Across every great dispute, the pattern held. In 1892, in 1919, and again in 1986, the women of Broken Hill organised the support that made long strikes survivable: raising money, distributing it, keeping spirits up through the toughest stretches when a single mining family's income simply stopped. This was not a supporting role in any small sense. A strike is a siege, and a siege is won or lost on whether the people behind the lines can endure. The women endured, and they made endurance possible for everyone else. Theirs was the labour that does not show up in the production figures or the union ledgers, but without it the famous battles of Broken Hill would have been lost before they began.

The memorial began with leftover money and a good decision. During an industrial dispute at the mine in 1986, the women of the town once again raised funds to sustain the strikers. When the dispute ended, a thousand dollars remained in the women's fund. Rather than simply divide it, they resolved to use it to build a memorial to themselves and to the generations of women who had done this work before them. The miners' union supplied the balance of the cost. It is a fitting origin for a monument to people whose contribution was always practical and collective: it was paid for, in the end, by the same kind of pooled effort it was built to honour.

The memorial is made of two pieces of black granite, cut and set by Zanon Memorials, carrying an image of a family and two passages of text. It was unveiled on 30 March 2001 by Martin Ferguson, then a federal opposition frontbencher with the Labor Party. The president of the miners' union, Eddie Butcher, dedicated it with words that fixed the meaning plainly: the women, he said, were the unsung heroes who stood by their men through the toughest and darkest hours of mining history, the backbone of Broken Hill's society, who truly deserved the recognition the monument would give them. In a town crowded with memorials to fallen miners and martyred union leaders, this one names a quieter, steadier kind of heroism.

There is something deliberate about the memorial's location in the Town Square, at the civic centre of the city rather than out at the mines. It places the women where the public business of Broken Hill happens, an everyday reminder rather than a remote shrine. The monument tells a truth that mining towns the world over have been slow to acknowledge: that the survival of a community under pressure depends on far more than the men at the rock face. Broken Hill's identity was forged in struggle, and this small black monument insists that the struggle had two fronts. The women held one of them, often without recognition, and the granite now makes sure they are not forgotten.