A local’s guide to Broken Hill: ‘Chances are, someone will spark up a chat’

Artists are drawn to this historic outback mining town where creative energy meets red dirt, says the former director of the Broken Heel festival, Esther La Rovere

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My parents moved to Australia from Italy in the 1950s but they met here. I was born in Broken Hill, in far west New South Wales, on country that’s traditionally owned by the Wilyakali people. I left as a teenager but I came back in 2009 when my sister and I bought the Palace hotel (made famous in the 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). We started the Broken Heel festival in 2015 as a tribute to the film and last year it sadly hung up its heels.