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
Idriess also conveys an acute sense of his distress at the despoilation of the natural world by wave after wave of settlers...
- Yvonne Preston,
The Canberra Times