Long before silver, this was the country of the Wilyakali people, and the wider region belongs to the Paakantyi, Maljangapa, and Ngiyampaa language groups. They lived in a land of little permanent water, knowledge of which was survival itself. When the British explorer Charles Sturt pushed through in 1844, hunting for an imagined inland sea, he was guided along Stephens Creek by an Aboriginal teenager from Menindee named Topar; without that local knowledge the expedition would have struggled badly in such unforgiving country. Sturt named the Barrier Range for the way it blocked his path north. The land that the newcomers would soon call Willyama, and then Broken Hill, had already been known and walked for many thousands of years.

In September 1883, a boundary rider on the Mount Gipps sheep station named Charles Rasp pegged out a mineral lease over an outcrop he believed held tin. He was wrong about the tin, but spectacularly right about the place. When silver ore turned up in 1885, Rasp and six associates registered the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, the Syndicate of Seven, to mine the lode. That company, BHP, would grow into one of the largest mining firms on the planet, its birth rooted in this single outback ridge. The town exploded into being. Yet by 1915 BHP knew its ore reserves here were finite and began moving into steel; its Broken Hill mines closed in 1939, though others worked the northern and southern ends of the Line of Lode for decades more, and mining continues today.

Broken Hill became a byword for industrial struggle. The work was dangerous and the company powerful, and the miners answered with organisation as fierce as anything in Australian history. The great disputes of 1892, 1909, and 1919 are remembered far beyond the city, and out of them, in 1923, came the Barrier Industrial Council, an alliance of eighteen unions that effectively ran the town for generations. The price of that fight is etched into the rust-red Line of Lode Miners' Memorial, opened in 2001 on a hill above the city, where the names of more than 800 miners killed underground are cut into freestanding glass. The Trades Hall on Sulphide Street and the Women's Memorial in the Town Square tell the same story from different angles: a city that organised itself around labour and never forgot its dead.

For a place surrounded by desert, Broken Hill is startlingly green and startlingly creative. In the 1930s, the people deliberately planted regeneration reserves to wall the town against the dust storms that scour the plains. The fierce outback light drew painters, most famously Pro Hart, who with Jack Absalom, Eric Minchin, and others formed the Brushmen of the Bush and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. Just north of town, on Sundown Hill, twelve giant sandstone sculptures carved by international artists in 1993 stand against the sunset in the Living Desert. The isolation that defines the city also shaped its institutions: the Royal Flying Doctor Service runs a major base here, and the Broken Hill School of the Air, founded in 1956, has long taught children scattered across hundreds of kilometres of outback by radio and now by screen.

Broken Hill wears its strangeness well. Its desert backdrop has stood in for the end of the world in films from Mad Max 2 to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, whose drag heroines made the city's flamboyant Palace Hotel famous. There are nearly two million Merino sheep in the surrounding country, far outnumbering the people. The Battle of Broken Hill, a strange and deadly episode on New Year's Day 1915 when two men firing on a picnic train brought the First World War to Australian soil, is remembered at White Rocks Reserve. And in 2015, after a decade-long campaign, Broken Hill became the first entire city in Australia to be added to the National Heritage List. The broken hill itself is long gone, mined into history, but the Silver City it created endures as the longest-running mining town in the country.