When Rupert Murdoch Came to Tea

Whoever coined the phrase 'the middle of nowhere' must have had Broken Hill in mind, because that's where it was -- and still is, although the Road to Nowhere is now all-weather tarmac. Seven hundred miles due west of Sydney. Three hundred and thirty miles northeast of Adelaide. It sprawls about the low range of lode-bearing hills, and, when I was a child, was dominated by the artificial mountains of skimp, grey silt-like stuff that was left over once the ore was extracted from the mines. Most of the skimp dumps are gone now, reprocessed, when extraction techniques improved, for the ore they still contained. To me the town is all the poorer for their demise.