The reshaping of BHP confirms a key message of this week’s Platinum 70 Year coverage of The Australia’s Financial Review’s first seven decades.

Chairman Ken MacKenzie and chief executive Mike Henry are attempting BHP’s third great transformation since it began as a silver and lead miner in Broken Hill in 1885, became Australia’s steelmaker just before World War I and, in the 1960s, turned into a global iron ore, coal and copper miner and oil and gas producer.