It's a quirky claim to fame. Broken Hill museum owner and former miner Kevin "Bushy" White claims to be the only artist to have depicted the town's history,  mines, unions and workers,  using rare local minerals exclusively as his paint.

He is one of a breed of Broken Hill characters who have opened private museums and galleries to tell their stories and show their art.  White's museum, which includes nearly 1000 historical works based on old black and white photos, is one of dozens in the town, despite a 30 per cent drop in the Hill's population since the heyday of mining. 

Across NSW, museum experts are working with collectors like Mr White to sort the rich from the raff, preserve these collections for the future, work out succession plans and make it easier for visitors to find them.

Many, like Mr White's museum, don't have a website or email.
 

Mr White is described as a character in a town where larrikins are plenty. A visit to  Whites Minerals and Mining Museum (with his wife's doll museum in one wing) has a touch of the ghost train about it. 

To prove that the artworks are indestructible, the 74-year-old Mr White scrapes his fingernails down the hard surface of the ground minerals with glue. It's an effect much like nails on a chalkboard. 

"You've got to realise all these minerals are underground, you don't see them above ground," Mr White said. His palette is more than 40 rare minerals – some seen above ground in street names like Calcite and Galena in Broken Hill – which are now nearly impossible to find.

"When you are underground, you are wearing your cap lamp, and every time you shine your light around ... it all twinkles," he said.

In interviews, Mr White often says he was struck by the beauty underground when he was working with the Zinc Corporation in 1971. He came home to his wife, and said, "It's dark down there, Betty – but it's beautiful."

To illustrate, Mr White turns the lights off in the museum built by his family in 1984 to resemble an underground mine. 

He then talks by candlelight. "The pretty green is the feldspar of Broken Hill. And this green over here is malachite. But the most important part of these artworks, the only thing you want in Broken Hill when you mine, is the galena [lead and silver] and we want the sphalerite, which is zinc."

NSW museum adviser Lynn Collins said Mr White was "one of these quirky characters who presents a bit of theatre".

Mr Collins, who is employed by Broken Hill City Council with support from Museum and Galleries NSW, is working with Mr White to preserve his stories (as well as some of the objects) which tell the story of mateship and Broken Hill in its heyday. 

"When I was there and you went underground, you'd always have a mate with you,"  Mr White said.  "Comradeship and mateship, it was all about that in the mines. It doesn't matter whether he was the biggest drunk in Broken Hill, you trusted him, you worked with him."

The museum includes portraits of some of the 800 miners who were killed down the mines. There are also images of Mr White's crib tin. Crib tins held miners' lunches, playing cards and cribbage sets for underground games at lunch and during breaks, and most would fill them with minerals at the end of the day.

"Once you emptied [your crib tin], you filled it up with minerals. And they let you do that for hundreds of years," he said. 

Now that mining is automated, the ore is crushed before it is brought to the surface. "You can't get the minerals anymore, because they crush it up before it comes up," Mr  White said.

Mr White's work also includes images of headstones of scab labourers, erected to show what would happen to unionised workers if they worked during a strike. 

"They said, these scabs should be dead. So they put their names [the scabs that tried to take over jobs from our men that worked here] on the graves. They should be dead, but no one died."