By Julie Power
It took two million man-hours to build Australia’s first skyscraper, Sydney’s AMP Building, and about that many broken heels to put the spiritual home of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the Palace Hotel in Broken Hill, on the map.
Their importance to NSW’s culture and history was recognised this week on the NSW State Heritage Register along with the Riverina woolshed Toganmain, one of the largest in Australia, and Mittagong’s Fitz Roy Iron Works, the country’s first commercial iron smelter.
Heritage minister Penny Sharpe has recognised the contribution of the Palace Hotel as the spiritual home of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. “The Palace Hotel’s amendment on the NSW State Heritage Register recognises the vibrant LGBTQIA+ history that has flourished within its walls.”Credit: suppllied
Heritage minister Penny Sharpe said the listings recognised and preserved the state’s rich and diverse culture. The harbourside office building, the shearing shed and the iron works are new to the heritage register.
Sharpe said the Palace’s listing was amended and expanded to celebrate a previously ignored part of its past, “the vibrant LGBTQIA+ history that has flourished within its walls”. The hotel had served as a symbolic gathering place and become an essential part of Broken Hill’s story.
The Palace began not as a hotel but as coffee palace, opened by the Temperance League to provide an alcohol-free alternative to the licensed hotels that flourished in the mining town. The palace with no beer did not catch on.
The AMP building.
Under Italian-born hotelier Mario Celotto, it flourished. Celotto painted the Palace’s first artwork, replicating Botticelli’s Birth of Venus on the foyer ceiling in 1980. The hotel gained fame around the world with the 1994 release of the critically acclaimed film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
A sequel to Priscilla by writer-director Stephan Elliot is in the works, with the original cast.
When Esther La Rovere bought the Palace in 2009, she was astounded by the number of international visitors who visited because of the movie.
It was also a place of pilgrimage for those on an outback adventure or road trip, and for many people celebrating 50th birthdays. La Rovere said the movie had meant a “great deal to them, and their coming-out story.”
Broken Hill councillor Darriea Turley welcomed the news: “Who would’ve thought that the economy of a mining town would grow on the back of a group of drag queens?”
The newly renovated AMP building, now known as 33 Alfred Street, has also been added to the register in recognition of its groundbreaking contribution to the state’s architectural and cultural history.
Sharpe called it the “grand old dame of city skyscrapers”. It had transformed Sydney’s CBD and skyline, redefining urban design and influencing how workplaces were conceived.
At 26 storeys and 117 metres when completed in 1962, it was the tallest building in Sydney. For 60 years, legislation limited the height of Sydney buildings to 46 metres.
It was such a marvel of modernity that it was opened by the Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies.
Its groundbreaking technologies included ducted air-conditioning and the longest-span beams in an Australian office building at the time. An automatic document conveyor delivered mail between floors, and its bank of lifts travelled at the unheard-of 300 metres a minute.
Toganmain, near Darlington Point in the Riverina, is regarded as one of Australia’s most significant woolsheds, and largest at 93 metres by 46 metres wide. More than seven million sheep were shorn at Toganmain, and it holds the Australian record for shearing more than 202,000 sheep, by 92 blade shearers, in a month.
Hugo Weaving on the Palace Hotel balcony in 1993. Credit: Elise Lockwood, courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive
Christine Chirgwin, who has been fundraising to save the sheds, told the ABC that it was full of history. “There’s so much attached to this place. Banjo Paterson wrote about it in Flash Jack from Gundagai.”
Paterson’s poem then inspired a song by The Bushwackers.
Operating in Mittagong from 1848 to 1877, the Fitz Roy Iron Works was a pioneering site of the iron industry in Australia and in a conservation project, some of its structure has been preserved in the carpark of a modern shopping centre.
The heritage listing covers the works archaeological site and its moveable heritage – the only known physical remains of 19th-century iron processing in Australia.
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