Lithgow: Where Australia Learned the Cost of Work

Lithgow sits on the western slopes of the Blue Mountains, a town shaped by the industries that powered modern Australia. (image credit: soaring eagle productions)

From the convict road over Victoria Pass to the industries that powered the nation, the story behind workers’ compensation begins in towns like this.

The road that climbs out of Lithgow toward the Blue Mountains was first carved into the escarpment nearly two centuries ago.

In the early 1830s, convict labour gangs cut sandstone from the cliff face, stacked it into retaining walls and forced a narrow passage across the mountains. When Mitchell’s Causeway — often called the Convict Bridge opened in 1832, it created one of the first reliable routes linking Sydney to the interior of New South Wales.

For generations, people, freight and opportunity moved across Victoria Pass. Until now.

Last week the Great Western Highway at Victoria Pass was closed after cracks and structural movement were discovered in the historic bridge. Engineers have described it as a major geotechnical failure. Images show long fractures running across the road surface, visible signs of deeper instability beneath.

For the first time in generations, the most direct road between Sydney and the Central West has been severed.

For travellers it means detours. For communities beyond the mountains, it means something more immediate. Freight becomes slower and more expensive. Small businesses lose passing trade. School runs stretch longer. The everyday rhythm of life shifts.

For many residents the impact is even more personal. People who travel to Sydney for medical appointments now face longer and more uncertain journeys across the mountains.

The full effects of a disruption like this are rarely visible at first. They tend to unfold gradually — in the small adjustments people make to work, family routines and community life.

In towns like Lithgow, where connections between people and place run deep, those changes ripple quietly through the social fabric.

A town of just over twenty thousand people on the western slopes of the Blue Mountains.

For more than a century, this valley helped power the nation. Coal from the Western Coalfields fuelled industries that built modern Australia. Lithgow’s Eskbank Ironworks became Australia’s first commercially viable iron and steel works — the birthplace of the nation’s steel industry. Nearby, Portland would later proudly call itself “the town that built Sydney,” its cement used in bridges, dams and buildings across the state.

For many families these industries meant something simple but powerful: regular work, steady wages and the ability to build a life in the valley. But industrial progress never arrives without consequence. The social history of workers makes that clear.

Across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial towns like Lithgow carried the risks that came with rapid development. Mining explosions. Roof collapses. Crushing injuries underground. Burns and machinery accidents in steelmaking and heavy industry. These were not rare events. They were part of working life.

Over time those realities forced a response. The systems we now know as workers’ compensation did not emerge from theory alone. They emerged from lived experience: injury, loss and a growing understanding that safety at work could no longer be left to chance.

It is a quiet irony that in modern Australia far more people are seriously injured at work each year than die on our roads. And yet, at this moment, the road into Lithgow is being asked to absorb around 12,000 vehicles a day, traffic that once flowed across the mountains but is now forced through the town itself. Streets never designed for that scale of movement must now carry it.

The pass above the valley was carved into the mountains in the 1830s for horses and carts, not modern freight convoys and commuter traffic.

It is another reminder that places like Lithgow have long carried more than their share of Australia’s industrial story — the coal that powered cities, the steel that built infrastructure, the cement that shaped skylines, and now the traffic that keeps the state moving west.

Long before coal mines, blast furnaces and railway lines arrived, this valley was and remains part of Wiradjuri Country, with Gundungurra and Dharug peoples connected to the surrounding mountains and valleys. For tens of thousands of years these landscapes held different forms of knowledge, movement and care. Industrial Australia arrived only recently in comparison.

The modern story of Lithgow is now entering another period of change. The closure of Wallerawang Power Station in 2014 marked the end of one chapter in the region’s energy history. The valley is now navigating the gradual transition of the coal-powered economy that shaped it for generations. New industries are emerging. Renewable energy projects are being explored. Tourism, advanced manufacturing and small enterprise are beginning to grow alongside the region’s industrial heritage.

Over time, a growing focus has also emerged on industrial heritage tourism, the blast furnace ruins, the rail history, the mines and power stations that once defined the valley.

And surrounding it all, the extraordinary beauty of the seven valleys that form part of the wider Blue Mountains World Heritage landscape.

This valley is also where I was born. For many years I had not returned often. Like many people who grow up in regional towns, life eventually leads elsewhere.

When filming for Shattered began, Lithgow was only meant to be one story among many. But the longer the work continued, the clearer it became that the story ran deeper here than expected. Time spent walking through the industrial landscape, revisiting archives and standing in the places where so much of Australia’s industrial history unfolded gradually revealed something unexpected.

The story did not simply pass through Lithgow. In many ways, it begins in towns like this. Looking across the valley today, the layers of history remain visible. The coal seams beneath the hills. The ruins of the blast furnace beside the railway. Power stations that once supplied electricity across the state.

And above it all, the Great Western Highway winding through Victoria Pass — the road first carved into the mountains by convict labour nearly two centuries ago. It becomes even clearer why this story begins here. Because the protection of workers was never just a policy idea. It was something learned in real places.

Places like Lithgow.

And places like this are where the consequences of our systems are often felt first.