Postcard from Mt Kembla

On the weekend just concluded, we went to the Mt Kembla Village Festival.

This festival started in 2002, prompted by the centenary of the Mt Kembla mine disaster.  Ninety-six men & boys died in a mining disaster that apparently remains as the worst on-land disaster in Australia.

Mt Kembla is an unusual village on the edge of the City of Wollongong.  Its a very pleasant place to spend a day - walking about, looking in George's old-wares shop, or visiting the pub.

This festival saw a greater presence from the National Parks & Wildlife Service, who were running visits to the remains of the Mt Kembla mine.

Pauline & I were fortunate to get on one of these tours, and we visited the former stables of the colliery's pit ponies.  This building is still buried in the bush, and still has the little numbered stalls where the ponies were stabled.

I have heard much about the Mt Kembla disaster ever since being an undergraduate here in the 1970s.  But until now I never quite knew where the mine exactly was. 

One of my former history lecturers at the University of Wollongong had done considerable on the effect of this event on the local community and, more broadly, on the history of the labour movement in New South Wales. This culminated in the publication of the book The Mt Kembla disaster in 1992, in collaboration with Dr Henry Lee.

Dr Stuart Piggin is the recently-retired Foundation Director of Macquarie Christian Studies Institute at Macquarie University, Sydney.  He had the great professional misfortune of teaching church history to the writer of this weblog at the University of Wollongong in 1978. 

In a reflection on the disaster, he wrote:

...two things are unique about the Kembla disaster: its magnitude and its memory. There has been no bigger disaster on land in Australian history; no other local community has had to survive the death in one day of 96 of its young and finest men; and, when combined with the Bulli mine disaster of 23 March 1887 when 81 died, no other Australian region has been so faced with the horror of sudden death as the mining villages of Illawarra. The Kembla disaster is unique in its magnitude.

Monument at Mt Kembla churchyard

It is also unique in its memory. No other Australian calamity has been remembered so tenaciously and so faithfully for so long. This memory is 13 years older than Anzac Day. Every year for 100 years the Kembla disaster has been commemorated. The centenary of the Bulli disaster was commemorated in 1987, but there were many years when it was not commemorated, at least, publicly. There has never been a year when the Kembla disaster has not been commemmorated .

 
Its remarkable that the Bulli disaster 1887 seems to attract no attention these days.

The Festival concludes tonight with a remembrance service at the Windy Gully Cemetery for the 96 victims.  This is held today to mark the 105th anniversary of the disaster.

Whilst visiting this festival, we also travelled further up Cordeaux Road to look at the remains of the last remaining part of the Cordeaux River community. 

This was a small but thriving village, complete with farms, post office and primary school -  that gradually wore down by resumptions of land for the Sydney Water supply catchment.  The resumptions started in the early 20th century; the village shrunk considerably from the 1950s, and the last business - an apple orchard - closed down earlier this year when the elderly owner finally sold up to the Sydney Catchment Authority.

Derelict orchard at Cordeaux River

The former owner was interviewed in our local paper, the Illawarra Mercury, earlier this year.  It all sounded a bit sad.  Widowed, no family following him, he would sit in his isolated home late on Saturday nights whilst the local yobbos would thrash their cars around his property.  No wonder he sold up.

We went for a little walk about the place (do not do this, folks, and please do not dob me in - this is water catchment land with no public access).  The landscape is beautiful, despite the eerie derelict apple trees.  The only sounds were the wrens flitting about and a distant kookaburra. And only about 15 minutes or so from central Wollongong.  I' m sorry we didn't visit here when it was a working orchard (the owner would let you pick your own fruit).

Stuart Piggin on the 102nd anniversary of the Mt Kembla disaster

• MS Word document
• HTML document (via Google)

Stuart Piggin's reflection on the disaster

• MS Word document
• HTML document (via Google)