I've been to Broken Hill quite a few times, usually when driving from Sydney to Adelaide in South Australia and I can attest it's not the most hospitable place on earth—although I've been to worse places elsewhere in Australia. It's usually horribly dry, very hot, especially in summer, and there is very little vegetation (trees are somewhat of a luxury).<p>It has 'Hill' in name because the terrain changes on either side of the road that enters and leaves the town, the first sign one gets that one is nearing the place is that the dead flat landscape one has just driven through for hundreds of miles starts to undulate.<p>There's precious little of interest there although the town is of historical importance and very important to New south Wales, if one is interested in mining and early 20th-Century mining towns then it's probably worth a visit. With the exception of its slightly varying terrain, it's unlikely it'd be on the map if it were not for its wealth of minerals and mining.<p>For those who have never visited Australia there's one thing to understand about this country and that is it's a land of extremes: there's lots of desert, many droughts and where there's vegetation there will be periodic bushfires of enormous proportions. And when it eventually does rain it pours down and the floods cause immense damage.