FINAL DRAFT PHASE 2 CORRIDOR OPTIONS HISTORIC … · Phase 2, Final Draft _____ Casey & Lowe...

FINAL DRAFT PHASE 2

CORRIDOR OPTIONS HISTORIC HERITAGE

MT VICTORIA TO LITHGOW

View over Hartley Vale Shale Mine refinery, Hartley Valley with Hassans Walls in the right background, taken from the tramway, 4 May 2009.

For

Sinclair Knight Merz

on behalf of the NSW Roads & Traffic Authority

September 2009

Phase 2, Final Draft

________________________________________________________________________________ Casey & Lowe Corridor Options, Historic Heritage

Mt Victoria to Lithgow

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AIMS Phase 2 of this project requires the identification of constraints associated with the historic-period occupation of the study area within the six modified corridors identified by the RTA. To achieve this aim the following work was undertaken:

A final historical report with some additional information to the Phase 1 report. Review of register searches, copies of schedules to be presented in appendices. An updated table summarising all known heritage items located within and adjacent to the

corridors. This would build on the detailed table provided in the Study Area Investigations and Corridors Identification report.

Mapping of the identified items chronologically so as to provide an overview of the development of the study area. This mapping is included in Section 2.

Fieldwork on the main risk areas, as identified by the consultant, SKM and the RTA. This involved a focus on the issues associated with the World Heritage Area, State Heritage Register items and a review of curtilage issues, State significant heritage items adjacent to and within the corridors.

METHODOLOGY Obtain a copy of the Blue Mountains Council inventory sheets to provide dates for all the identified sites within their area. Already have these dates for Lithgow. SKM to produce chronological mapping using data from both councils’ inventory sheets as these are the only reasonable dates available for these sites to use for mapping. Review of registers:

State Heritage Inventory State Heritage Register and proposed listings Council LEPs S170 Registers: RTA, RailCorp, DECC, Sydney Water Register of the National Estate National Heritage List Australian Heritage Database

Confirmation of identified sites and mapping of these sites, provision of curtilages where possible such as Hartley Vale Shale Mine, the two stockade sites, Fernhill, Mt Victoria Railway Station, and The Grange. Mapping of sites within corridors to allow for assessment of issues associated with each corridor. Opportunities and constraints have been identified for each modified corridor. Sites providing the most constraints for the corridor were the subject of field investigations and appropriate preliminary curtilages were identified. This Phase 2 report adds in the fieldwork component as well as additional historical research so as to understand some of the new issues identified during fieldwork. Document Status

Name Date Purpose Authors ReviewedDRAFT Issue 1 24 March 2009 Draft issue to SKM MTC/IJ TLDraft Issue 2 27 March 2009 Draft issue to SKM MTC/IJ Draft Issue 3 17 July 2009 Draft issue to SKM MTC/IJ/WM-W TL/BM Draft Issue 4 19 July 2009 Draft issue to SKM MTC/IJ/WM-W Draft Issue 5 Draft issue to SKM MTC/IJ/WM-W Final Draft 30 Sept 2009 Issue to SKM “ “ TL

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CONTENTS

1.0 Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background ................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Study Area ................................................................................................................. 1 1.3 Methodology .............................................................................................................. 1 1.4 Limitations ................................................................................................................. 4 1.5 Author Identification ................................................................................................. 4 1.6 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... 4 1.7 Abbreviations ............................................................................................................. 4

2.0 Historical Background ................................................................................. 6

2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 6 2.2 The Seven Lines of Road to the West ....................................................................... 8 2.3 An Alternative Approach: Victoria Pass and Berghofers Pass ................................ 15 2.4 The Stockades .......................................................................................................... 17 2.5 The Seventh Way: the Road from Bell to Lithgow ................................................. 23 2.6 Service Centres along the Highway ......................................................................... 23 2.7 Hartley Vale as a Farming Community ................................................................... 30 2.8 Hartley Vale and the Oil-Shale Industry ................................................................. 32 2.9 Darling Causeway .................................................................................................... 42 2.10 The Dam at the (Piddington) Grange, Mount Victoria ........................................ 50

3.0 Historic Heritage and Corridor Issues ..................................................... 58

3.1 The Corridors ........................................................................................................... 58 3.2 Identification of Heritage Items and Sites ............................................................... 60 3.3 Constraints Arising from Significance .................................................................... 61 3.4 Modified Orange Option 1 Corridor ........................................................................ 62 3.5 Modified Orange Option 2 Corridor ........................................................................ 63 3.6 Modified Red Option 1 Corridor ............................................................................. 64 3.7 Modified Red Option 2 ............................................................................................ 65 3.8 Modified Green Corridor ......................................................................................... 66 3.9 Modified Purple Corridor ........................................................................................ 67

4.0 Landscape Analysis .................................................................................... 79

4.1 Landscape Character issues ..................................................................................... 79 4.2 Visual Issues ............................................................................................................ 86

5.0 Field Inspections World Heritage Area and State Heritage Register Items 5.1 Methodology for all Heritage Items 90 5.1.1 Review of Issues associated with the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area 5.1.2 Review of Issues associated with all SHR Items 90 5.1.3 Review of Issues associated with all State significant items and sites 90 5.1.4 Approach 91 5.1.5 Curtilage Methodology 91 5.2 World Heritage Area 93 5.2.1 Eastern End of Corridors and Blue Mountains World Heritage Area 93 5.2.2 DECC Heritage Items in the World Heritage Area 105 5.3 State Heritage Register Items 106

5.3.1 Mt Victoria Railway Station Group 106 5.3.2 Berghofers Pass 114

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5.3.3 Hartley Vale Shale Mine and Incline 117 5.3.4 Historic Hartley 120 5.3.5 Fernhill 130 5.3.6 National School Group 138

6.0 Field Inspections and Curtilages for Heritage Items and Archaeological Sites 6.1 ‘The Grange’ Mt Victoria 140 6.2 Mt Victoria and Hassans Walls Stockades and Lockyers Line of Road 150 6.2.1 Mt Victoria Stockade Site 150 6.2.2 Hassans Walls Stockade and Lockyers Road 159 6.3 Hartley Vale Shale Mine 164 6.3.1 Description 164 6.3.2 Visual Analysis of Hartley Vale Village and Mining Areas 178 6.3.3 Hartley Vale Shale Mine and Village Curtilage 190 6.4 Hartley Vale Road (Bells Line of Road) 191 6.5 Little Hartley Visual Analysis 192 6.5.1 Pinch Point and Issues 197 6.5.2 Lithgow Heritage Study 197 6.6 Forty Bends Visual Area 198 6.6.1 Analysis of Heritage Items, Sites and Vistas 198 6.7 Old Bowenfels and Associated Heritage Items, Sites and Vistas 205 6.8 Ruined Cottage, Browns Gap Road 218

7.0 Historic Cemeteries 220 7.1 Mt Victoria Cemetery 220 7.2 Hartley General Cemetery 223 7.3 Forty Bends Cemetery 225

8.0 Old Lines of Road within the Corridors 228 8.1 Section of Road and Culvert on Mitchell’s Line of Road, Historic Hartley 228 8.2 Culverts and Rock Cutting on Mitchell’s Line of Road, Forty Bends 230 8.3 The Culvert at ‘Emoh’, Old Bowenfels 231 8.4 Mitchell’s Line of Road 231 8.5 Coxs Pass 233

9.0 Pinch Points 234 9.1 Mt Victoria Pinch Point 234 9.2 Darling Causeway Pinch Point 236

10.0 Statutory Constraints 238

10.1 Commonwealth Legislation 238 10.2 State Legislation 240 10.3 Local Council Statutory Controls 242

11.0 Heritage Significance 244

11.1 The Burra Charter and Significance 244 11.2 Significance and Historic Heritage 244

12.0 References 247 Appendices Appendix 1: Schedules of Heritage Items Appendix 2: Section 170 Registers Appendix 3: List of all sites within the Phase 1 study area

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Corridor Options: Phase 2-Fieldwork Historic Heritage Issues Mt Victoria to Lithgow

1.0 Introduction 1.1 Background The NSW Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) are investigating the feasibility of options to upgrade the Great Western Highway from Mt Victoria to Lithgow. Project objectives include by-passing Mount Victoria, Victoria Pass and River Lett Hill. A feasible option should meet identified safety requirements and project objectives. The RTA requires the Preliminary Environmental Assessment (PEI) be undertaken in three phases:

Phase 1: Study area investigations, constraints mapping Phase 2: Corridor options investigations with fieldwork Phase 3: Route option investigations.

