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 followed along what became the Line of Lode, and seven men joined forces as the Syndicate of Seven. When Philip Charley found silver on his lease in 1885, the rush was on. A township was thrown up almost overnight — so makeshift that an entire suburb was simply called Canvas Town, after the tents and tarpaulins its first residents lived under. Out of that dust and improvisation, the syndicate named their venture the Broken Hill Mining Company.

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. One of them was a small hut — and for a short time it doubled as the company's works office, the place where every piece of mining business was conducted. From this single room Jamieson planned the mine's earliest development, including its first smelters. In August 1885 the syndicate formally registered the name that would echo through Australian history: the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, BHP. Jamieson himself resigned by the end of that first year, his job done. The hut he had built outlasted his tenure by more than a century — at least, part of it did.

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 and brick. Remarkably, even the early company recognised what it had: around 1907, BHP fenced the chimney with a wooden railing so that it might be preserved. The top section was later rebuilt, and a simple shelter raised over it. In 2008, under the city council's heritage advisor, the stonework was repointed and interpretive signs added. BHP ceased operations at Broken Hill in 1939, but its first hearth still stands where the company was born.

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, simply: 'This fireplace built by Tom Phin and A.W.B. Orman 1885 is part of the first office of the B.H.P.' From a company that shaped Australia's mining, industry and immigration over more than a century, this is the unlikely seed. It is a useful reminder that even the largest enterprises begin small — sometimes as small as a hut on a dusty common, where a few men lit a fire and got to work.