Sunset Strip

Sunset Strip. The name that conjures images of Hollywood glamour - movie stars, rock stars, billboards, boutiques, the castle-like Chateau Marmont hotel and clubs with legendary names such as Whisky A-Go-Go, the Roxy and the Viper Room. That's Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, a stretch of road where the American dream lives large. Sunset Strip in outback New South Wales is similar, in that it is a where the Outback Australian dream lives large, but unlike its Californian counterpart, it that says nothing about glamour but everything about outback irony and the Australian dream - a holiday house with water views.

Where is it?: 20 km north of Menindee, along the Broken Hill Rd, is a signposted turnoff, on the left, to Sunset Strip which is situated on the northern shore of Lake Menindee.

Sunset Strip far-western NSW-style is a rather bizarre manifestation of the Australian quest for a holiday by the sea - a quest driven by the fact that the vast majority of the country's population is located along the coastal fringe. That has not stopped the people of the dusty mining city of Broken Hill. Despite living in the middle of the desert, they gladly drive nearly 100 km to gaze out upon a muddy lake full of dead trees in a rather odd version of a waterfront resort. Instead of the overdone and often tasteless 'luxury villas' of the the coastal resorts there are inexpensive, kit-type holiday homes where corrugated iron is more common than brick. While the well-irrigated gardens are attractive, the exteriors of the houses are often awful. If nothing else Sunset Strip certainly affords genuine insight into the priorities of Australians.

Sunset Strip sits on the northern shore of mighty Lake Menindee, 100 kilometres east of the Hill. There are about 100 dwellings, built as only conventional Australian holiday shacks can be - devoid of aesthetics but oozing utilitarian charm. A lot of the corrugated iron, concrete, bricks and fibro were "borrowed" from the Broken Hill mines. Nothing on Sunset Strip will ever grace the cover of Vogue Living but those who own a piece of it say, fair dinkum, it's paradise on Earth.



The Menindee Lakes are a series of natural and ephemeral lakes that only used to fill when the nearby Darling River flooded. Lake Menindee, at 168 square kilometres, is the biggest. It can hold 594,500 megalitres - more water than Sydney Harbour. Officially opened in 1960, the Menindee Lakes Scheme "realised a dream of an oasis in the outback", according to a Central Darling Shire plaque. The idea of an oasis in the outback appealed to the residents of Broken Hill, and Sunset Strip was born.

It's an outback oasis of holiday homes with glorious water views that stretch almost to the horizon - at least, it is, when the lake is full. But just as Hollywood's Sunset Strip is sometimes referred to as the "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams", so too is Menindee's Sunset Strip when the lake dries up. Drought has seen Sunset Strip occasionally lose its water views before but never for this long. However, Sunset Strippers don't blame the lack of water on drought or climate change - they blame the irrigated cotton industry that has been allowed to develop in recent decades on the Darling and its tributaries. Whatever the reason for the Murray-Darling Basin's lack of water at times, another factor is that the Menindee Lakes are so shallow, the extreme climate sees them typically lose to evaporation about half what they store each year - on average, at least 400,000 megalitres annually.

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