Broken Hill and the Line of Lode

A city sitting on one continuous ore body, still working

Broken Hill sits in the Barrier Range of far western New South Wales, on the traditional lands of the Wilyakali people, more than 1,100 km from Sydney and closer to Adelaide. Its clocks still run on South Australian time, a leftover from the days when the only direct railway ran to Adelaide.

The range got its name in 1844 from the explorer Charles Sturt, guided up Stephens Creek by a Menindee teenager called Topar. Sturt was hunting for an inland sea, the hills blocked his way north, and in his diary he mentioned a "Broken Hill." That hill was the exposed spine of one of the world's largest silver, lead and zinc deposits, formed about 1,800 million years ago and shaped like a boomerang, plunging into the earth at both ends and breaking the surface in the middle as a jagged ridge. Miners called it the Line of Lode.

In 1883 Charles Rasp, a boundary rider patrolling the Mount Gipps station fences, picked up samples he took for tin. They were silver and lead. In 1885 Rasp and six partners, the Syndicate of Seven, founded the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, which grew into BHP. Other companies worked the north and south ends of the lode, the field became a centre of mining innovation that made froth flotation a working process, and the broken hill itself was mined clean away. The ore left its mark far beyond town: lead bearing the isotope signature of Broken Hill ore has turned up in ice cores across all of Antarctica, dating back to the late 19th century.

The mines made fortunes and fights. Some of Australia's bitterest industrial disputes were fought here, in 1892, 1909 and 1919, and in 1923 the last of them produced the Barrier Industrial Council, a federation of 18 unions that became one of the most powerful forces in the city's politics. ABC News called the town the birthplace of Australia's union movement and the eight-hour day. BHP itself moved into steel from 1915 and stopped mining at Broken Hill in 1939, but others carried on, and the city remains Australia's longest-running mining town, still producing around two million tonnes a year.

The price is written on the hill. The Line of Lode Miners Memorial, opened in 2001, stands on a 30-metre heap of mullock in the middle of town, and inside its high rust-red steel walls the names of more than 800 miners killed at Broken Hill are etched into freestanding glass panels. In 2015 Broken Hill became the first city in Australia to be placed, whole, on the National Heritage List, after a campaign the council began a decade earlier.