There'll always be a Liberal Party if there's a BHP, was a tuneful satire of the 50s and 60s.
But the connections between what is now the world's biggest mining company and the political and business establishment is much more prosaic than that.
Journalists Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin have laid bare the story of the company they say embodies the history of Australia's corporate DNA in a new book.
In The Big Fella - The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton, the two chart the history of the two separate companies - The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, or BHP, and South Africa's Billiton.
The two merged in 2001 to form BHP Billiton, or the Big Fella as its chairman Don Argus calls it.
Although to many in corporate circles the Big Fella always was, and remains, Kerry Packer - or for those with a historical bent - 1930s NSW premier Jack Lang. BHP is still remembered as the Big Australian.
And while the book reveals that BHP has been privately eyeing off a tilt at rival Rio Tinto for at least the past 10 years - and way before its unsuccessful $150 billion merger proposal in 2007 - it also unearths older secrets.
Former prime minister Bob Menzie's father, James, worked as a lobbyist for BHP until his death in 1945.
As the younger Menzies rose to power and influence in conservative politics, becoming deputy premier of Victoria in 1932, the association between the family and the company became very close. Bob Menzies transferred to the House of Representatives in 1934 and was appointed attorney general and - happily for BHP - industry minister.
The obvious conflict of interest has never been previously revealed.
The connections between government and BHP also ran deep in the 1950s.
According to the book, the BHP board had access to top-secret intelligence from home and overseas through the National Security Resources Board, chaired by Menzies. BHP operatives would boast of their access to intelligence sources within government. The benefits to the company's international negotiations were incalculable.
The much more recent machinations of chief executive Brian Gilberston's dramatic and sudden departure in 2003 are also laid bare.
Gilbertson, who began his working life as a South African rocket scientist, wanted to consolidate BHP Billiton's position as the mining industry's first $US100 billion company - three times its value in the early part of the decade. The one opportunity that stood out as a tremendous prize was putting BHP Billiton together with its greatest rival, Rio Tinto.
However, while the BHP board was supportive of the move, the merger proposal foundered on Argus's unwillingness to surrender the chairmanship or to consider moving BHP from Melbourne to either Sydney, San Francisco or London.
The world's biggest mining company hasn't always been in a dominant position.
For those old enough to remember, BHP came under attack in 1986 from corporate raider Robert Holmes a Court who gained 20 per cent of the company. His $1.9 billion bid aimed for 39 per cent of the BHP's stock and control of the company.
A shell-shocked BHP turned to then Elders boss John Elliott as a white knight to buy a 20 per cent stake to block the takeover.
BHP also engaged Macquarie Bank executive director Graeme Samuel to fend off the raid. Samuel is now the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Comission.
The share market crash in 1987 led eventually to an unwinding of the deal. Holmes a Court would have sold off various arms of the miner to pay for the deal.
It was a salulatory lesson for BHP, as was its disastrous $3.2 billion purchase of Magma Copper in the US in the mid 1990s. BHP overpaid by about five times the value of the company at a time when commodity prices peaked.
The series of poor investments and write-offs in the late 1990s set in train boardroom depatures and eventually the hiring of outsiders as chief executives to resuscitate the company - firstly in the form of Duke Energy boss Paul Anderson, then Gilberson followed Chip Goodyear and lately, the current incumbent Marius Kloppers, who came from the Billiton side.
If there is a theme from the book, it is that BHP has always been rescued by the next big thing.
In the 1920s steel making transformed the company. The discovery of oil in Bass Strait did the same thing in the 1960s as did the finding of iron ore in the Pilbera of Western Australia.
In the 1980s, it was the purchase of Utah Coal and the development of the Escondida copper deposit in Chile. The Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine in South Australia is an extension of that theme.
AAP
