Friday, February 9, 2007

Silverton Hotel

Well this watering hole is in the middle of nowhere mate it's about 25kms away from Broken Hill down a potholed invested stretch of tar. If you pass the pub and keep heading into the sticks you will come upon a lookout with a carpark next to it. From there the road drops down into a land only a bloke like Jack Absalom could bring life too. from the lookout you can lay your eyes on one of Australia's most beaut views, overlooking the Mundi Mundi plains into the Never Never and is commonly referred by the aborigines as looking over the mundi mundi plains into the never never..... (not a very hard language to get use to).
The Silverton Hotel is located in a little place called Silverton (hence the name) which is a little ghost town with about 50 people living in it, it was once a thriving mining town with more then 3000 but once the mines closed so did the town. The town paper wrote in 1887... 'The scum of the country began to be attracted to the new fields like blowflies to a carcase. Horse-stealer's, cattle duffers, rogues, robbers, all came to this mining town' sounds a bit like present day Canberra!. Nowadays there's some art's and craft shops and art galleries. But as for the Pub it's a beaut little watering hole with that old Australian style about it, you can pop in any time of day and there will probably be a bushie or worker inside having a yarn and sinking a coldie. Or a group of oldies on a bus trip into the Never Never or maybe just a couple of backpackers on walkabout. The Pub has heaps of bush memorabilia all over it and has some pictures of different times the Pub has been used in films. Like the movies Razorback, Dirty Deeds, A town like Alice, and the Mad Max movies. Actually Mel Gibson's famous V8 INTERCEPTOR is sometimes parked outside the Pub.
It's one of those Pubs that you have to see to appreciate, just imagine you've had a hot day in the car as the air conditioning in the commodore has just shit itself (which isn't that hard to imagine..... believe me) and you've had a gander at the art galleries. You walk into the hotel and sit back and wrap ya laughing gear around an icy cold schooner of Toothys..... life's pretty good mate. And the publican has always got a yarn about something to tell everyone, and if ya get there just before sundown as per ANYWHERE in Australian bush country, the whole place just lights up in every shade of orange you can point a bloody stick at mate.