The Silver City

<p>Broken Hill in the early 1900s was a hell on earth. In his 1956 book <strong><em>The Silver City</em></strong> which draws on his childhood experiences in Broken Hill he produces some of his most evocative writing to describe it:</p><p> <em>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...</em></p><p> In <strong><em>The Silver City</em></strong> Idriess also conveys an acute sense of his distress at the despoilation of the natural world by wave after wave of settlers...</p><p> - Yvonne Preston <em>The Canberra Times</em></p>