getting to Broken Hill.
Chances are, when you conjure up an image of a country town, it is either a desolate main street, or a large regional centre, or the red earth of an outback town with a stray dog scratching.
But 36 hours in a ute will remind you that there are many incarnations of country towns which fit neither the Sunday Too Far Away image or the Wake in Fright model. It brought home the diversity of rural towns and the relentless search for their own secret ingredient that will bring people to visit or live and turn around the (commonly felt) economic malaise that has dogged them.
You will always find life if you follow a river. We stalked the Murrumbidgee, turned right, up the Murray and onto its junction with the Darling at the little town of Wentworth. We saw towns as small as Yenda, growing grapes to supply to big winemakers. And towns as as large as neighbouring Griffith, a busy hub which appeared to be full of vim, vigour and young men in noisy cars doing “mainies” on a Sunday night. Away from my own home landscape of sheep and wheat, there was a certain relief in the grapevines and fruit trees which lined the road. Homebuilt stalls, chock full of mandarins, oranges and fresh eggs selling for a pittance. Here, Italian restaurants are easily more plentiful than steakhouses. The flow of migrants, like the river, have fed the diversity of these towns.
On through Hay, machinery stores dot the landscape which has made money from sheep and wool, though in later years crops like rice and cotton have been grown. Standing on the edge of town, the museum Shear Outback pays homage to the work of shearers, a more common Australian legend than the migrant grower of the irrigation towns.
On the corner of the main street in Mildura, the Grand Hotel stands like an art deco tribute to development, more Hotel California than Australian country pub. Palm trees line its streets, which, like Manhattan, are named for numbers. On Seventh St, the Grand’s pergola flows with gnarled crimson grapevine and its courtyards are dotted with Italianate fountains. In the basement restaurant hides a chef of some note. Stefano Di Pieri was introduced to Australia via his television series, Gondola on the Murray. After a break from the restaurant business, he has returned to cooking and serves up a rich and honest Italian four course meal which would pass muster in any place around globe.
From Wentworth, we leave the river and drive through the sandhills to follow the Silver City Highway north to Broken Hill. The four hour drive is only punctuated by a roadhouse where hot milk has to substitute for coffee. At face value, the landscape is all red dirt and scrub but if you observe with a stockman’s eye, it changes constantly from low saltbush, to larger trees to dry lakes. You can see the dots of Indigenous paintings. Sheep pick their way through the foliage looking for a feed and goats weave in and out of fences. There is just no keeping a goat in.
Coming from the south, the first thing you notice about Broken Hill is the mountains of black mullock and the industrial machinery rising above them, rows of miners’ cottages and equipment yards, ringed by cyclone fences. If you have never been, you can probably still imagine the main street, wide verandahs, rows of heritage buildings and tributes to miners long dead and still toiling. Russell Drysdale’s painting, The Cricketers comes to mind, for its stone pub and veranda profile.
But there is not a mixed grill in sight at The Silly Goat, a main street cafe which offers paleo breakfasts of quinoa and poached eggs, a knockout avocado and eggs on toast and the best coffee of the trip. The waitress with the henna tattoo sends us to the Palace Hotel for dinner, which is how we end up in a dining room, sitting between miners and drag queens.
And while you may sniff at the idea of a drag show in a country pub as a little bit passe, there is a serious point to the Queens of the City. This cast has been touring for months now, through places like Renmark, Wyalla, Mildura and Broken Hill. And as the Simon and Justin do their nails, we talk about tolerance in country towns and the capacity to accept diversity in all its forms, sexual, cultural and physical. For example, it can be hard to come out in a rural community. Do they get any flak?
“Every town has been great but they all say, ‘oh you might get some stick down the road’,” says Simon. “They all think their own town is more accepting than the next one but we have never had any problems.”
What they do get are letters from small town residents, young and old, thanking them for turning up to show their little corner of the world that it is OK to be different.
“It is not just people who want to come out about their sexuality, it is also people who may feel constrained in any way about what people think of them. We had a letter from the wife of an old man in a wheelchair. One of us sat in his lap after the show and he had a photo with us and after he died, she wrote to tell us he treasured that photo and wanted to be buried with it.”
Here’s to diversity.
