When Miles found his ore, Mount Isa was nothing, perhaps 300 people living in dwellings of iron, canvas, and timber. Then the rush came. The population swelled from 1926 to 1930, and by 1929 hundreds of tents sprawled between the township and the mine, housing the railway gangs and construction crews who were racing to build a city from scratch. The housing shortage was acute and the climate merciless. The tent house was the practical answer: a long, narrow tent sheltered beneath a separate iron-clad roof, with board or ripple-iron cladding around the base to keep out the dust and the worst of the weather. It was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to keep a worker alive until something better could be built.

The man behind the planned settlement on the other side of the hill was Leslie Urquhart, the Russian-experienced industrialist whose Russo-Asiatic Consolidated company took control of the mine in June 1927. Urquhart had learned in Russia that in a place this harsh, with a reputation for industrial unrest, looking after workers was not charity but sound investment. His company town was approached through a valley guarded by a gatekeeper, and by mid-1929 it offered cottages, dormitories, staff houses, even reticulated water and septic systems. It was called an 'interesting experiment,' because providing such accommodation was not the norm in 1929. But the company houses could not be built fast enough, and so the tent houses filled the gap for the men left waiting.

By 1937 this particular tent house stood at 16 Fourth Avenue, registered to Alfred Mills, a miner who worked for Mount Isa Mines from 1930 to 1953. A government description from that year is bracingly plain: a three-roomed house, walls of galvanized iron, partitions of iron and wood, a floor of boards and earth. As the city grew up and proper homes replaced canvas, the tent houses vanished one by one. By 1967 this was among the last, and the decision was made to keep it as a museum piece. The only other survivor was demolished in 1991. In 2013 the National Trust gifted this final example to the Mount Isa Underground Hospital and Museum Inc., which moved it to the Underground Hospital site, where it could be better protected and more easily visited. It had already been added to the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992 on the strength of its rarity.

The tent house survives for a reason that has nothing to do with grandeur. It is plain, small, and was always temporary, the kind of structure that history usually erases without a second thought. But the people of Mount Isa wanted to hold onto a physical link to the hard early days, when their parents and grandparents made homes out of canvas and iron and sheer stubbornness in the spinifex. Stand inside it and you feel the genius of that double roof, the small pocket of moving air that made the unbearable bearable. It is a monument not to wealth but to endurance, to the ordinary people who built a city in one of the hottest, most remote corners of the continent.