Facing the station platform, the slag heap loomed over the town, and stood as a daring clue to the stories to be unpicked. As I stepped off the Outback Explorer train, Broken Hill introduced me to a monumental reality.
I was tempted to find the First Heritage City in Australia exotic and seductive – except Broken Hill does not hide behind glossy brochures or luxury resorts. It is unfazed and uncomfortable, and eschews nostalgia.
I saw clear plastic bags of vintage ceramic shards for sale. They had been excavated from the Council rubbish tip by so-called 'dump diggers', pre-dating the 1924 closure of the tip at a time when the mining activities and population peaked. I brought one bag back to Sydney.
Artist Kathie Najar came across similar shards 260 km away in the bush at White Cliffs, and interpreted them as ‘white man’s midden’. Traditionally defined as archive-relics of indigenous domestic activity across the world, this midden iteration speaks instead of an imported culture — crockery used by the miners and their families, and their shared human experience on an unfamiliar soil. They also shed light on more than 800 accidental mining deaths and the resulting birth of the trade union movement.
The shards are earthenware with geometric or figurative coloured patterns. Their cracked glazes and ragged edges echo the outback raw aesthetic, and allude to the ongoing challenging narratives of Broken Hill.
Author and ceramicist Edmund de Waal retraces the biography of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke, carved miniatures, that was passed on in his family through five generations over 140 years. In context, De Waal refers to ‘the secret history of touch’.
'Family lores may share universal themes but, like the shards, they are uniquely fragmented, disjointed. These vignettes speak to one another across place and time, and eventually fuse to a composite mural.'
My collection numbers 234 pieces. I wonder about the hands that delicately grasped the original ceramic vessels. From the stages of pottery making, their packing then freighting in crates on ships and trains to Broken Hill, their unpacking and displaying in local shops, their purchase, their daily use and washing-up by mining families until they smashed and were trashed, and found their way to the Council tip when they remained for one hundred years.
Some time this century, the shards were dug out, cleaned, and then sold in a bag with others in a retail outlet. Now they are sitting