It was known as the Willyama, Hog’s Back or less poetically, the ‘broken hill’. For millennia it baked beneath the scorching sun, lain frozen through harsh glacial times, or been washed and leached during the times of Australia’s wet, tropical climate.

In its depth slumbered the world’s largest silver-lead-zinc lode.

It was left to a man called Charles Rasp to discover the lode, peg the first claim and to form a mining syndicate which, eighteen months later, was floated as a public company named the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd, the BHP. A city sprang up alongside the ‘broken hill’, soon dubbed the Silver City.

The ‘broken hill’ rose steeply from the sun-scorched blue-bush plain of the Mount Gipps sheep run, its bare, craggy, rugged ridge of burnished, dull-black rock a sharp silhouette in the clear, dry air of the shimmering mid-morning heat of September 3rd, 1883.

On that day, Charles Rasp challenged Destiny. He had chosen the date carefully as a precedence for good omen: thirteen years earlier, on September 3rd, 1870 Napoleon III had been taken prisoner of war by Bismarck’s victorious armies during the Franco-Prussian war.

And Rasp had another September 3rd in mind, that of 1758 in Lisbon which had forced his grandfather, a member of Portugal’s aristocracy, into exile and to change his illustrious identity, taking on the no-less-noble name of his mother’s family, de Pereira. As ‘Francois de Pereira’ he left Portugal and became Charge d’Affairs for the Portuguese Crown in St. Petersburg. Shortly after he was appointed Ambassador to Sweden and the Baltic ports.

On this auspicious September 3rd Charles Rasp would peg out his claim on top of the ‘broken hill’. Prospectors had long coined the broken-backed hill the ‘hill of mullock’, a term for barren rock. Spoilt by the immense silver riches in the hills and plains of the Umberumberka silver field just 20 miles northwest and west of Mount Gipps Station, today’s Silverton, they shunned and even despised this huge hill.

They had searched it for commercial minerals and had found nothing.

Rasp had an outstanding reputation as a bushman; as one of Mount Gipps’ boundary riders his task was to find sufficient numbers of sheep for shearing from the distant paddocks and then to drive them to the long stone shearing sheds. This enabled him to know every inch of the whole run, including the ‘broken hill’.

The clang of his hammer carried far when it came down hard on a boulder of the dark capping of the ‘broken hill’, metalliferous rock, black, hard and heavy.

He was known as ‘Sharlie Rasp’, esteemed as a reliable, honourable man and well liked by his boss and workmates. Being fluent in five languages and exceptionally highly educated had earned him the nickname Walking Encyclopaedi’.

Yet for 125 years Charles Rasp’s true role in the events of the discovery of the magnificent lode in the ‘broken hill’ and the birth of the BHP remained shrouded.

A photograph taken in 1885, the year BHP was floated, show Rasp - slim and of medium height - standing next to a comfortably seated George McCulloch, manager of Mount Gipps station.

Rather than an indication of McCulloch’s role in the early events, this arrangement was in fact simply due to the sheer body size of the over six feet tall, broad-shouldered McCulloch.

Yet for more than a century people deduced from a standing Rasp a lesser importance in the evolution of the events that led to the floating of The Proprietary, Australia’s ‘Big Mine’.

The 1935 Jubilee edition of The BHP Review by Sir Winston Joseph Dugan features the same photograph, yet we search in vain for a standing Charles Rasp; the author had erased him altogether.

History books still tell us the familiar story: the fairy tale of a lucky German-born boundary rider of Mount Gipps who discovered the lode in the ‘hill of mullock’, believing at first that it was tin and not the prized silver, and who lived happily ever after in Medindie, one of Adelaide’s finest suburbs, as Australia’s Silver King in a mansion called Willyama.

The true story of the Silver City’s enigmatic founder must read:

“Jerome von Pereira, the discoverer of the fabulous silver-lead-zinc lode in the ‘broken hill’ and founder of the first mining company on the ‘broken hill’ which evolved into the BHP, was a highly educated nobleman of Portuguese-German origin whose fascinating, turbulent and tragic pre-Australian life had forced him to keep a low profile and who therefore went into Australian history merely as the German-born boundary rider Charles Rasp who discovered the ore body.”

Before pegging the first claim on the crown of the ‘broken hill’ Rasp convinced David James, a former tin miner in Cornwall and now well-sinker on Mount Gipps, and James’ workmate James Poole, to join his enterprise.

James and Poole helped Rasp to measure out the first 40 acres claim. They formed the Syndicate of Three with a working capital of £210.

Two days later, on September 5, 1883 Charles Rasp registered his Mining Lease Application No 2355 for silver and, just in case, also for tin: rocks bearing silver or tin are both black, hard and heavy.

Only then did Rasp tell Mount Gipps’ manager of his venture. And this is where the pastoralist George McCulloch finally came in.

The boundary rider and the manager were more than boss and employee, they were friends and equals: McCulloch was well aware of Rasp’s true story and exceptional educational background. McCulloch knew that Rasp’s outstanding education equalled his own from the Andersonian University at Glasgow.

