Delprats Underground Tourist Mine

Line of Lode Miners Memorial

Useful Information

Location:	1 Federation Way, Broken Hill NSW 2880. Broken Hill. Behind the Railway Station, access via Crystal and Iodide Streets, turn right on Federation Way to the end of the road. (-31.964392, 141.464832)
Open:	Line of Lode Cafe: All year daily 8:30-15. Line of Lode Miners Memorial: All year daily 8-22:30. [2026]
Fee:	free. [2026]
Classification:	Lead Mine Zinc Mine Silver Mine
Light:	n/a
Dimension:
Guided tours:	self guided.
Photography:	allowed
Accessibility:	yes
Bibliography:
Address:	Visitor Information Centre, Corner of Blende Street and Bromide Street, Broken Hill, NSW 2880, Tel: +61-8-8080-3560. E-mail:
As far as we know this information was accurate when it was published (see years in brackets), but may have changed since then. Please check rates and details directly with the companies in question if you need more recent info.

History

1900	Delprat shaft sunk.
1952	original wooden headframe was replaced by the present steel structure.
1976	end of mining.
1977	show mine opened to the public.
2001	Line of Lode Miners Memorial inaugurated.
2007	show mine closed.

Geology

The lead-zinc-silver orebody is 7 km long and straight, and only 220 m wide, and thus it is named Line of Lode. It formed as a result of volcanic activity about 1.7 Ga ago. Mining ended in the 1970s because the metal prices on the international market went down, there is still a lot of ore underground. The lode is more than 1.5 km deep, mining happened only in the uppermost 200 or 300 m.

Description

The mine was entered down Delprat Shaft, named after Guillaume Daniel [G.D.] Delprat, a Dutch-Australian metallurgist and mining engineer. He was also a businessman, and was BHP’s General Manager from 1899 to 1921. He perfected the Potter-Delprat flotation process for sulphide ore treatment. This brought enormous profits because it was now possible to rework formerly useless tailings and extract the metal content of millions of tons of slack. The Delprat Shaft was sunk in 1900 and had a wooden headframe powered by a steam engine. It was replaced by a steel headframe in 1952, which had an electric winder. The end of mining at Broken Hill was in 1976, when the company Mining for Metal and Minerals (MMM) closed.

Delprats Underground Tourist Mine was opened only a year later, in 1977. The underground tour took place on a level 200 meters deep below the surface. The visitors got helmets, rubber boots and miners lamps. The show mine was closed to the public in 2007. This was because it was bought by Consolidated Broken Hill, a New Mining company which intended to reopen the original mining leases. They bought the mine from the former owner BHP Billiton, a local mining company. Unfortunately prices for metals were decreasing in 2008 and so the venture was on hold. Nevertheless, the show mine was never reopened. It’s possible to see the headframe from the road, but the site is now fenced in.

On the other side of the bend of the road is the Mullockers Memorial, two mine carts. It is dedicated to Thomas Jordan (aged 19) and Leopold Campbell (aged 21), who were killed by a rock fall in Stope A5 on the 500 ft level, Central Mine on 08-OCT-1902. The memorial was inaugurated 100 years later. Their bodies were never removed and remain the only fatalities still entombed on the Line of Lode. A Mullocker is a person who shovels away waste material, hence the mine carts.

This place behind the railway station is a huge hill which is actually a slack heap. There is a huge parking lot at the end of the road and the Line of Lode Cafe. From the cafe is a sort of elevated trail across the slack heap to the Line of Lode Miners Memorial The memorial is dedicated to more than 800 miners who died in the mines over the years. It has rust-red steel walls which protect the freestanding glass panes engraved with the names of all the miners who lost their lives. Along the trail is a different kind of memorial, a sort of open air museum with old mining machinery. It is definitely worth a visit.

The ores are found on the surface, so it was mined by the local natives for millennia, but of course only on a small scale. The English settlers discovered the ore in 1883, it was the boundary rider Charles Rasp. Soon BHP was founded and mining started, the outpost became the epicentre of national and then international mining. Between 1900 and 1908 the production was around 13,000 tons of ore per week. BHP left Broken Hill in 1939 and since its foundation it had mined 12.3 million tons of ore and created a profit of £30 million.