ARTIST Rick Ball visited Broken Hill twenty two years ago on the recommendation of a friend, and decided to stay.
He has family history in Broken Hill; his grandmother grew up here and great-grandfather relocated to Broken Hill from Silverton, but he only ever passed through on route to elsewhere.
“I’d visited, stopped off on the way through, but it was always on my family map,” he said.
Having grown up in Sydney before living in the Blue Mountains and Mittagong, Ball said he’d been struggling to afford being an artist.
“(The friend) said to me, you know, I think you might like it out there,” he said.
Ball stayed for a week at what was then the West Darling Hotel, now the Broken Hill Pub.
He then decided he’d like to buy a house and relocate to Broken Hill.
“I’d been looking around at properties and I had one more day, I was heading off, and I was brought here, just before I had to leave,” he said of his house-turned-art-studio.
“The real estate agent said nobody has been living here for several years. This was in the middle of a very bad drought, so houses were very cheap here.”
He submitted an offer which was accepted and began approaching schools in search of work as an art teacher.
“I checked out the availability of work in the schools, and when I spoke to the person at the main office they said ‘when can you start? Tomorrow?’”
He began teaching casually at Broken Hill High School.
“Then I got a phone call from the principal at Menindee one day and someone had recommended I might be a suitable person to work with the kids and I went down and had a few days there,” he said.
“My first day I remember hardly any of the kids were in the classroom. It was a respectful, pleasant chaos. Kids were running the place more than anything.”
Mr Ball said he instantly liked the students and school at Menindee and found the experience both challenging and deeply fulfilling.
“I was interested in this passionate distaste for classroom learning,” he said.
“It took me a few years to soften this very hard soil and tend to that in-between thing between teacher and student to develop trust and a sense of safety.”
Ball said the students began producing creative work well beyond what was expected.
“The kids were producing outstanding stuff, and I wasn’t directing it, it was coming out of them,” he said.
“My approach was: it’s not me or the art world or the history of art, it’s about you as a remarkable product of thousands of ancestors who each contributed to you. Those ancestors are here, interested in what you’re going to do with this gift of being here and alive. And the kids connected with that.”
Ball said this concept of being a product of deep time and endless generations of ancestry has informed his own arts practice too.
“My chief interest has always been the impulse in humans to build ceremony and to dance the way we do and sing and to make marks on rock or on our bodies,” he said.
“Before there was an art world and galleries and art as such, there was this impetus to express meaning in the community, and that’s the sort of art I’m interested in.”
He said the landscape and lifestyle in Broken Hill has had a strong impact on the work he has created since moving here.
“The gravitational pull of what is important in the cities, I don’t feel it so much out here,” he said.
“The land, the power of the continent we live on, Australia’s rocks and waterways and trees and little scrubby surviving desert animals, it’s so powerful, the narrative that runs through this ancient land.
“I’ve travelled in different parts of the world and they’re just teenage lands in comparison.”
Ball has recently taken a short break from art to allow his intuition to guide his creativity.
“I’m just getting back, slowly, gradually, after taking several months off,” he said.
Listening to music, gardening and long walks in the hills around Broken Hill have been some of Ball’s favourite activities.
“I need to take time away because there’s stuff that needs to come out,” he said. “So I need time to just sit and read crime novels and fix the studio space up ready for when it comes. I know it will.”
