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.
Wallerawang: The Danger We Couldn't See
The dangers of industry did not end when explosions became less common.
At Wallerawang Power Station, generations of workers helped power New South Wales. The station supplied electricity to homes, industry and the expanding state economy.
Yet many worked surrounded by materials later recognised as deadly.
Asbestos was widely used throughout twentieth-century power stations to insulate boilers, turbines and steam systems. Many workers handled it without understanding the risks they faced. Some would only learn decades later that the dust they breathed carried consequences long after their working lives had ended.
The history of workplace harm is not only a story of sudden catastrophe.
Sometimes it arrives slowly.
Through illness.
Through waiting.
Through the delayed recognition that the cost of progress was borne by human bodies.
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. There 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.
