The Diocese of Wilcannia was created in 1887 by Pope Leo XIII, stitched together from land taken off three neighbouring dioceses — Armidale, Bathurst and Goulburn — to serve the scattered, remote settlements of the Far West. John Dunne was consecrated as its first bishop, charged with ministering across enormous distances of semi-arid country where a priest might ride for days between congregations. That same year, on 7 August 1887, a modest first church opened: Sacred Heart, built of iron and stone in a Gothic style behind the bishop's residence, and pressed into service as the young diocese's makeshift cathedral. The combination of materials was unusual — corrugated iron and quarried stone in the same Gothic frame, a frontier improvisation born of what the outback could supply. That little building still stands today, tucked behind the later cathedral and repurposed as a hall.

By June 1903 the diocese had outgrown its iron church. More than 800 people gathered on the site to debate building something worthy — a true cathedral that could also serve as the city's parish church. The momentum was there, and so was the land: the Sisters of Mercy donated a corner of their convent grounds for it. The architect W. T. Knox was engaged to draw up the plans, working under Bishop Dunne's supervision. On 6 December 1903, the bishop laid the foundation stone. The new cathedral would take shape from the most local material imaginable — silver quarry stone, the rock left over from the surrounding silver mines, gifted to the diocese by the North mine of Broken Hill.

There is a quiet poetry in the building's fabric. Broken Hill exists because of what lies beneath it — one of the world's richest deposits of silver, lead and zinc — and the cathedral is literally built from the byproduct of digging it out. The men who extracted that ore lived hard, dangerous lives underground; the same stone they helped wrench from the earth was raised, on the surface, into arches and a tower meant to lift the eye toward something beyond the daily grind of the mine. In a company town defined by extraction, the cathedral turned waste rock into permanence.

Bishop Dunne opened and consecrated the completed cathedral on 2 July 1905, at a final cost of £7,000. Around 1,500 people packed in for the occasion — a remarkable crowd for a remote mining city — and the guests reflected how far the outback diocese had come: the Archbishop of Melbourne, Thomas Carr, and the Coadjutor Archbishop of Sydney, Michael Kelly, both travelled to be there. More than a century on, the cathedral remains the seat of the Bishop of Wilcannia-Forbes and the spiritual anchor of an immense, sparsely peopled diocese. It still stands on its convent corner, weathered silver stone against a hard blue outback sky, the most enduring thing the mines ever produced.