This report provides a review of issues associated with the corridor options so feasible route options can be identified. To undertake analysis of the heritage issues Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd was commissioned by Sinclair Knight Merz to identify the historic and Aboriginal heritage within the study area, to provide mapping information to use for the identification of road corridors. This work was completed for Phase 1. The Phase 2 report reviews the heritage registers for the corridor areas, undertakes chronological mapping and identifies heritage issues associated with the four corridors so as to allow for the identification of route options within the corridor. The report on Aboriginal heritage constraints is being undertaken by Comber Consultants and is separate to this report. All historical research for this project is by Associate Professor Ian Jack while Mayne-Wilson Associates are reporting on the visual and curtilage issues. Historic Heritage Issues (Phase 2 - Fieldwork) The present report details the study of the various identified issues in relation to historic heritage and the four identified corridors. The report’s tasks are:

Review list of known and potential historic heritage sites Identification of sites within the corridors and associated issues Fieldwork covering the main items and sites which require clarification of a number of issues.

1.2 Study Area The eastern part of the study area is located within the local government area of Blue Mountains Council while the western two-thirds are within the Lithgow Council area (Fig. 1.1). The study area is a triangular-shaped area extending from just east of Mt Victoria in the southeast with the southern boundary generally along the southern side of the Great Western Highway, including the locality of Little Hartley, the historic townships of Hartley and South (Old) Bowenfels. The northern boundary is along the geological formation of Hassans Walls and eastwards to Darling Causeway and includes Hartley Vale and the site of the Hartley Vale Shale Mine. 1.3 Methodology 1.3.1 Historic Heritage List of heritage sites based on the Blue Mountains and Lithgow Heritage LEPs and Heritage Studies has been assembled (Appendix 3). These lists include scheduled heritage items, heritage




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conservation areas, items on the State Heritage Register (SHR), items listed on the Register of the National Estate, S170 items managed by statutory authorities, and some potential archaeological relics as protected under S139 of the NSW Heritage Act. This list was produced based on a desktop review of the State Heritage Inventory (SHI), Councils’ LEP heritage schedules, relevant heritage information contained on council websites (Blue Mountains and Lithgow), the Australian Heritage Council website, S170 registers for the RTA, RailCorp, Sydney Water and DECC (Appendix 2). Where locations of sites are known they are mapped. It is noted that the location of sites in the Lithgow area have some level of inaccuracy and these will need to be checked for the next stage depending upon the route options. Fieldwork was undertaken to inspect a number of heritage items and sites which were within corridors and required further clarification. Typically we already knew where the site was from mapping and from inventory sheets. In addition, Mary Casey was accompanied on the survey by Ian Jack who had seen a number of the sites previously. Also locals provided considerable assistance in identifying the location of archaeological sites whose location was less certain.

Figure 1.1: Plan showing the study area extending from Mount Victoria in the southeast to Old Bowenfels in the northwest.


Figure 1.2: Layout of corridors in relation to the study area.




1.4 Limitations As part of the Phase 2 project SKM has obtained access to heritage inventories for Blue Mountains and Lithgow LGA. There are still some inadequacies for the SHR curtilages for some sites where these are not available, such as the Blue Mountains Walking Tracks for which the SHR listing has no on-line maps or clear maps at DECC, or no identified curtilage in the case of the Mt Victoria Railway Station Group. The inventory sheets provided by DECC have some details but again there is some uncertainty in relation to which parts of the tracks/former roads are listed on the SHR and which are not. In general, we have chosen to take the cautious approach and assume, until curtilages are further clarified, that all items in a group are included in the SHR listing. The items that require further clarification are the Hartley Vale Shale Mine tramway and incline. Mayne-Wilson & Associates identified a range of limitations associated with the visual analysis and identification of curtilages. It should be noted here, however, that with only one or two exceptions, the heritage inventory sheets in themselves do not provide much information on land surrounding heritage buildings to assist in determining curtilages. More thorough research (i.e. a full heritage study), entering private properties and discussions with their owners may be required to adequately determine curtilages for some heritage properties within the route of the finally selected corridor. Both time and fee constraints limited the extent to which this could be done at this preliminary stage. 1.5 Author Identification Section 2, the historical report, was researched and written by Associate Professor Ian Jack. The list of sites has been collated by Dr Mary Casey based on available information and in consultation with Ian Jack and various agencies and SKM. All mapping for this project was provided by Sinclair Knight Merz. Analysis of curtilages and views for heritage items was undertaken by Warwick Mayne-Wilson and Ari Anderson, Mayne-Wilson & Associates. Their work on the curtilages and views has been incorporated into this report throughout the sections. Mary Casey identified the curtilages for archaeological sites and was responsible for overall co-ordination and analysis of site issues. She was accompanied on various site visits by various members of the team and Tony Lowe, Director, Casey & Lowe. Assistance on this project was provided by Bernadette McCall. Comments on a draft were received from the RTA and have been incorporated into the final draft. 1.6 Acknowledgements Yvette Sheedy Sinclair Knight Merz Andrew Spinks Sinclair Knight Merz John Beattie Manager, Information Systems and Assessment Section, Department of

Environment & Climate Change Ruth Berndt S170 manager, Rail Corp Cheryl Brown AHIMS manager, Department of Environment & Climate Change Martin Gibbs Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney Bob and Warren Merrick landowners re Lockyers Road and Hassans Walls Stockade Bill Nethery Heritage Branch, Department of Planning Kathy & Greg Noble Comet Inn and lessee of part of the Hartley Vale Shale Mine Marcia Ostenberg-Olsen Landowner re Mt Victoria Stockade site James Sheehan Land owner, Hassans Walls Stockade site Katrina Stankowski Formerly Department of Environment & Climate Change, now at the

Heritage Branch, Dept of Planning Bill Nethery Heritage Branch, Department of Planning 1.7 Abbreviations BM LEP Blue Mountains Local Environmental Plan HCC LEP Hawkesbury City Council Local Environmental Plan




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HVSM Hartley Vale Shale Mine LCC LEP Lithgow City Council Local Environmental Plan NSWSHI New South Wales State Heritage Inventory SHR Listed on the State Heritage Register




