Qualla: First BHP Offices Chimney Ruin

First BHP Offices Chimney Ruin: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 3.0. It looks like nothing — a single stone-and-brick chimney standing alone on open ground, sheltered under a tin roof on four metal poles, ringed by a wire fence. You could walk past it without a second glance. Yet this humble fireplace once warmed the office of a company that would help build modern Australia. BHP — today one of the largest mining and resources companies on Earth — began here, in a miner's hut on the Willyama Common, in the same year that Broken Hill itself began.

Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 3.0

First BHP Offices Chimney Ruin: Canvas Town and the Syndicate of Seven

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1883, sheep grazed across the Mount Gipps Station when three of its workers — Charles Rasp, David James and James Poole — pegged the first mineral lease in a paddock named, decades earlier, by the explorer Charles Sturt for a broken hill on the horizon. Six more leases followe...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

First BHP Offices Chimney Ruin: Two Weeks, One Hut, a Company Born

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. In April 1885 the syndicate appointed William Jamieson as their first manager. He moved fast. Within two weeks, working alongside two labourers named Alf Orman and Tom Phin, Jamieson had established a camp at the foot of Block 14 and thrown up the first structures on the field. O...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

First BHP Offices Chimney Ruin: The Last Stone Standing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1888, the company had moved on to wooden staff houses and a handsome stone office a few hundred metres to the northwest, and the old hut was left behind. Time took the rest of it. Only the chimney remained, the fireplace that Tom Phin and A.W.B. Orman had laid in random stone ...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

First BHP Offices Chimney Ruin: Reading a Ruin

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register in April 2010, the chimney is valued not for its grandeur — it has none — but for what it marks. No photograph of the original hut has ever been found. There is only this fireplace, and a weathered metal plaque that reads, simp...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0