Lithgow: Where Australia Was Forged
Before The Mines, There Was Country
Before furnaces, before rail, before coal, there was Country.
For tens of thousands of years, the lands around present-day Lithgow were cared for by the Wiradjuri people through systems of law, knowledge and responsibility that long predated European settlement.
Pastoral expansion, mining, rail and industry transformed the region, but they were built upon the dispossession of First Nations peoples whose connection to Country endures today.
We acknowledge the Wiradjuri people as Traditional Custodians of this Country, pay our respects to Elders past and present, and recognise that the story of industry sits within a much older story of Country.
The Seven Valleys: Where Shattered Begins
The Lithgow region sits within an extraordinary landscape of mountains, forests and sweeping valleys. Around almost every bend, sandstone escarpments rise from the earth, opening onto vast skies and country that feels both ancient and immense.
Nowhere is this more remarkable than the Gardens of Stone—an extraordinary landscape of towering cliffs, narrow canyons and sculpted sandstone pagodas that remains unfamiliar to many Australians.
When Charles Darwin travelled through the western escarpment in 1836, he described “a broken and stony country of great desolation.” Yet beneath that rugged country lay coal, iron and clay—resources that would shape the region, its industries and generations of working lives.
Mining, steelmaking, power generation and brickmaking brought growth and opportunity. The work was often dangerous, however, and its legacy continues to be carried by families, communities and the environment.
Today, across Lithgow’s Seven Valleys, another chapter is being written—one that recognises the wonder of the surrounding landscape, restores what has been harmed and honours the people whose labour helped build the region.
Shattered begins here: in a place shaped by industry and its human cost, but held within a landscape of extraordinary beauty, resilience and hope.
Julie Favell and Chris Jonkers speak about the vital role of the environment in Lithgow’s future—as the region transitions from coal and explores new opportunities for restoration, employment and community life. Recipients of the Gardens of Stone Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award 2026, they have been recognised for decades of environmental advocacy and fact-finding across the Lithgow region. Julie remains an active voice in community consultation and the rehabilitation of land affected by mining.
A Landscape Worth Protecting
This award-winning film explains the majesty of the precious landscape in the Lithgow region. It was made before the Gardens of Stone State Conservation Area was formally gazetted in May 2022. Its closing appeal reflects the landscape’s status at that time. Today, more than 30,000 hectares have been added to the national parks estate, protecting ancient pagodas, threatened species and important Wiradjuri cultural heritage. The film remains a powerful record of the landscape—and of the community effort that helped secure its future. Credit: Joel Robinson - shared with permission.
Professor Emeritus Greg Patmore
Professor Emeritus of Business and Labour History, The University of Sydney
Drawing on decades of research into labour history, co-operatives and mutual organisations, Professor Greg Patmore places Lithgow within the broader story of modern Australia. In Shattered, he explores how its communities responded to industrial change and danger, supported one another through grief and loss, and helped lay the foundations for the systems of care and responsibility that continue to shape Australian working life.
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. Coalminers, 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 the state.
That idea did not originate in Parliament alone.
It was forged in towns like Lithgow.
Lithgow’s labour tradition also reached national politics. Ben Chifley, the former railwayman and unionist who represented the region in federal Parliament, opened Lithgow Trades Hall in 1929. His later commitment as prime minister to full employment, social security and postwar reconstruction reflected values deeply understood in industrial communities like this one.
The Valley on Alert
When war came, Lithgow became essential—and vulnerable. The Small Arms Factory, established in 1912, became one of Australia’s most important defence manufacturing sites.
Its location owed much to Joseph Cook, a former Lithgow coalminer and union official who strongly promoted the town as the site of Australia’s first Commonwealth arms factory. Cook later became prime minister, but this earlier decision would shape Lithgow’s employment, population and identity for generations.
By the end of 1942, almost 6,000 people worked at the factory, with thousands more employed in feeder factories supporting the war effort.