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2.0 Historical Background 2.1 Introduction To the early European settlers the Blue Mountains offered a challenge and an opportunity. Within months of white settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788, the colonists were aware that a major barrier lay to the west, just beyond the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. For the first Europeans, the Blue Mountains constituted the west wall of the big detention centre on the Cumberland Plain. The building of the first road across the Mountains in 1814-5 by William Cox’s convicts and the unlocking of inland Australia which was its corollary had symbolism as well as practicality. The western road was a necessary step in the transition from penal settlement to free colony. To see the mountains as a barrier was, however, a very European construct. For Aboriginal people for millennia before 1788 the Blue Mountains, though a self-evident demarcator, were not so much a divider as a meeting-place. They lay on the periphery of several language groups. For the Wiradjuri, the Gundungurra and the Darug people, the Mountains were a natural point of contact. One result was that there was widespread Aboriginal knowledge of how to attain the table-top from the plains and valleys on all sides, including the west, and how to cross the climactic landscape of the table-top without abruptly terminating one’s journey. For everyone on the Mountains, Aboriginal or European, travel in the region was at bottom a ‘negotiation of the perpendicular’.1 The Blue Mountains are split in two by the gorge of the Grose River. From the hinterland of Sydney there proved to be only one viable traffic corridor across the mountain ridges south of the Grose and another, less patronised, corridor north of the gorge. The southern route, now the Great Western Highway, had recurrent narrow pinches along its ridge and the railway from the 1860s onwards had to share this minimal space. There were, and still remain, problems in ascending the eastern escarpment from the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley onto both of the traffic corridors, north and south of the Grose, while the graver difficulties in descending from both these Mountain routes to the Bathurst Plains are still unresolved. The present quest by the RTA for a new route down from Mount Victoria, Mount York and the Darling Causeway is merely another stage in two centuries of experimentation. If a new descent is identified and a new road link built, it will be the eighth since William Cox’s convicts negotiated the perpendicular at Mount York late in 1814. While the Great Western Highway and Bells Line of Road over the plateau have remained basically stable routes, they have both culminated in a series of diverse roadways down into Hartley Valley. In the 1860s the railway engineers were unable to find suitable gradients adjacent to any of the road alignments descending south of the Grose and chose a western extension of Bells Line instead, skirting Newnes Plateau and constructing one of the world’s great ZigZags between Clarence and Lithgow. The result of these physical constraints is that the present study area from Mount Victoria to Hassans Walls is criss-crossed with significant lines of earlier roadways. Its eastern perimeter is the narrow Darling Causeway, which runs from north to south and links the two sides of the Grose River gorge, but the Causeway also carries the railway line from Mount Victoria to Bell. The various vehicular descents into Hartley Valley, whatever their deficiencies, brought population into the valley once the west was opened to settlement in the 1820s. As a result, Hartley Valley, the core of the study area, with attractive grazing potential, was more densely populated in the early Victorian period than the Blue Mountains plateau above. The plateau became a holiday ground for city-folk with a dozen village service centres only after the western railway was fully functioning in the 1870s.

1 Martin Thomas, The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains, Melbourne University Press, Carlton 2003, 37.




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The late Victorian period brought major industrial development to Hartley Vale in the form of the most successful and long-lived oil-shale plant in Australia, flourishing in the Golden Age of Kerosene and supplying lubricating oils for the Age of Steam. Heavy transport of materials and products was, however, largely by rail, not by road and the company built an incline up to the Darling Causeway where it joined a private tramway to the main western railway. In the twentieth century the impact of the motor car reinvigorated the Great Western Highway but also prompted the building of Berghofers Pass, the first alternative route to Mitchell’s Victoria Pass of 1832. The result of all this sporadic change is a remarkable concentration of over a hundred significant heritage items within the study area, as well as the roads and railways themselves. More than half of these sites are in the urban area of Mount Victoria, which was the gateway to the west both by road and by rail. Thirty-five more heritage items lie along the line of the Great Western Highway, at Little Hartley, Hartley Historic Site and Old Bowenfels. In the rolling paddocks of Hartley Vale, to the north of the Great Western Highway, there are twenty-three identified heritage sites, including rural homesteads, important cemeteries, the highly significant industrial remains of the oil-shale works and the substantial company town called Hartley Vale. Figure 2.1: Hartley Vale from the top of the oil-shale incline on the western edge of Darling Causeway.

The industrial company village of Hartley Vale is in the left foreground. Source: Photograph by Ian Jack, 5 May 1997.

When one stands at the top of the oil-shale incline on the western edge of the Darling Causeway, the industrial plant and town are tucked away below and the main vista is a colonial rural scene. Within that vista, the boundaries of the original grants are still clearly distinguishable as far as Hassans Walls, the dominating cliffs which close off the valley to the north. Most of the land has remained in farming use and successive homesteads and outbuildings have been constructed over a long period. Hartley Vale is a singularly important cultural landscape (Fig. 2.1). The broader area known as Hartley Valley, straddling the Great Western Highway, and including Hartley Vale, is the earliest settled area beyond the Mountains. When the distinguished judge and litterateur, Barron Field, first rode along Coxs Road in 1822 and looked down on Hartley Vale, he enthused:




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Mount York redeems the journey across the Blue Mountains, for it leads you to the first green valley. The earliest burst of Christian transalpine country … is very beautiful…After three days’ starving on the mountains, your cattle now get plenty of grass.2

Although Evans himself in 1814 had noted that the best grazing lay further west, on the Bathurst Plains, Hartley Valley attracted settlement throughout the 1820s for precisely the reasons Field enunciates. The area continued to develop and benefited from the growth of Bathurst. Its original farmers and innkeepers still live through their building complexes, tree plantings, archaeological sites and burial-grounds. The adverse effect of the railway bypassing the valley slowed development along the Highway in the last thirty years of Victoria’s reign, but this was counter-balanced by the success of the major oil and kerosene industry in Hartley Vale for half a century. After World War I coincided with the end of the local oil industry, Hartley Vale relapsed into somnolence. But the Great Western Highway, with its villages, Little Hartley, Hartley and South Bowenfels, became increasingly busy with the coming of motor transport in the early twentieth century. Berghofers Pass replaced Victoria Pass for a while, with gradients less arduous for early cars, but Mitchell’s route regained its ascendancy in the 1920s and through traffic to the further west inexorably increased on Victoria Pass to create the problems which face transport administrators today. 2.2 The Seven Lines of Road to the West 2.2.1 Four Routes down the Western Escarpment into Hartley Vale, 1814 to 1828 2.2.1.1 Coxs Road, 1814-5 After a series of explorations in the Blue Mountains beginning with Dawes and Johnston in 1789, a route across the plateau was finally established in 1813 by three settlers, anxious to find new grazing lands primarily for themselves. The route blazed by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth was professionally surveyed, refined and extended by George William Evans later in 1813. Governor Macquarie specially recalled Evans from his surveying duties in Tasmania to establish the new route to the west and to explore beyond as far as the site of the future Bathurst. Evans’ blazed route from Emu Plains to Bathurst was formed into a dray road by convict labour under the supervision of William Cox, the Windsor magistrate and entrepreneur, the governor’s man on the Hawkesbury. Coxs Road was completed over six months, from July 1814 to January 1815.3 The top of Mount York was reached on 12 November 1814, but a preliminary reconnaissance had already convinced Cox that:

it is not possible to make a good road to go down and up again without going to a very great expense. I have, therefore made up my mind to make such a road as a cart can go down empty or with a very light load without a possibility of its being able to return with any sort of load whatever; and such a road will also answer to drive stock down to the forest ground.4

Mount York juts out aggressively into Hartley Vale and its rock faces to the north and west do not encourage road-building (Fig. 2.2). Cox’s solution was to go down the eastern side of the mountain and then turn north, turning west only when the valley floor was safely reached near the later Hartley Vale cemetery (Fig. 2.3).

2 G. Mackaness, (ed.), Fourteen Journey over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, 1813-1841, Sydney 1950, reprinted Dubbo 1978, II 37. 3 Grace Karskens, Cox’s Way: Historical and Archaeological Study of Cox’s Road and Early Crossings of the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Sydney 1988, 46, 86-96. 4 Memoirs of William Cox, J.P., Sydney 1901, reprinted Library of Australian History, North Sydney 1979, 73.




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Figure 2.2: The north face of Mount York, viewed from Hartley Vale. Coxs Road descended on the east (right) side and came along the valley floor close to the ruined chimney surviving from a nineteenth-century house. Source: Photograph by Ian Jack, 20 May 1997.

Cox’s own judgment on the quality of his pass down to Hartley Vale was sound. Wheeled vehicles could go down only if logs were attached behind to act as brakes. Governor and Mrs Macquarie had to walk down the pass in 1815, while their carriage was manhandled over the steep and uneven surface.5 When the first farms were established beyond the mountains in 1821-2, soon followed by Collits’ Inn, there was every incentive to find an alternative descent. 2.2.1.2 Lawsons Long Alley, 1822 William Lawson, one of the original three entrepreneurs of 1813, now had responsibility for road-building in the colony, and in 1822 constructed a new stretch of road starting well to the east of Cox’s descent, going due north down the valley of what was later named Kerosene Creek, and then turning west to join Coxs Road on the floor of the valley (Fig. 2.3).6

5 Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales: Journals of his Tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1810-1822, Public Library of NSW, Sydney 1979. 6 Karskens, Cox’s Way, 46.




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Figure 2.3: The descent into Hartley Vale by Coxs Road (1814), Lawsons Long Alley (1822), Lockyers Road (1828) and Bells Line of Road (1823). Source: Pamphlet issued by Department of Lands, Sydney 1986.

