The Silver City

Broken Hill in the early 1900s was a hell on earth. In his 1956 book The Silver City, which draws on his childhood experiences in Broken Hill, he produces some of his most evocative writing to describe it:

Flies and dust and isolation, the deadening feeling that no-one else in the world knew or cared whether we lived or died out there, typhoid, pneumonia, dysentery and lead poisoning had to be put up with; so did the dirty brown water, so frightfully expensive, that in drought time came rumbling up in water trains from South Australia. When I think of air-conditioning and painless dentistry and hearken back to the memory of those days — what a wonderful story is in the medical, transport, electrical, chemical and technical discoveries that have done away with such an ocean of pain and death. . .

In The Silver City Idriess also conveys an acute sense of his distress at the despoliation of the natural world by wave

after wave of settlers… Yvonne Preston, The Canberra Times