Long before any of this, the land here had another name. The Wiljakali people called the country around the rise Coonbaralba, and they had moved through these arid plains for thousands of years, following the water that the gibber and saltbush so rarely gave up. The explorer Charles Sturt passed through in 1844 and named a nearby peak Mount Gibbs; over time the spelling drifted to Gipps. When the Barrier Ranges Company established a pastoral run here around 1863, it became the first station in the Barrier Range and one of the earliest west of the Darling River. This was sheep country at the very edge of where sheep could survive.

Rasp could not work the find alone. He joined two fellow station hands, David James and James Poole, and they took out a mining lease and sank a shaft into the dark outcrop. Early results discouraged them, but they persisted, and were soon joined by four more men working on Mount Gipps. The group called itself the Syndicate of Seven. For more than a year the hill gave up little but disappointment. Then, in January 1885, they struck a rich vein of silver. The Broken Hill Proprietary Company was born, and the rush was on. A shanty settlement called Canvas Town sprouted in the dust, and within a few years it had grown into a full mining city.

On 10 August 1885, the Syndicate of Seven floated the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited. The fortune that followed was almost beyond imagining. By 1890, Charles Rasp's shares in BHP were worth more than a million pounds, an extraordinary sum for a man who had been mending fences a few years earlier. He moved to Adelaide, married, built a grand house called Willyama, and travelled the world, sailing to Europe, Africa, China, Japan and India. The fence-mender had become the Silver King. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1907, the boundary rider's chance glance at a dark hill had reshaped a continent's economy. The lode he found, the Line of Lode, proved up to 250 metres wide and more than seven kilometres long, among the largest silver-lead-zinc deposits on Earth.

By 1877 Mount Gipps had spread across roughly 540,000 acres and carried a flock of 71,000 sheep. The mineral wealth eventually overshadowed the wool, but the station never disappeared. It still runs sheep today, smaller now at around 85,000 acres, and welcomes travellers as the Mt Gipps Station Stay. The country remains as it was: gibber plains, sweeps of saltbush and mulga, and sandy creek beds threaded with coolibah trees. Stephens Creek runs through the property with semi-permanent waterholes, though most water still comes up from bores drilled deep into the dry ground.

There is one more layer to this place. The old Mount Gipps homestead site became the base for the Broken Hill section of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the airborne medical lifeline that brings doctors to the people scattered across the vast Australian outback. So the same patch of ground that launched a mining empire also helped anchor one of the country's most beloved institutions. Stand here and you are standing at the cradle of Broken Hill, the spot where a fence-mender's curiosity changed the map of Australian industry forever.