The town struggled to keep up. Families shared tiny homes. Others lived in humpies at the showground or camped in nearby pine forests without water or sanitation. Workers arrived from across Australia to meet the demands of wartime production. The pressure was immense.
Between July 1940 and June 1941 alone, the factory recorded 786 workplace accidents, with 58 workers requiring more than a month to recover.
Women entered industrial work in unprecedented numbers, helping sustain production while often receiving less pay than men performing comparable work.
The valley was camouflaged from the air. Blackout conditions and air-raid precautions became part of daily life. No bombs fell on Lithgow, but the possibility was never far away. For those who lived and worked there, the war was not something happening elsewhere. It was woven into everyday life.
The Factory And The People
Yet the story of the factory did not begin and end with war. Over more than 80 years, Lithgow's workforce applied its skills to an extraordinary range of civilian products. Sewing machines, sheep shearing handpieces, medical implants, handcuffs and countless other precision-engineered items demonstrated the versatility of the workforce and the depth of engineering expertise that existed within the valley.
The factory's greatest legacy was not simply what it produced, but the generations of skilled workers and families who built a community around it. Long before innovation became a buzzword, Lithgow workers were adapting, redesigning and solving complex engineering challenges.
Pictured left: Donna White, President (and Custodian) of the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum
The Whistle That Ruled The Day
For generations, Lithgow lived by the sound of a whistle.
Three minutes before the start of each shift, the steam whistle sounded across the valley, warning workers it was time to be at their machines.
At 4.06 pm each weekday, it signalled the end of the working day.
Its reach was remarkable. On a clear day, the whistle could reportedly be heard as far away as Hartley. Locals recalled that whenever it sounded, dogs across the town would begin to howl.
In an era when many families owned neither a watch nor an alarm clock, the whistle became Lithgow's timekeeper.
Children heard it from schoolyards. Shopkeepers heard it from their counters. Families listened for it knowing the day's work was done and people would soon be heading home.
The whistle did more than mark the hours.
It regulated the rhythm of an industrial town and became one of the defining sounds of life in Lithgow.
A Lithgow-made Pinnock sewing machine—one example of the Small Arms Factory’s remarkable shift into civilian manufacturing after the war.
Workers at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, whose skills supported both wartime production and an extraordinary range of civilian manufacturing.
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.
“Two Killed in Quarry Fall,” Lithgow Mercury, September 1939. The report records the deaths of Charles Strange and the filmmaker’s paternal grandfather, Jacob Patrick, when hundreds of tons of granite collapsed at a quarry near South Bowenfels. Both men were employed by the Main Roads Board.
A Connection To Safety Education Carried Through Family
For the filmmaker, this history is also personal.
In 1925—just one year before the legislation—her maternal grandfather, Francis J. Neubeck, descended 50 feet into a colliery shaft at Lidsdale after miner Neils Petersen was overcome by foul air. Although the candle he carried was immediately extinguished, Francis continued down a primitive ladder, secured Petersen’s body so it could be lifted to the surface, and then climbed back by the same ladder. He was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the Royal Shipwreck Relief and Humane Society of New South Wales. Fourteen years later, the filmmaker’s paternal grandfather, Jacob Patrick, was killed in a quarry cave-in at South Bowenfels, leaving a widow and four children. Their stories reveal both the dangerous working world from which reform emerged and its limits. Legislation could establish rights and responsibilities, but it could not prevent every death—or protect every family from what followed. For the filmmaker, Lithgow’s industrial history is therefore not distant history. It is inherited history. This family connection is shared not to place one family at the centre, but to acknowledge a deep connection to Lithgow and the responsibility she feels to tell, with dignity and respect, the much larger story of the workers who built this region—and the families and communities who carried the consequences of that work.
Wallerawang: The History That Nearly Disappeared
Warren Hay worked at Wallerawang Power Station from 1955 to 1961, first as a fitter’s assistant. More than three decades later, in 1993, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma.
Warren’s personal-injury claim was settled the following year. But the dispute over responsibility continued for years, eventually reaching the High Court of Australia and then returning to the NSW Court of Appeal.