2.2.1.3 Bells Line of Road, 1823 In the following year, 1823, young Archibald Bell, the son of an important landowner at North Richmond, embarked on a series of three expeditions, with Aboriginal assistance, to find a route across the Mountains north of the Grose River. Despite the obstacle of Mount Tomah, Bell successfully blazed what is still known as Bells Line of Road in 1823. Once over Mount Tomah, the road followed the only practicable ridgeline to the Darling Causeway, where it turned south towards Mount Victoria and Coxs Road. But Bell’s road did not join Coxs Road on the plateau but instead turned west halfway along the Causeway and went down the only viable gully into Hartley Vale, above part of the headwaters of the River Lett.7 Alone among the four earliest descents, Bell’s route is still in use today for light vehicular traffic and is known as Hartley Vale Road. Once down the western escarpment, Bells Line of Road met Lawsons Long Alley and then, after passing the inn that

7 State Records NSW, Map SZ 422.




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Pierce Collits had established in 1823, the combined Lawson-Bell road merged into Coxs Road (Figs 2.3, 2.4).

Figure 2.4: Bells Line of Road, western end, in heavy black. Source: NRMA Map 5, 1998, adapted by Ian Jack.

2.2.1.4 Lockyers Road, 1828 Though Lawsons Long Alley was less difficult for wheeled vehicles than Coxs Road, its upper stretches had posed comparable problems for the convict builders. A former army major, Edmund Lockyer, who had taken up land at Marulan as well as being appointed police magistrate at Parramatta in 1827, was in the following year made Governor Darling’s principal surveyor of roads and bridges in the colony.8 Before the Surveyor-General, Thomas Mitchell, managed to gain control of road-building in 1829, Lockyer partially succeeded in devising and constructing a radical alternative to the transmontane section of the western road, which was common to Cox, Lawson and Bell (Fig. 2.3). Unlike the others, Lockyer built his road from the west to the east, so to him the problem was an ascent to the Blue Mountains plateau.9 Lockyer approached Hartley Valley from the north. He had deviated from Coxs Road near Bathurst, where the old road crossed the Macquarie River, and directed his route through the Tarana and Sodwalls area before reaching Old Bowenfels. There he encountered Hassans Walls, a barrier separating Old Bowenfels from the Lithgow Valley to the east. Lockyer chose to direct his road some distance to the south of Hassans Walls, through what is now private property. In 1830 Mitchell criticized this part of Lockyers Road. ‘For the purpose of heading the ravines which render this road impracticable’ Mitchell built his own new road closer to Hassans Walls, including what became known as Forty Bends Road. After Lockyer negotiated the ‘ravines’ to which Mitchell alluded, he reached the top of River Lett Hill in 1828. There Lockyer chose to avoid the uncompromising descent which Mitchell adopted in 1830 and which still worries those who administer the road system. Instead Lockyer very sensibly turned east close to the base of Hassans Walls just south of the later Fernhill. Mitchell’s road of the 8 ‘Lockyer, Edmund (1874-1860), Australian Dictionary of Biography, II, Melbourne University Press, Carlton 1967, 123. 9 A. Wilson, ‘The Great Western Highway: a Romance of Early Road-building’, Main Roads 15 i, September 1949, 12, 14.




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1830s crossed Lockyer’s close to Fernhill and then, on its way north-west, crossed it again at Old Bowenfels (Fig. 2.5).10

Figure 2.5: The lines of Lockyers Road and Mitchells road between Hartley Vale and the hinterland of Old Bowenfels. Red line is Lockyers road and the black line is Mitchells road. Source: Central Mapping Authority, 1:25000 map, Hartley 8930-4N, annotated by Ian Jack, 2009.

From the later cross-roads with Mitchell’s road close to the later Fernhill, Lockyers Road travelled north-east through what was soon to be land granted to John Blackman. It then turned at the main Blackman homestead of Rosedale and followed the line of what we know as The Gap Road south-east in a fairly straight line down to Collits Inn. As a result, Lockyer tackled the escarpment halfway between Coxs Road and Lawsons Long Alley (Fig. 2.6).

10 T.L. Mitchell, Report upon the Progress made in Roads, and in the Construction of Public Works, in New South Wales, from the year 1827 to June, 1855, Sydney 1856, 13.




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Figure 2.6: Lockyers Road, shown in heavy black, from Fernhill on the top left through to the Mount

York Road at the bottom right. Mitchells Great Western Highway of 1832, shown in red, cut across Lockyers Road just south of the later Fernhill. Source: Parish map of Lett, county of Cook, 4th ed. 1897, Lands, PMap OE06, 11278301; parish map of Hartley, county of Cook, 2nd ed. 1888, Lands, PMap OE06, 11260701.

The approach to the cliff was completed in some style, with a wide, raised carriageway supported by retaining walls (Fig. 2.7), but the ascent to the ridgeway demanded a zigzag and strenuous rock-removal. It seems that Lockyer’s convicts, like Cox’s, were divided into separate gangs so that work on the new road up on the plateau going south to join Coxs Road south of Mount York could proceed simultaneously with the more difficult work of scaling the cliff. Lockyer’s works were still incomplete when Mitchell took over in 1829 and characteristically determined a quite different approach. Lockyers Road was not by any means a failure, however. The modern road from Sodwalls and its eastwards continuation, now called Rydal Road, still largely follow Lockyer’s route. From the junction of Rydal Road with what was then the road to Mudgee at Old Bowenfels, Lockyers Road is now the line of the Great Western Highway. From Old Bowenfels to Fernhill, Lockyer’s line went south of all subsequent public roads. Mitchell’s road along the notorious Forty Bends was itself superseded in the twentieth century by the present highway closer still to Hassans Walls (Fig. 2.5). The entire route blazed through the centre of Hartley Vale by Lockyer in 1828-9 was needed by the new settlers there and is still in use as The Gap Road. What fell out of public use and became a private access road was the east-west section under Hassans Walls, which connected the Blackman properties of Fernhill (on the Great Western Highway) and Rosedale (on The Gap Road). The section running between Lockyer’s bridge over the River Lett and Collits’ Inn was also associated with the Collits family. James Collit, the son of the first innkeeper, Pierce, had already suggested a new line of road to Bathurst in 1827.11 When Larmer surveyed Hartley Vale in 1832, he described the part of Lockyer’s road between the inn and the bridge as ‘Young Colletts Road’.12

11 . Mitchell, Report upon the Progress made in Roads … from the year 1827 to June, 1855, 13. 12 State Records NSW, Map 5026.




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Figure 2.7: Sketch-map of Lockyers Road as it started the ascent from Hartley Vale to the Blue Mountains plateau in 1828. North is in the bottom right-hand corner. Source: Greg Powell, Pathways to History: Exploring the Blue Mountains, MacStyle Media, Sandringham 1995, 86.

As well as The Gap Road, Lockyer’s route up the Mount York escarpment also continued in use, well into Queen Victoria’s reign but only as a stock-route.13

13 Edna Hickson, ed., George Cox of Mulgoa and Mudgee: Letters to his Sons, 1846-49, Cox family, Mudgee 1980, 36, 72.




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2.3 An Alternative Approach: Victoria Pass and Berghofers Pass 2.3.1 Victoria Pass Despite some initial enthusiasm in the 1820s for Bell’s more direct route to the west on the north side of the Grose, the Great Western Highway remained the dominant route across the plateau. Its dominance was confirmed by the commitment of the great but intransigent Surveyor General, Thomas Mitchell, to his new Victoria Pass as the final answer to the difficult descent of the western escarpment. Mitchell’s preference for a route which went from A to B in as straight a line as was feasible has become legendary. To go in the shortest distance from the eastern end of Mount York Road to the site of the later Hartley, Mitchell chose to use the northern slopes of the mountain called Mount Victoria, going down what has since 1921 been called Mitchells Ridge.14 A massive causeway had to be built in the upper reaches of this descent, supported by buttressed masonry walls as, more famously, on Mitchell’s Great North Road (Fig. 2.8). Mitchell named the new descent Victoria Pass, after the princess who became queen in 1837: the comparable new route on the eastern escarpment of the mountains from Emu Plains up to Glenbrook was already known as Mitchells Pass.15

Figure 2.8: Victoria Pass, buttressing on north side of the causeway. From west. Source: Photograph by Ian Jack, May 1984.

