It is a stark, flat-topped reminder of Broken Hill's history as the crucible of Australia's industrial powerhouse.

It also offers a clue as to why the company, known until recently as "The Big Australian", faces what many now see as the greatest challenge to its survival in more than a century.

Dogged by chronically low commodity prices, cost blowouts at major new projects and now a long search for a new chief executive, BHP has pledged to radically reform the company to return to profitability.

But 115 years ago, BHP was little more than an idea in the head of a stockman checking the fences of a sheep farm in the semi-desert of far western New South Wales.

On September 5, 1883, this stockman, an Austrian immigrant named Charles Rasp, noticed a strange hillock thatappeared to have been "broken".

Up closer, he noticed unusual dark rocks protruding from the top of the formation.

Thinking they might contain tin, Rasp collected a few of the rocks and sent them for testing.

Upon finding the rocks contained lead with a few traces of silver, Rasp joined six other men to form the "syndicate of seven" and pegged out leases on most of the "Broken Hill".

This syndicate was later extended and it sunk a small shaft into the hill to find they had stumbled across what was then the world's biggest deposit of zinc, lead and silver ore.

They floated The Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited on August 10, 1885, and within a few years it had burrowed deep into the outcrop and had opened a smelter at Broken Hill.

By the late 1890s, BHP had almost exhausted the easier to process oxide ores which yielded high grades of silver.

Sensing it had to change to survive, BHP developed new ways to process the ore and looked to develop the other mineral deposits it had acquired nearBroken Hill.

BHP had bought nearby iron ore deposits to help run its lead and zinc smelter, but could see as the 20th century approached that steel-making was about to explode worldwide.

BHP opened its Newcastle steel works in 1915 and by 1939, BHP had left Broken Hill altogether.

Since then, BHP has successfully made several of these transformations, including the opening of the Bass Strait oil and gas fields with Esso in the 1960s.

By the early 1990s, BHP was a monolith in Australian terms, employing over 50,000 people and easily growing to become the largest Australian-based company by market capitalisation. It was also among the most profitable.

But things began to go horribly wrong.

In late 1995, BHP bought the massive US copper mining and smelting group Magma Copper for about A$3.2 billion ($1.9 billion), making it the biggest non-government copper producer in the world.

Within a year copper prices had slumped.

BHP has since written off more than A$2 billion from the value of Magma andshut down a sizeable chunk of its output.

Compounding the Magma debacle:

* The Asian economic crisis further savaged oil, copper, steel and coal prices;

* The cost of its Hot Briquetted Iron (HBI) plant in Western Australia blew out by A$1 billion; and

* BHP's new Beenup mineral sands project in Western Australia and its majority owned Hartley platinum mine in Zimbabwe were be devilled by production delays and higher costs.

These problems, many of which were credited to questionable management decisions, reached a crescendo in June this year when BHP reported a loss of A$1.47 billion after it wrote down its asset values by over A$3 billion.

BHP's share price has slumped almost 40 per cent in just over a year. Chief executive John Prescott resigned in April amid a mounting shareholder revolt.

In the space of four years from 1994, BHP invested more than A$18 billion to again reinvent itself, and its core profits actually fell A$300 million a year.

BHP reported a first-quarter net profit beforeabnormal items of A$351 million, up A$67 million, or 23.6 per cent, from the same period a year ago. Including abnormals, the A$351 million profit to August 31 was down A$6 million on the same period a year ago.

Adding to the uncertainty at the top, chairman Jerry Ellis, who led BHP into Magma, last month was forced to promise to resign next year.

After six months of searching, BHP has yet to find a candidate able or, more importantly, willing to take up the job.

Ellis apologised to shareholders at a recent annual meeting and pledged to pare down BHP into the leaner Australian.

But it will be tough as commodity prices are still falling because of the Asian crisis and few want to buy BHP's poor-performing assets.

"The management decisions taken since the early 1990s will be very hard to turn around," says funds manager Peter Morgan.

Even BHP has acknowledged it is vulnerable to being taken over by a foreign predator and broken up.

Meanwhile, the BHP mine that churned out Broken Hill's giant slagheap has become a relic of the past and is now used as a tourist attraction.

The modern BHP hopes it will not become a corporate relic as well.