The Priscilla Suite at the Palace Hotel

It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to spend the night in an honest-to-goodness movie set. Unless of course, you live in Broken Hill. Immortalised in the 1994-released Aussie cinema classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert, the aptly name Priscilla Suite at the Palace Hotel is available for paying guests. It's been painstakingly preserved so that it appears exactly as it does in the movie. Or at least the bedroom has. The kitsch-as-hell decor, including a pretty politically incorrect lamp, velour headboard and tacky bakelite vanity, is counterpointed by the fabulous eccentricities of the rest of the facilities, including a sparkly bathroom with a roll-top bath and crystal chandelier, an eye-popping multicoloured dressing room, and a disco ball in the room’s entrance hall. The walls are covered by vivid murals of bucolic landscapes, painted by a local First Nations artist, Gordon Wayne. This may sound like a lot, but at the Palace Hotel, too much is never enough. This extraordinary pub is covered by similar landscape murals, painted by both Wayne and the pub’s former owner Mario Celotto, on virtually every surface of the Palace's ornate interior. Constructed in 1889 as a grand coffee salon during the height of Broken Hill’s mining boom, the Palace is today best known for its cinematic legacy and as the home of the annual Broken Heel Festival, a celebration of drag and queer culture that attracts LGBTQIA+ people from all over the country.