Large gangs of convicts were needed. In the adjacent Victoria Stockade there were 282 convicts in early May and by the end of May there were 378, with 13 draught animals. In October 1832 Governor Bourke opened the Pass. Soon afterwards, however, part of the sustaining wall and the parapet of the central causeway section failed. The damage was made good in a temporary way and the road continued to be used by the increasing traffic. In April 1835 Mitchell visited the pass and found that the masons whom he had directed in mid-1834 to rebuild the sustaining wall properly had

14 Brian Fox, Blue Mountains Geographical Dictionary, author, Bathurst 2006, 206. 15 Fox, Blue Mountains Geographical Dictionary, 229, 206. The name of Victoria Pass had a variety of forms: Pass of Victoria, Pass of Mount Victoria, Mount Victoria Pass.




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laid only the foundations of one buttress.16 Only in 1838 were permanent repairs to the damaged wall completed, using lifting engines which were sketched by Conrad Martens.17 Victoria Pass, although steep, was in most ways highly successful. Its surface did not satisfy the graziers, however. In the 1840s George Cox (the road-builder’s son) who had large grazing interests near Mudgee, was advising his own son to avoid droving sheep on ‘all that pounded Red Ironstone’ on Victoria Pass. Instead Cox recommended, first and foremost, Bells Line of Road all the way from Hartley Vale to Kurrajong and Richmond, bypassing the Great Western Highway entirely. As an alternative, he suggested that Lockyers Road up to Mount Victoria where it joined the Great Western Highway was also preferable to Victoria Pass when sheep had to be driven up for shearing on the plateau or for sale in coastal markets.18 Collitts Inn in Hartley Vale, though no longer licensed premises, was strategically placed to provide paddocks to muster stock before the drovers tackled Bells Line or Lockyers Road. There is an illuminating story about stock-dealers from Emu Plains near Penrith playing cat-and-mouse in 1852 to get first offer of cattle at Joseph Collitts’ establishment: the price had just risen in Sydney but western cattlemen did not yet know of the increase. There were 250 fat cattle in Collitts’ yard and another 550 head on offer.19 Victoria Pass was a punishing climb for the increasing number of bullock teams hauling laden drays from the western plains in the years up to the 1870s, and the whole Great Western Road had deteriorated during the gold-rush years of the 1850s through over-use and under-maintenance. Matters improved for a while after the Main Roads Management Act of 1858, the creation of the Department of Public Works in the following year and the appointment of a commissioner and Engineer-in-Chief for Roads in 1862. At the end of the 1860s, the coming of the western railway relieved the pressure on the road for the transport of wool and grain and made the mineral industry possible. The railway reached Bathurst in 1876, the Mudgee area in the 1880s. Although this reversed the problem of excessive use of the Great Western Highway, it also had the effect that there was little incentive for the government to upgrade the highway in the closing decades of the nineteenth century or to reconsider its route just beyond Mount Victoria. 2.3.1.1 Berghofers Pass The internal combustion engine changed attitudes towards roads in the twentieth century. Early motor vehicles, though robust in many ways, found the uncompromising grades of Victoria Pass challenging and for the first time since the 1830s serious consideration was given to by-passing Mitchell’s descent. Constructive action was taken by John Berghofer, a German immigrant with a long experience of Mount Victoria, Kanimbla Valley and Hartley Valley. After 1892, he and his family lived in the old Victoria Inn at the foot of Victoria Pass, renaming it Rosenthal and then, bowing to anti-German sentiment in the 1910s, Rosedale. He was a public-spirited citizen who became the founding President of Blaxland Shire when it was created in 1906.20 Berghofer was primarily responsible for the construction, between 1907 and 1912, of a new pass, bearing his name. At the top the new route started on Mount York Road, directly opposite the start of Lawsons Long Alley. Unlike Lawson, Berghofer headed south and then turned west, more or less parallel to Victoria Pass, but across the gully which Victoria Pass skirted to the south (Fig. 2.9). This new road wound around the cliffs with sheer drops beyond the post-and-rail fencing, but it avoided the more severe gradients of the 1832 pass and was quite popular with motorists. As car engines 16 State Records NSW, Colonial Secretary, Special Bundles, 9/2886, pp. [10-11], Surveyor-General to Governor, 2 April 1835. 17 State Records NSW, Surveyor General’s correspondence, Reel 3080, 2/1561 pp.83, 118, 215; Conrad Martens, sketch, 1838, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, ZPL PX24 p.40. 18 Hickson, ed., George Cox of Mulgoa and Mudgee: Letters to his Sons, 1846-49, 36, 72. 19 J.T.Ryan, Reminiscences of Australia, Robertson, Sydney 1894, reprinted 1982, 295-8. 20 G.F.J. Bergmann, John William Berghofer, Blue Mountains Historical Society, Wentworth Falls 1954, 2-7.




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became more powerful, however, Victoria Pass reasserted itself as the preferred route and Berghofers Pass was relegated to a minor route and finally it became a walking track after Victoria Pass at last received major improvements in 1934.21

Figure 2.9: Berghofers Pass shown in relation to Lawsons Long Alley and Victoria Pass. Source: Central Mapping Authority, 1:25000, Hartley 8930-4N.

2.4 The Stockades The work of road building in the 1820s and 1830s was done by gangs of convicts guarded by the military. The gangs and their mentors were accommodated in stockades of varying permanency and complexity. Sometimes the convicts lived in moveable boxes, sometimes in huts and sometimes there was a barracks for the soldiery. There were three such stockades within the study area, in Bowens Hollow, under Hassans Walls and at the foot of Victoria Pass. None of these has been excavated archaeologically, although they have all been explored and materials removed by Ollie Leckbandt.22 Coxs River Stockade No. 2, beyond the study area to the west, has, however, been excavated and analysed, giving useful comparative material.23

21 A. Wilson, ‘The Great Western Highway’, Main Roads, 15 i, September 1949. 22 Ollie Leckbandt, Convict Stockades from Mt. Walker to Mt. Victoria, author, Lithgow 1998. 23 S. Rosen and M. Pearson, ‘The No.2 Stockade Cox’s River – its Life and Times: an historical and archaeological investigation’, report to Pacific Power 1997.




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2.4.1 Bowens Hollow Stockade A principal depot for the road-gangs working beyond the River Lett from 1832 to 1840 was No.2 Stockade, on Coxs River. This was some four kilometres west of Old Bowenfels and is now partly submerged by Lyell Dam. In 1836, after some abortive attempts, forty or so convicts were transferred from Coxs River to a new encampment at Bowens Hollow, on the east side of Mitchell’s new line of road (Fig. 2.7). There up to eighty men quarried stone for the abutments of a new bridge over Bowens Creek and did other road work. There was a lumber yard and a small hospital, while the men lived in portable boxes both at the quarry and at the main site, but the stockade soon served its purpose and seems to have closed in 1838 (Fig. 2.10).24 There are few traces of the stockade, but Ollie Leckbandt believes that there were structures on both sides of a seasonal tributary of Bowens Creek. Vestigial remains of the convict quarry lie in what is now a sub-division area of Old Bowenfels called Quarry Place.25

Figure 2.10: Location of Bowens Hollow Stockade marked with a circled black cross. Source: Central Mapping Authority, 1:25000 map, Hartley 8930-4N, annotated by Ian Jack.

24 Rosen and Pearson, ‘The No.2 Stockade Cox’s River’, 65, 68, 74, 76, 79, 81, 206. 25 Leckbandt, Convict Stockades, 23, 28.




