Palace Hotel, Broken Hill
Heritage listed building in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Palace Hotel, originally built as Broken Hill Coffee Palace, is a heritage-listed pub at 227 Argent Street, Broken Hill, City of Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. It has also been known as the Mario's Hotel and Mario's.
The Palace Hotel was in many of the scenes in the 1994 Australian comedy-drama film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register in April 1999, with the entry expanded in January 2025 to reflect its importance to LGBTQIA+ history.
History
The hotel was originally built as a coffee palace by local members of the temperance movement, as the Broken Hill Coffee Palace. It was designed by Melbourne architect Alfred Dunn and built in 1889 at a cost of £12,190, opening on 18 December that year.
The coffee palace was not a financial success, running at a loss for its first three years. In July 1892, media reports indicated the company and lessees were "stone broke". In that month, the lessee applied for and was granted a liquor license, at which time it was renamed the Palace Hotel.
Around 1980, the owner at the time, Mario Celotto, painted a mural of Botticelli's Venus on a ceiling.
“Palace Hotel, Broken Hill” enters the record as heritage listed building in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Palace, Hotel and Broken can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Palace Hotel, Broken Hill” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Palace, Hotel and Broken provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55628401. Authority coordinates are -31.960, 141.464. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1999, 2025 and 1889.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
- Historic place names
- Jurisdictional context
- Routes into maps and plans
Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Palace Hotel, Broken Hill”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Palace Hotel, Broken Hill primary sources, Palace Hotel, Broken Hill archive and Palace research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- Which authority defined the place, boundary or structure at the relevant date?
- Which earlier names or jurisdictions may reveal additional records?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Palace Hotel, Broken Hill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.