Australia’s Big Things: The Big Bench in Broken Hill

This is a post in an ongoing series on the Big Things in Australia. If you like the post, be sure to follow along by subscribing to my RSS feed.

big bench broken hill australia There’s an outback town just on the edge of New South Wales that is home to another one of Australia’s big things. This town, Broken Hill, is an old silver mining town with an overwhelming amount of “hotels” (of the drinking kind) per capita. It is a picturesque location, one of which has been the backdrop for many big Australian movies (think Mad Max and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert).

Broken Hill makes for a great stop on any road trip from Sydney taking you to the outback areas of Alice Springs or further onto the Nullarbor Plain. Some attractions to consider at this location are the Living Desert Sculpture Symposium site, Silverton, old mines and a stop in some great national parks.

Besides these, visitors have the chance to visit the Big Bench.

The Big Bench is an over-sized park bench that makes even the biggest of people look and feel like a child again. It was constructed back in 2002 as a sculpture on top of the Line of Load hill and has since become a popular tourist attraction. With a size of 2.5 times a normal park bench, most people will need to use the bricks on the sides just to get up on it.

I was lucky to get the chance to see the Big Bench while on a whistle stop tour on my Indian Pacific train ride from Sydney to Perth. I was over in the direction of it as the rest of my group was in another part of the hill, so I had to be crafty when getting the photo below. There was also quite a bit of water on the bench, hence why I’m standing and not sitting (Broken Hill was very green this time around).

big bench brooke standing broken hill

If you’d like to see the Big Bench, you should definitely plan an outback adventure to Broken Hill, and here are the resources to do it:

Photo credit: 1, 2 – author.