40,000 years ago amid a series of freshwater lakes, the first Australians developed their unique culture. The climate was sub-tropical, the lakes teemed with fish and yabbies, giant kangaroos roamed the landscapes and birdlife filled the sky. Life was good and the natives put down roots, developed a tribal structure and learned to live in harmony with nature. Unfortunately nature is a feeble mistress and slowly the climate underwent one of its many dramatic changes and the last great ice age was the result. The lakes, so vital to the aborigines, dried up forcing the people to develop a nomadic lifestyle as their lives became dependant upon the one great necessity in inland Australia - water. Some were lucky and established themselves along the banks of Australia's mighty inland river, The Darling, where they struggled between the periods of minimal rainfall and devastating drought. Others were forced out into the wilderness where their whole lives became a battle against the elements as they trudged from one waterhole to another in their battle to survive. Water was such a precious commodity that these places took on an almost spiritual significance, much the same as a church has to modern religions and secret rites and ceremonies were enacted there.

 

The last and most fatal change for the aborigines came not from the climate but the arrival of European man. When James Cook landed at Botany Bay in1770 he changed their way of life forever. The first European to discover the Broken Hill region was Sir Thomas Mitchell, the New South Wales Surveyor General in 1841 some 28 years after the first crossing of the Blue Mountains. After Mitchell came the pastoralists and by the 1860's a profusion of small sheep stations had sprung up. The wool, mainly from the Spanish bred Merino, chosen for their ability to survive the harsh climate, was highly prized and after shearing was transported by bullock and dray to Wilcannia, from whence it was shipped b y paddle steamer to Melbourne and Adelaide then by clipper ship to England. By the 1870's many of these small stations proved to be unviable and were bought up by pastoral entrepreneurs, the foremost of these being Sydney Kidman, the famed "cattle king". By the mid 1880's Kidman owned all the land west of the Darling to the Queensland, Victorian and South Australian borders, an area equivalent in size to France. It was at this time that the man destined to change the fate of the region forever appeared on the scene: Charles Rasp was a boundary rider on Mt Gipps Station. He had arrived in Australia as a soldier in the New South Wales Regiment and claimed to be a Prussian aristocrat fleeing persecution as a result of the Franco-Prussian wars. Gold had been discovered at Tibooburra and Milparinka to the north and silver at Thakaringa to the west. The area where Broken Hill now stands was named by the explorer Charles Sturt in 1844 on his journey to try and find the inland sea; it got its title from a break in the Barrier Ranges that was impeding Sturt's northern progress. Locals had named it "The Hill of Mullock" rather disparagingly and the only mineral thought to reside under it was tin. Rasp had other ideas however and he had some samples sent to Adelaide for assaying. The results came back stating that the land contained good quantities of lead and zinc with traces of silver. On the basis of these results Rasp and six other workers on Mt Gipps Station pegged out a claim covering 10 blocks. Mining started in 1885 and within six months the syndicate struck rich veins of silver resulting in the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited being floated on the Stock Exchange in Melbourne and so was born BHP, Australia's biggest and most successful public company. Over the next 50 years the leases changed hands a number of times and other areas of the hill were pegged and worked without much success. By 1939 BHP had left Broken Hill never to return. The fortunes of the mines fluctuated with the price of base metals, booming during the 1960's and falling disastrously in the 1970's but still providing the bulk of employment for the city and becoming in the process the longest continuous mining operation in Australia.