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Stockade Barracks

2.4.2 Hassans Walls Stockade Hassans Walls Stockade is located in the north-west corner of the study area (Fig. 2.11). The site is on a part of Lockyers Road which is now a property track to the east of Mitchell’s Great Western Highway just west of Fernhill. The stockade is 300 m north-east of Fernhill, while the barracks is on the opposite side of Boxes Creek some 200 m further away (Fig. 2.11). Hassans Walls Stockade lay on Lockyers Road and as a result it has been argued that the stockade was built for Lockyer’s convict workmen but it fact it belongs to Mitchell’s time. In April 1835 Mitchell complained that, although he had directed that a new ‘station for an iron-gang should be placed at the first crossing of the new line’ up River Lett Hill with Major Lockyer’s road, the new huts ‘have been erected on a damp looking piece of ground nearly a quarter of a mile from the spot pointed out by me – as being on the line on which the gang is to be employed’.26 In two 1837 surveys, four or six huts are shown in the stockade on the ‘old road’ (Fig. 2.12).27 Four stone chimney bases are still discernible in the area occupied by the convict road-gangs (Fig. 2.13).28 The stone barracks across the creek were photographed in the 1890s and were still visible ruins in 1914 but there are now only sub-surface remains.29

Figure 2.11: Location map of Hassans Walls stockade and barracks. Source: Central Mapping Authority, 1:25000, Hartley 8930-4N.

26 State Records NSW, Colonial Secretary, Special Bundles, 9/2886, pp. [11-12], Surveyor General to Governor, 2 April 1835. 27 Department of Lands , Plans 302.691, 303.691, reproduced in Leckbandt, Convict Stockades from Mt. Walker to Mt. Victoria, 40, 41. 28 Inspection by Ian Jack, 16 June 1997. 29 Leckbandt, Convict Stockades, 37-61.




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Figure 2.12: Lockyers Road, going in general from west to east at this point, was crossed by Mitchell’s road of 1832, which was running basically north-west to south-east at the top of the River Lett Hill. Hassans Walls loom to the north. The group of four huts marked on the right of Lockyers Road is part of Hassans Walls Stockade, wrongly sited by Mitchell’s men. Source: Department of Lands, Plan 303.691, reproduced in Ollie Leckbandt, Convict Stockades from Mount Walker to Mount Victoria, Lithgow 1998, 40.

Figure 2.13: Remains of one of the chimney bases at Hassans Walls Stockade. Source: Photograph by

Ian Jack, 27 May 1997. The Hassans Walls establishment was used both for roadworks and for law and order. There were 83 convicts thereabouts in 1832, but these seem to have been moved to Coxs River Stockade No.2 in the mid 1830s. In 1832 the ‘convicts were accommodated in huts...erected on a damp piece of ground, near a creek a quarter of a mile from the new line’ of road.30 Rosen noted that ‘from October 1833 until at least September 1834 No.11 Road Party, under overseers George Morley and James Dew, worked on the road under the walls. Little is known of the use of the site but its status from an

30 Rosen, Sue “That Den of infamy, No. 2 Stockade, Cox’s River”: An historical investigation into the construction, in the 1830s, of the Western Road from Mt Victoria to Bathurst by a convict workforce, Phd thesis, 2006: 144.




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unsecured site to a secure stockaded site, in theory at least, changed in mid-1834 when a stockade superintendent was appointed but William Smith died in August 1834. It was about that time that Mitchell suggested that a detached iron gang could be stationed at Hassans Walls and approval was received for this to go ahead as soon as the ‘wooden houses’ were ready. These were the caravans or boxes...’.31 The main building operations seem to have been in the latter part of 1834 and into April 1835 when Mitchell gave further instructions for a new station for ‘accommodation of an iron gang at Hassan’s Walls’. Rosen thinks there may have been a shift in the location of the stockade at this time, away from the damp ground.32 Between April and December 1835 there was quite a bit of building:

Officers’ quarters, barracks, guard room and a shed were erected shortly after [April] and the remainder of the buildings for cooking and use of overseers were in progress. One of the boxes had been moved onto the stockade and a second one was ready, with others expected to be finished by the first week in May. Other buildings were of slab and bark as at Cox’s River and Mt Victoria. By mid 1835, there was a post office and a public house in the vicinity. Despite the facility being declared ready to receive the first iron gang in June 1835, by late September the facility was described as ‘falling to decay’. It was again declared ready for the reception of a gang in December 1835.33

By February 1836 there was an iron gang at the stockade with a superintendent and constable. A detachment of the 4th Regiment were stationed there and occupied barracks. By August 1836 there were 69 men in the iron gangs and by November the 28th Regiment had replaced the 4th Regiment. By 1837 there were 70 convicts at Hassans Walls and 143 in the following year under the supervision of the 80th Regiment. In August 1838 there were: 43 men in irons and 12 servants, artificers etc out of irons.34 The barracks, which are likely to be later in date than the huts, continued to be occupied by soldiers in 1839 and 1840.35 The land where the complex had grown up was granted to William Richards in 1837 and once the military finally left early in 1840, the stockade was incorporated in a working farm.36 2.4.3 Victoria Stockade Victoria Stockade, also known as no.1 Stockade, lay in Butlers Creek valley, a little north of both Victoria Pass and the later Berghofers Pass, on the large portion 279 shown clearly on the 1:25000 map (Fig. 2.14). Victoria Stockade housed more than 200 convict road-builders from 1830 to 1833, with less consistent use during the rest of the decade.37 The number of convicts changed depending upon the building program. In May 1832 there were 261 men in irons and 21 out of irons. Only three weeks later there were 343 men in irons and 235 out, a total of 378 men using 13 oxen to haul stones and equipment.38 Surveyor W.R. Govett published a good description of the Stockade in 1836. The complex is more adequately known in physical detail than Hassans Walls Stockade. The convicts were housed in a fenced stockade above a swamp. Huts for constables, barracks for soldiers and a cottage were nearby. A bridge, probably a corduroy, led across the swamp to the neatly thatched cottage of the commissariat officer and a storehouse built of logs.39 The site has been 31 Rosen, Sue 2006: 144 32 Rosen, Sue 2006: 144-145 33 Rosen, Sue 2006:145 34 Rosen, Sue 2006:146 35 Ian Jack, ‘Hassans Walls Stockade Site’, Lithgow Heritage Study, 1999, A 021; Leckbandt, Convict Stockades, 53; State Records NSW, Colonial Secretary, Special Bundles, 9/2886, pp. [11-12], Surveyor General to Governor, 2 April 1835. 36 Department of Lands , Plan 302.691. 37 S. Rosen and M. Pearson, ‘The No.2 Stockade Cox’s River – its Life and Times: an Historical and Archaeological Investigation’, report to Pacific Power 1997, 20, 23, 30-1, 204. 38 Lavelle 1999:5. 39 W.R.Govett, ‘Sketches of New South Wales, no. XI’, The Saturday Magazine, 12 November 1836, 190-2, reprinted as Sketches of New South Wales, Renard, Melbourne 1977, 46-50




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disturbed by subsequent farming activities, including the building of dams, and Mr Leckbandt has removed a good deal of physical evidence in his series of visits to the site.40 There is some doubt whether the site has been correctly pin-pointed, although the site identified by Leckbandt is certainly in the vicinity of the stockade (Fig. 2.15).

Figure 2.14: Location of Victoria Stockade on portion 279 in the centre of the map. Source: Central Mapping Authority, 1:25000, Hartley 8930-4N.

Figure 2.15: General location of Victoria Stockade, from Berghofers Pass. From south-east. Source: Photograph by Ian Jack, 18 December 1998.

