Lithgow: Where the Story Begins
Before The Mines, There Was Country
Before furnaces, before rail, before coal, there was Country. For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal peoples lived in relationship with this land — not as property, but as kin: held through law, story, and responsibility. The arrival of European settlers in the early 1800s brought a radically different worldview: land fenced and surveyed, its value measured in yield and profit rather than care.
Pastoral expansion, and later industrial development, were built on this dispossession.We acknowledge the deep and continuing connection of Aboriginal peoples to this Country, the enduring impacts of colonisation, and pay respect to Elders past and present. We recognise that the story of industry sits within a much older story of land, law, and survival.
Darwin’s Window into a Changing World
When Charles Darwin travelled through the western escarpment in 1836, he described the valley as “a broken and stony country of great desolation.”
He saw geological wonder — ancient time revealed in stone.
But beneath his gaze lay the raw materials of a revolution: coal, iron, and clay.
Within decades, the quiet valleys Darwin crossed would roar with human ambition.
He read the earth’s story; we rewrote it for profit.
Darwin saw creation. We saw capacity.
The Birthplace of Steel & Industrial Risk
In 1875, William Sandford founded the Eskbank Ironworks, producing the first pig iron made in Australia. By 1907, Lithgow’s Blast Furnace was rolling out steel rails — marking the first successful commercial iron and steel production in New South Wales, an inland proving ground for an industry that would later consolidate at Port Kembla.
But the fire began here. The valley filled with miners, brickmakers, furnace workers, and engineers. Whistles marked the rhythm of life. By the 1930s, Lithgow was one of the most industrialised valleys in NSW — small in size, immense in output. Men and women forged the bones of a nation with their bodies.
And they paid for it.
The Valley of Smoke and Solidarity
Industry in Lithgow was never safe by default. Coal miners, ironworkers, and factory hands laboured in environments where risk was normalised and injury expected. In response, a fierce union culture took root — not as rebellion, but as survival.
The Lithgow Ironworks strike of 1911–12, miners’ stoppages, and repeated industrial disputes were not ideological theatre. They were collective attempts to draw a line between productivity and human cost.
From this solidarity emerged a crucial moral insight:
Injury at work was not personal failure — it was a shared responsibility of industry and state. That idea did not originate in Parliament alone.
It was forged in towns like Lithgow.
The Valley on Alert
When war came, Lithgow became essential — and therefore vulnerable. The Small Arms Factory, established in 1912, became one of Australia’s most critical defence sites. At its wartime peak, more than 6,000 people worked under blackout curtains and air-raid drills, producing weapons for the Allied front.
The town was camouflaged from the air. No bombs fell — but the threat was constant. For a generation, Lithgow understood what it meant to be essential yet expendable.
Once, danger came from the sky. Now, it comes through paperwork, process, and denial.
From Lived Harm to Law: The Road to 1926
The catastrophic State Mine explosion of 1916, which killed twenty-eight men, forced a reckoning. It made visible what workers had long known: that industrial progress without protection exacted an unacceptable toll.
Over the following decade, these lessons — drawn from coalfields, furnaces, rail yards and factories — shaped reform.
In 1926, under Premier Jack Lang, New South Wales enacted the modern Workers’ Compensation Act, establishing a compulsory, state-based system that recognised injury as a social and economic responsibility — not an individual misfortune.
Lithgow was not where the Act was drafted. It was one of the places that made it unavoidable.
Like Broken Hill’s role in mining reform, Lithgow’s industrial experience — its injuries, strikes, deaths, and solidarities — formed part of the human evidence base upon which the law stood.
The first steel forged here was industrial. The next was moral.
From Steel to Psychosocial Trauma
A century ago, danger was visible: fire, collapse, explosion. Today, it is often invisible: isolation, disbelief, procedural cruelty, and the slow erosion of meaning.
Psychological and moral injury occur when systems designed to protect instead betray. When recovery becomes adversarial. When suffering is processed as data.
The machinery of harm has changed — algorithmic, administrative, unaccountable — but the pattern is familiar.
Yet so is resistance. The same resilience that once built railways and steel lives on in those calling for systems worthy of human dignity.
The Valley Today: Transition, Safety, and Renewal
The furnaces are silent now. Their remains — the Blast Furnace, State Mine, and Small Arms Factory — stand as testimony to what was built, and what was endured.
Lithgow today is in transition.
The region is reshaping itself through renewable energy, grid infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and public services. Coal remains part of the present, but not the future.
Hydrogen, pumped hydro, battery storage and solar are rewriting the valley’s relationship with power.
Importantly, today’s largest employment sectors include Health Care & Social Assistance and Public Administration & Safety — industries where protection, prevention, and responsibility are not optional.
Workplace safety is no longer a side issue.
It is economic infrastructure.
The Next Chapter: 2026 & Beyond
Lithgow’s story is not one of loss, but of legacy.
As Australia approaches the centenary of the Workers’ Compensation Act in 2026, this valley offers something rare: a place where the human origins of protection can still be seen, walked, and understood.
Here, history is not a detour.
It is the foundation.
Lithgow has never feared hard work. Its future depends on whether the nation finally honours what this region has always known:
That progress without compassion is not progress at all.
The machinery may change.
The courage of workers never has.
