My Grandfather was born and raised in Broken Hill, outback New South Wales. Defined by dust and mining no town could have been further from his desires. Broken Hill was known for its rich orebody. An arc of heavy minerals beneath its streets, the orebody flowed underfoot like a silent river of silver. It was the life-stream of the town. An oasis of the outback.
Everything in Broken Hill was coated in a fine powder of red: the drying washing, the du-coat fence lines, the cat's back, Mrs McGreggor's ashen wig. Its airborne soil cast the township under a rusted haze. A sleepy, scorched, rusted haze. And as my Grandfather played through endless summers of sunburnt days he dreamt only of a salve. A wet to all that dry. A cool to all that heat.
The orebody gave the town its name. Amidst the area's sweeping plains a jagged rocky ridge line rose up from nothing marking one end of the mineral formation. As if the silver had rained from the skies, the broken hill, this peak-less mountain, caught the leadened liquid and from its lee side the river then flowed. But its name was also a prophecy. It wasn't until my Grandfather was a man with a family - who had their own family - that the ridge line finally collapsed under its own weight. The years of pilfering, the years of men and their machines embezzling the rivers riches, caused the hill to break. My Grandfather told me that the collapse wasn't as dramatic as it sounded. It wasn't some cataclysmic implosion that threw up clouds of thick red ash. The hillside didn't spontaneously cast off great slabs of rock from its face. He said it was quiet and slow. A daily erosion. And as a child he swore he could hear it. Lying awake by night he listened to the distant groan. The low cracking and rumbling were calls of a landscape in lament. The miners had tapped the silver artery one too many times in the pursuit of blood. They were incessant. And finally one day the stone ran dry.
Lulled to sleep by the sounds of shifting earth my Grandfather said he would often dream of mountains. Glacial, icy, powder blue, snow-capped mountains. He told me that one dream in particular had always stuck in his mind where he and his brother had decided to walk the Arctic Circle. Both quite determined young men they set off well prepared and equipped ready for the extremity they were about to embark on. Stoked with chests full of courage they boarded a Norwegian breaker in pursuit of their first destination - a tiny island just one degree north of the invisible latitude. From across the rough slate seas they saw the rocky outcrop before them. Its sides reached high into the clouds. The sheer white cliff faces caught the light and cast off a cool blue that was as soft as it was stern. The image stood before them in complete opposition to everything they had experienced up to that point. Just as they took in this other worldly sight an origin-less rumbling began to sound. It grew in intensity, echoing in their ears. The sound was closing in near deafening them when they spied unusual activity in the ocean just off the island's coastline. From below the cliff face, emerging from the salted depths of the Arctic, great shelves of ice broke through the water's surface. In reversed slow motion the sheets rose up. They sucked their splash back into their watery void, rising and rising as if falling upwards. Finally the great chunks affixed themselves to the side of the island like pieces of a puzzle. As the slabs adhered themselves to the icy body from which they were born the noise subsided. The cracking and groaning dimmed to silence. Whole once more the island ceased its call and the landscape finally lay quiet.
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