Esther, Queen of the Desert
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I am in Broken Hill, New South Wales: the Silver City. Besides being a classic Australian mining town, it has been the location for some cult movies – including Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The central set for the music was the marvellous Palace Hotel, whose co-owner is today’s guest. Esther La Rovere has been telling me what makes Broken Hill so special.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 6th of March. |
| 0:09.8 | I have found the most astonishingly Australian location in the world. I'm speaking to you from |
| 0:16.6 | beautiful Broken Hill, which is in New South Wales Wales but very close to the South Australian border |
| 0:22.5 | not too far actually north of the Victorian border I'm here for all sorts of reasons |
| 0:27.7 | partly to get to the heart of Australia but also because you might remember a film called |
| 0:33.4 | Priscilla Queen of the Desert it was set here in a wonderful location where I happen to be |
| 0:40.1 | staying for a very reasonable $80 a night, the Palace Hotel. I am delighted to be talking to the |
| 0:47.5 | owner, Esther La Reverevere. Esther, you own the palace along with your sister and your brother-in-law. |
| 0:52.7 | I sure do. Yeah, I've been there, so probably 16 years, I think it is now. Tell us about the place. We bought the hotel. It had actually been closed for a couple of years. So Mario, who was the long-time owner, had unfortunately passed away and the building had been closed. So it's been a slow process of renovation and getting that building |
| 1:11.4 | back into full operation. You know, as you see, it's very large building, three-story, big |
| 1:16.4 | ornate Australian sort of Federation heritage architecture and covered in, of course, all of those |
| 1:22.3 | fantastic murals that you see in Priscilla that were painted by an indigenous artist. |
| 1:27.4 | It is a piece of |
| 1:29.1 | art architecture and history. Can you tell me a bit about it, story? Building was originally |
| 1:34.8 | built in 1889 and funded by the Temperance Movement. So of course, so anti-alcohol and they |
| 1:40.8 | built it as a coffee palace. So back in the day, but you know, as you can |
| 1:45.1 | imagine, probably Pengement wasn't so much for coffee and it did turn into a working hotel |
| 1:49.3 | only two years later. I was there on Wednesday night, karaoke night. It was fantastic, |
| 1:54.4 | but not too much coffee being drunk from what I can say. No. It's sort of become absolutely the social hub for the town. |
| 2:03.4 | There must have been 200 people there, |
| 2:06.0 | spilling out onto the street, |
| 2:07.7 | just a really good atmosphere. |
... |
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