Long after Warren had breathed the dust, responsibility for its consequences was still being contested.
Government reports and court judgments preserve only part of this history. Much of what workers experienced survived through their own testimony—and through the determination of ordinary people to ensure it was not lost.
Social historian Marje Prior was commissioned by Delta Electricity to document the social history of Wallerawang Power Station. Retired workers contributed their memories, photographs and accounts of working life. As those stories emerged, so too did recollections of asbestos exposure.
The project was discontinued before publication.
Almost two decades later, Marje ensured that the history was finally preserved by publishing it herself.
For Shattered's filmmaker, returning to Wallerawang also meant returning to the district where she spent her early childhood, at nearby Lidsdale. What began as a return to a familiar landscape became an encounter with histories its workers and families had been carrying for decades.
Today, the physical dangers of asbestos are widely recognised. But Shattered asks whether another form of workplace harm is still being understood too late.
Psychiatrist Dr Julian Parmegiani warns that psychological injury may become “the asbestos crisis of the future.”
The histories of Wallerawang, the Latrobe Valley and communities across Australia leave us with one confronting question: after all this, what have we learned?
Further reading
For a broader account of the national political landscape surrounding the asbestos compensation funding crisis—and Bernie Banton’s extraordinary advocacy for victims and their families—we recommend Matt Peacock’s compelling book, Killer Company: James Hardie Exposed.
Lithgow & Wallerawang Powerhouse Workers was originally commissioned by Delta Electricity in 2005 as part of its community relations program. Through oral histories with former workers, it captured memories of life inside the power stations, including recollections of asbestos exposure and unsafe workplace practices before the introduction of modern occupational health and safety laws. The project was subsequently shelved and remained unpublished for almost twenty years before Marje Prior finally published it in 2024.
Marje Prior stands with retired Wallerawang Power Station workers at the 2024 launch of Lithgow & Wallerawang Powerhouse Workers, returning these stories to the community where they began. Together, they preserved an important chapter of Australia's industrial history through the voices of those who lived it.
Members of the Wallerawang Social History Group gathered to share memories, photographs and personal accounts of life at the power station. Their collective effort reminds us that industrial history is not only about infrastructure and production, but about people, families and communities whose experiences might otherwise be lost.
From Visible Risks to Hidden Harms
Today, workplaces are increasingly expected to protect workers in both mind and body. Alongside physical hazards, employers must identify psychosocial hazards and take reasonable steps to eliminate them or minimise their risks.
A century ago, danger was often immediate and visible: fire, collapse, machinery and explosion. Many workers also endured exposures that would only be understood decades later.
The challenges of our own time can be harder to see. For some, injury is compounded by isolation, prolonged uncertainty, complex processes and systems that can lose sight of the person at their centre.
Yet history also tells another story. Across generations, people have cared for one another, organised, adapted and called for something better. The resilience that helped build communities like Lithgow and Wallerawang continues in those working to create systems that uphold safety, fairness and human dignity.
The Valley Today: Transition, Safety, and Renewal
The furnaces are silent now. The Blast Furnace, State Mine Heritage Park and Small Arms Factory Museum remain 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.
Where the Story Led
When our research began in Lithgow, we wanted to understand why so many Australians are injured at work—and what happens to them afterwards.
That question took Shattered into communities across New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. We listened to workers and families, doctors and researchers, advocates and community leaders. Their experiences revealed a national story about work, injury, care, recovery and the systems that shape what happens next.
Throughout the research, we also encountered the memorials created by communities determined that those who died because of their work would not be forgotten. They remind us that workplace harm is never only an individual event. Its consequences pass through families, workplaces and communities—and can endure across generations.
Generations gather at the annual Mt Kembla memorial service held each year on July 31, remembering the 96 men and boys killed in the 1902 mine disaster. (pictured left images from Mt Kembla memorial service footage courtesy win tv).
Shattered begins in Lithgow, but the questions it asks belong to every community:
What happens after work changes a life?
And what do we owe people when it does?