40 Leckbandt, Convict Stockades, 72-93.




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2.5 The Seventh Way: the Road from Bell to Lithgow At what we now know as Bell, Bells Line of Road had veered south along Darling Causeway. The construction of the western railway in the 1860s along the Causeway and then westwards to Lithgow created a new communications corridor from Bell by Dargan and Clarence, culminating in the majestic railway Zig Zag down into Lithgow Valley. No significant road accompanied the railway until World War II, although the construction of the Clarence tunnels to replace the ZigZag brought massive investment in the rail system. The strategic importance of Lithgow, with its Small Arms Factory, prompted the development of a new major road link paralleling the railway and in some places using old railway cuttings which had been superseded by later tunnels. This new road from Bell, completed in 1950, made its descent from the escarpment just above Lithgow Valley on Scenic Hill, which is no less steep and has more bends than Victoria Pass.41 The new route, named Chifley Road after the prime minister, is nowadays often referred to as Bells Line of Road, but this popular parlance is misleading. None of the nineteenth-century roads down the western escarpment led anywhere but the Hartley Valley. 2.6 Service Centres along the Highway The completion of Coxs Road in 1815 did not instantly bring much traffic to the west, but as government policy towards western expansion mellowed and land-grants were issued in increasing numbers in the 1820s, there was a perceived need for an accommodation house with a liquor licence in Hartley Valley. The establishment of inns was slow in the 1820s. Pierce Collitts opened his Golden Fleece in 1823 where Lawsons Long Alley curved west to join Coxs Road.42 But this remained the only service in Hartley Vale until it was bypassed by Mitchell’s new highway in 1832. 2.6.1 Little Hartley Collits had been aware from 1830, when Mitchell’s plans became known, that the Golden Fleece would no longer be successful, so he applied for a grant near the intended line of Mitchell’s road, hoping that a surveyed village would cluster round his new Royal Garter inn. But Little Hartley did not become a nucleated village, but a hamlet instead, with houses spread out along a single street, the Great Western Highway (Fig. 2.16).

41 Department of Main Roads, The Roadmakers: a History of Main Roads in New South Wales, Sydney 1976, 202. 42 Collits, Pierce (1769?-1848)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, I, Melbourne University Press, Carlton 1966, 241.




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Figure 2.16: The Great Western Highway at Little Hartley, with the Kerosene Hotel on the middle left. From the north-west, in 1872. Source: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Holtermann photographs 1/17741.

The Royal Garter did not lie directly on the new line of road and immediately faced competition from the Harp of Erin, opened right on the road in 1833 as a store as well as a public house. The western end of the Harp of Erin today is the oldest continuously occupied store over the mountains, closing only in 1960. The Royal Garter did not long survive as licensed premises. Other rival hostelries in Little Hartley in the 1830s were also short-lived with the notable exception of the Victoria Inn, opened in 1839 and intermittently licensed until 1893. The Victoria Inn, a gracious Georgian two-storey house built in ashlar, still impresses travellers as they come towards Little Hartley after descending Victoria Pass. In the 1840s it had competition within the hamlet from the Rose Inn, now Ambermere, built by a son of Pierce Collits, and facing the Harp of Erin across Mitchell’s highway. Rivalry for the coaching contract was intense when coaches ran regularly to Bathurst and the Rose benefited from this in the 1860s. The establishment of the oil-shale works in Hartley Vale in 1865 brought a new population to the area. There were no licensed premises in the company town at Hartley Vale, so in 1866 the Kerosene Hotel opened in Little Hartley. It became a tradition that on each pay-day at the oil works, the men would march behind their brass band across country to the Kerosene Hotel. But all this ended when the Comet Inn was built in Hartley Vale village in 1879 and the Kerosene Hotel reverted to being a farmhouse in 1882 and is still known as Meads Farm today.43 Little Hartley was fairly somnolent in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, but the coming of the motor-car prompted the building of a bed-and-breakfast and dance hall in the early 1930s, followed by the Log Cabin, serving afternoon teas in an American-style context. Under the name of Cockatoo Cabin, this café still flourishes. 2.6.2 Hartley Historic Site Four km to the north-west of Little Hartley along the Great Western Highway is the very different village of Hartley. Law and order over the mountains had been a military responsibility until in 1834

43 Siobhan Lavelle with R. Ian Jack, ‘Historical Archaeological and Heritage Assessment: Upgrading of the Great Western Highway, Little Hartley, NSW’, report to Musecape Pty Ltd, April 1999, 5-8.




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the government in Sydney decided to create a police district with a courthouse near the new bridge across the River Lett, replacing the No.2 Stockade at Coxs River, which was being wound down.44 Even before the survey of the new village was completed in 1836, tenders for a stone courthouse had been sought, to a design by the Colonial Architect, Mortimer Lewis. The fine courthouse was occupied in December 1837 and was the vital heart of Hartley. The village was laid out initially in 1836 on both sides of the River Lett arranged along the curves of Mitchell’s new road in an ambitious grid pattern, containing sixteen streets (Fig. 2.17). It was gazetted at the beginning of 1838.45 Figure 2.17: Plan of Hartley village, 1836, showing the site of the court-house, the developed sections

around Victoria Street and Windsor Street and the proposed site for the Anglican church across the river. Source: State Records NSW, Map 3103.

The success of the village depended on increased use of the highway. Ireland and Richards had already opened their coach service to Bathurst in 1833 and John Perry of Mount Victoria opened his rival service in 1834. In 1836 Ireland and Reilly replaced Ireland and Richards, and new competition was offered by the Bathurst Conveyancing Company.46 The opening of the courthouse was the critical factor in allowing Hartley to replace Little Hartley as the first major transport hub over the Mountains in the 1840s. As a result the Albion (later the Royal) Hotel opened in 1841 in rivalry to the Coach and Horses on Pierce Collits’ land close to the bridge.47 The service community which formed had a distinctive Irish-Catholic flavour. John and Mary Finn from county Kerry and their children dominated the village allotments in the 1840s and 1850s, running a general store and post office. In conjunction with the Catholic Grants of Moyne Farm, the

44 Rosen and Pearson, ‘The No.2 Stockade Cox’s River’, 79 45 W.C. Foster, W.L.Havard and B.T.Dowd, The Story of Hartley and its Historic Court House, New South Wales, Blaxland Shire Council, 1937, 17. 46 W. Foster, ‘Hartley – the Gateway to the West’, Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society 18, 1932, 223-4. 47 Y. Tearle, Publican Licences: Hartley District c. 1820 -1900, rev. ed. 1993.




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earliest established farm over the Mountains, the Finns succeeded in raising the money for a Catholic church in the main village, built between 1842 and 1848.48 A small community grew up in the 1840s and their buildings are today represented by Bungarribee, Ivy Cottage, the Shamrock Inn and Farmers Inn. A well-travelled visitor described the village in 1852 as:

Altogether a very romantic-looking village, in a situation which would bear comparison with some of those charming spots which the traveller finds among the Swiss Alps…At present it cannot boast of many inhabitants, nor are its streets easily defined, but it is increasing steadily. It possesses several remarkably clean and comfortable inns, and the houses are well built.49

Viewed from the top of River Lett Hill today, this environmental charm is still visible (Fig. 2.18). Colonel Mundy’s sketch of the same year, 1852, captures the atmosphere of early Hartley well (Fig. 2.19).

Figure 2.18: Hartley village in its environmental context from the top of River Lett Hill. Source: Photograph by Ian Jack, 1997.

48 W.A. Cuneo, Hunters of God: a Brief History of St Bernard’s Church, Hartley, 1838-1939, 2nd. ed., Leura, 1983; S.M. Ingham, Enterprising Migrants: an Irish Family in Australia, Melbourne 1975, 58-70. 49 S. Mossman and T. Banister, Australia Visited and Revisited: a Narrative of Recent and\Old Experiences in Victoria and New South Wales, London 1854, reprinted Ure Smith, Sydney 1974, 219.




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Figure 2.19: Hartley village in 1852, showing the court-house on the left and St Bernard’s Catholic church on the right. Source: G.C. Mundy, Our Antipodes: or, Reminiscences and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies with a Glimpse of the Gold Fields, 2nd ed, London 1852, I after 184.

