Built in 1903, the residence is Federation Queen Anne in style, but the design was reworked for the brutal climate of the Far West. Most houses of the period wrapped a veranda around a single corner. Here the veranda encircles three full sides of the building, shading the rooms from a sun that routinely drives the outback past 40 degrees. The detailing gives away its origins: the red brick framing the windows in quoined surrounds follows South Australian fashion, suggesting the plans came from Adelaide rather than Sydney. That made it unusual. Most of Broken Hill's grand public buildings were designed in Sydney, but this manager's house borrowed the architectural language of the colony just across the border, the one whose trade and rail lines the Silver City actually faced.

The house is bound up with James Hebbard, manager of the Central Mine, and he was no ordinary boss. Historian Geoffrey Blainey records that Hebbard, a former government inspector of mines, ran what was then the most advanced industrial plant in Australia. He rotated men out of the dustiest jobs to limit their exposure, and he insisted that every worker in the plant wear a respirator — decades before the field's other companies would even enforce hard hats underground. In a place where lung disease quietly killed generations of miners, one historian credits Hebbard with saving hundreds of lives. He likely met fierce resistance from the very men he was protecting. The Hebbards filled the house with town life: weddings, choir, visiting dignitaries. During the bitter strike of 1918, family legend holds that Hebbard carried thin steel rods down to the picket line to be bent into knitting needles for women making socks for soldiers in Europe.

The Central Mine closed in 1940, and the grand house turned to a very different purpose. The Catholic Bishop of Wilcannia-Forbes bought it for the Sisters of Compassion, who ran it as St Anne's Home of Compassion — an orphanage that operated until around 1984. Through those decades, Aboriginal girls, aged from two to sixteen, were sent here from across New South Wales, far from their families and Country. The house holds, in the careful words of its heritage listing, both good and sad memories for the many people who grew up inside it. To stand here is to hold two truths at once: a building raised to display the wealth of mining, later filled with children separated from everything they knew. Both belong to its history.

Today the building serves as the administration centre for an aged-care provider, Southern Cross Care, and it was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register in December 2006. Its rarity is part of its value: a largely intact nineteenth-century town house standing among the small workers' cottages that still make up most of Broken Hill. It is one of a ring of managers' residences that once surrounded the leases along the Line of Lode, the great mineralised ridge that gave the city its silver, lead and zinc — and its name. The verandas still throw their long afternoon shade. The rooms still hold their stories, all of them.