Rio Tinto's iron operations in the Pilbara began here, in 1966, when Hamersley Iron opened the mine and built a town beside it to house the workers. Mount Tom Price was first - the original pit, the proof that this hard, red, almost waterless country held wealth on a scale few had imagined. The Hamersley Range cradling the mine contains around 80 percent of all identified iron ore reserves in Australia and ranks among the greatest iron provinces on Earth. Today the open-pit operation can produce some 28 million tonnes of ore a year, processed on site and railed away. But its real significance is historical. Every other pit in the region - Paraburdoo, Brockman, Marandoo, Yandicoogina - traces its lineage to the gamble that paid off here first.

The town of Tom Price grew up to serve the mine, and it grew up high. At 747 metres above sea level it is the highest town in Western Australia, a fact locals wear with pride and a nickname: the Top Town. It sits in the lee of a peak the surveyors once labelled, with blunt honesty, Mount Nameless - though the Eastern Guruma people had always known it by its proper name, Jarndunmunha, which it formally reclaimed alongside the colonial one in 2007. The mine's workforce lives in the town rather than flying in and out, which gives Tom Price something many Pilbara settlements lack: permanence, a community that stays, schools and sports and a festival named, fittingly, for the once-nameless mountain on its doorstep.

An iron mine is only as useful as the railway that empties it. At Mount Tom Price the ore is blasted from open pits, then crushed and screened into two products: lump, capped at 31.5 millimetres, and finer material capped at 6.3. From there it joins the relentless procession down the Hamersley and Robe River railway, hundreds of kilometres of heavy-haul track running northwest to the port of Dampier. At the coast the ore from Tom Price is blended with output from the other mines, rescreened, and loaded into bulk carriers bound mostly for the steel mills of Asia. It is one of the largest, most automated freight operations on the planet, a closed loop of pit, train, and ship that runs around the clock, turning ancient rock into the skeletons of modern cities a continent away.

Six decades in, the mine that launched the Pilbara is reinventing how it runs. Rio Tinto has been building a large battery system at Mount Tom Price - a 45-megawatt installation designed to act as a 'virtual synchronous machine,' steadying the remote electricity grid that powers the operation and helping shift it away from diesel and gas. It is a striking image: one of the oldest pits in the region, the place where the whole iron rush began in 1966, fitted out with grid technology aimed at a lower-carbon future. The country around it is unchanged - red ranges, spinifex, hard light - but the machine carved into it keeps adapting, still digging the same iron that built the boom, now trying to do it a little more cleanly.