Concrete Playground

A not-so-sleepy mining town known as the ‘capital of the outback’, Broken Hill has  many stories waiting to be uncovered.

Nice Dreams centres around one true story known as The Battle of Broken Hill: a tragic and bizzare event involving a persecuted halal butcher, his neighbour, a marijuana-peddling ice-cream vendor, and their attack on the entire British Empire, embodied in an unfortunate train carriage full of picnickers.

Sumugan Sivanesan and Gustavo Böke’s reimagining of this event draws on both contemporary dialogues about terrorism and Broken Hill’s history of Australian genre film to transform this series of accidents into an absurdist comedy of hallucinations and confused dreams.

If you happen to visit this exhibition at the right moment, you may even experience Sivanesan’s hilarious yet historically accurate narration or Böke handing out ice-creams in costume.