It took one to know one: both men had studied economics.

Due to the ongoing severe drought and fall in wool price McCulloch’s one-eighth share in Mount Gipps’ profit had dwindled drastically, exacerbated by steeply rising costs of running a station such as higher wages and higher government costs on leaseholds.

George McCulloch, though deeply adverse to mining on Mount Gipps, joined the Syndicate of Three.

Within a few days the syndicate grew into the Syndicate of Seven when jackaroo Philip Charley, bookkeeper George Lind, and sheep overseer George Urquhart also joined Rasp’s venture.

They each contributed further £70 to the working capital.

Rasp took out six more mining leases and the ‘Hill’ was theirs. Soon seven more men joined the syndicate, among them William Jamieson, a geologist and government surveyor and C. R. Wilson, director of the Barrier Ranges Silver Mining Association and the superbly rich Day Dream Mine in the Apollyon Valley near Silverton.

Jamieson and Wilson were the only two men in the syndicate with experience in matters mining.

The drought finally broke towards the end of 1884 and the sinking of shafts could at last go ahead on the ‘broken hill’.

When rich silver chlorides were at last jubilantly encountered in early 1885, the Syndicate of Seven amalgamated its seven leases into the Broken Hill Mining Company.

This company was finally registered and floated as a public company on August 13, 1885, renamed the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited, the BHP, Australia’s “Big Mine”.

Broken Hill’s discovery put the young Commonwealth of Australia onto the world’s economic stage. Mining the ‘broken hill’ saved South Australia economically during the severe drought of the 1880s, and Broken Hill raised millions of £ Stirling in revenue for the government of New South Wales.

Rasp and McCulloch, Jamieson, Wilson and Bowes Kelly were the driving force behind the fledgling BHP.

Rasp held two fourteenth of the company; this huge share holding alone would have qualified him for a position as director, yet he never joined the Board of the BHP.

For thirty years he believed – and erroneously so - that he had to keep a low profile due to his harrowing past. He preferred to remain the Man behind the Silver Mask and let others take the credit.

But Rasp did want his true story and identity come to light, one day, long after his death: he secreted away a time capsule on Willyama’s vast estate.

And there, 101 years after his death, though no longer within the boundary of today’s Willyama, this historic treasure still rests undisturbed.

Rasp’s biography, however, the result of thirty years of intricate research, will be published next year.

Charles Rasp composed an elegy, a poem for his beloved goddaughter Marjorie who was then fourteen years old. He compressed the story of his life into four lines. In copperplate he wrote into her album in February 1905, two years before his death:

“An album is…….

….A list of living friends: a holier room

For names of some since mouldering in the tomb

Whose blooming memories life’s cold laws survive

And, dead elsewhere, they here yet speak and live.”

Had he wanted his beloved godchild to ask one day: Whose precious memories? Life’s cold laws? And: who was dead elsewhere yet here he spoke and lived - as Charles Rasp? Had he wanted her to ask: Who were you? And: What is your true story?

Mrs Marjorie Lisle G. Johnson, nee Henderson, was the daughter of Rasp’s solicitor and close friend James ‘Jim’ Henderson. She was called Little Marjie by ‘Uncle and Auntie Rasp’; the little girl had spent a great part of her childhood at Willyama, her mother Annie, née Wood, being Agnes’ closest friend and confidante.

When interviewed in 1987, ninety-six-year-old Mrs Lisle G. Johnson was the only person still alive who had known Charles Rasp personally during the last sixteen years of his life.

Her description: “He was genuine, kind and gentle - a born gentleman. Not at all the boundary rider everyone seems to write about.”

How right she was, though she - like other friends and members of his extended family close to him, even his wife Agnes - had never imagined that he may not be ‘Charles Rasp of Stuttgart/Germany, born on October 6 or 7 in 1846, trained as an edible-oil technologist who, because he was multi-lingual, had worked as a clerk in the export department of a chemical manufacturing firm in Hamburg and who had come to Australia for health reasons’.

For a century, the real story dodged not only the relatives and Marjorie but also the efforts of many historians.

Mining the Broken Hill led to the industrialisation of Australia and had saved South Australia economically during the severe drought of the 1870s and ‘80s, and Broken Hill put millions and millions of £Sterling into the coffers of New South Wales.

Asked about Charles Rasp’s rightful place in Australia’s history, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, Emeritus Professor of Economic History states: “Charles Rasp is one of the most important figures in the history of our land in the late-19th century. In discovering the silver-lead of Broken Hill he initiated and shaped a crucial event in our economic development.”

Rasp died on May 21st, 1907, leaving a fabulous legacy to the young Commonwealth of Australia: Broken Hill and the BHP.

The Broken Hillis truly the ‘Hill that changed the Nation’.

Photo captions: Maja recreated the original ‘broken hill’ from photographs and sketches of the 1890s.

Photographs are by unknown photographers; C. Rasp: courtesy of the Broken Hill Historical Society, the other photographs are held by the Outback Archives, Broken Hill.