The gold-rush to the Bathurst and Mudgee areas in the 1850s brought increased traffic on the main road and more call for the services of Hartley. These needs were largely supplied by members of the Finn family, who were severally innkeepers, storekeepers, constables and pharmacists over the years up to the 1870s. Despite the Catholic flavour of the village, an Anglican church was built by Edmund Blacket in 1857 to serve the surrounding farming community. But the railway bypassed Hartley Valley entirely in the 1860s and the establishment of a major oil-industry in Hartley Vale also in the 1860s stultified growth. The grid-plan village of the surveyors’ plans (Fig. 2.17) did not eventuate and Hartley, whatever its aspirations, in fact resembles the hamlet of Little Hartley in its outcome. Hartley is distinguished by its public buildings, but they do not lie at the planned core of a nucleated settlement. Windsor Street, the main east-west street of the original plan, was never successfully sub-divided and Virginia Street farther south was notional (Fig. 2.20). With the coming of the motor car, traffic increased on the highway and Corney’s garage opened in the village in the 1940s. But in general Hartley stagnated in the twentieth century, retaining an almost exclusively Victorian aspect. The stagnation was confirmed by the rerouting of the Great Western Highway to the east of the village, crossing the River Lett on a new bridge before tackling Mitchell’s River Lett Hill. Its heritage values were acknowledged when almost the entire village became Hartley Historic Site under the National Parks and Wildlife Service. National Parks, now part of the Department of Environment and Climate Change, owns eleven nineteenth-century buildings within Hartley, including the court-house and a woolshed, as well as four later buildings. Patrick Finn’s 1850s house, now called Bungarribee, and the Anglican church remain in private ownership within the village.




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Figure 2.20: The final form of Hartley village, with development along the old highway, which is shown in red. Source: Hartley town plan, 1972, Lands, PMap OE01 14871101.

2.6.3 Old Bowenfels Another stage in the development of the road to Bathurst was reached at the top of the River Lett Hill, to which Mitchell, in characteristic fashion, took an uncompromising attitude. Lockyers Road had bypassed this massive hill, which still creates problems for heavy vehicles. Three kilometres to the north-west of Hartley, Lockyers Road met Mitchell’s road at right angles (Fig. 2.12). Close to this cross-roads, fronting Mitchell’s road, there was another inn, halfway to Old Bowenfels. This inn, now called Fernhill, was built between 1856 and 1859 to the design of the local builder and architect, Alexander Binning, who had worked for Mitchell as an inspector in the 1830s. The owner of Fernhill was John Blackman, whose substantial landholdings lay to the east of the highway. The main Blackman homestead, Rosedale, was three kilometres away from Fernhill on The Gap Road and he and later his widow continued to live at Rosedale while the fine new stone building was leased as the Australian Inn until 1873. After a period under the control of the National Trust, Fernhill, its fine stone stables and other out-buildings are back in the ownership of the Merricks, the direct descendants of the Blackmans (Fig. 2.21).




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Figure 2.21: Fernhill stables, South Bowenfels. Source: Photograph by Ian Jack, 27 May 1997. From Fernhill the present highway curves to the north-west and then south-west until at the straggly village of Old Bowenfels it turns north towards Bowenfels. This stretch of road, directly under the shadow of Hassans Walls, is a modification of Mitchell’s line, which replaced Lockyers Road completely (Fig. 2.5). Lockyer took his road to the south through what soon became private property. As a result Mitchell’s Forty Bends Road (now bypassed) attracted significant buildings with the undisturbed site of an 1836 inn, an 1840s cottage, two late Victorian houses, a significant Edwardian orchard and a European cemetery of the early 1830s as well as an Aboriginal burial place. On Mitchell’s line immediately to the west of Forty Bends Road as far as Old Bowenfels, part of his road which is still the Great Western Highway, other service buildings began to burgeon from the 1830s onwards. The Corderoy family store dates from 1834, the McKennan store from 1845 (the Travellers Arms after 1862), the Bowenfels Inn (now Umera) built before 1857 and the first National School over the Mountains, opened in 1851 with a new school building added in 1866. Thereafter Mitchell’s road diverges from the present Great Western Highway (Fig. 2.5). Mitchell’s road down into Bowens Hollow has the archaeological site of the stockade discussed in section 2.3.1. It also passes close to the site of Alexander Binning’s 1830s house and the remains of the stone buttresses and raised causeway of the bridge over Bowens Creek built for Mitchell by Binning. The principal features of historic Old Bowenfels are, however, on the present highway alignment, which is Lockyer’s. After the well preserved old Catholic cemetery with gravemarkers going back to the 1840s and the legible site of the village lock-up and constable’s cottage, there are the evidences of the grid plan of the village laid out in 1840. Within the grid the original post-office, later a private school, survives as Somerset House, built about 1840 and extended around 1870. On the bend of the highway just beyond the surveyed rectangle there is the fine Presbyterian church on the west, built in 1842 and extended in 1885, facing the celebrated Presbyterian cemetery across the road, dedicated in 1844, with headstones carved by the best local masons, Charles Goodluck and James Connor. On the highway opposite the junction with Rydal Road, which was part of Lockyers Road, there is the compromised, but intact, two-storey stone house built as his private residence by Alexander Binning, when he left Bowens Hollow in the late 1830s. On the corner of Rydal Road, Binning also




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built the Glasgow Arms, licensed in 1841, but this has been demolished. Under later owners, the Eathers, Binning’s residence became the Royal Hotel in 1884, as it still is today.50 Old Bowenfels is accordingly an area, rather than a village, of the greatest heritage significance for the early Victorian period of the inner central west. It has an entirely different character from Bowenfels proper, which was a private fiefdom of Andrew Brown throughout the nineteenth century and was in the twentieth century sub-divided as a new suburban extension of the industrial town of Lithgow. Old Bowenfels is the name approved by the Geographical Board which appears on the official maps, but because it lies south of Bowenfels it is often referred to as South Bowenfels.51 2.7 Hartley Vale as a Farming Community The first travellers over the Mountains reacted warmly to Hartley Vale, for its relative lushness after the rigours of the high plateau. It was ‘the first green valley’.52 Although better land was soon found to the west on the Bathurst Plains, in the 1820s and 1830s most of the area bounded by Hassans Walls to the north and the Darling Causeway to the east had been occupied by settlers in a mosaic of land grants. The properties varied in size, but most were over 100 acres (40 hectares) and the largest, one of John Blackman’s properties near Hassans Walls, was 453 acres (180 hectares) (Fig. 2.22).

Figure 2.22: Part of John Blackman’s consolidated farmland under Hassans Walls. Lockyers Road is shown passing through the northern part of portion 176, just above the number ‘176’. Source: Map of Lett parish, county of Cook, 4th ed. 1897, Lands Parish Map OE06 11278306.

50 For the whole section on the heritage of Old Bowenfels, see I. Jack with G. Edds, ‘Greater Lithgow Heritage’, unpublished report to Lithgow City Council 1998, B 043 toB 062; A 022 to A 030. 51 For a detailed statement of the complexities of the name Bowenfels, see Y. Jenkins, Bowenfels: People, Places, Past and Present, Rydal 2008, 9-10. 52 Barron Field in Mackaness, ed. Fourteen Journeys over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, II 37.




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Although the area was best suited to grazing, crops were grown from the outset. Pierce Collits, the earliest inhabitant, found it necessary to plant oats to supply fodder for the horses at his inn and maintained the crop until he left in 1838.53 The main water supply in the valley was supplied by the River Lett and Collits’ original grant of 200 acres (80 hectares) had the river as its northern boundary (Fig. 2.23). Hartley Vale has retained its rural qualities, except at the extreme eastern end where the oil-shale works and company village permanently changed the character of settlement. There are important physical remains of the early pastoral period throughout the valley. Collits’ Inn itself survives with its outbuildings as they evolved over the nineteenth century. But Blackman’s Rosedale, built on his 1839 grant, now only consist of one ruined stone wall amid rubble. Along The Gap Road from Hassans Walls south to Hartley Vale village, there are a number of evocative homesteads of varying age, but mostly early twentieth century, on much older properties. From west to east, these are Southleigh, The Oaks, Vellacott Park, Hillview and, just east of Collits Inn, Wondalga.

Figure 2.23: Collits Inn on portion 27 south of the road, with a frontage to the River Lett to the north. The Hartley Vale cemetery was established on his 150-acre grant to the south, portion 29. Source: Map of Hartley parish, county of Cook, 2nd ed. 1888, Lands, PMap OE06 11260701.

53 Iris Paridaens, Convicts on Trial, Hartley n.d., 30.




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2.8 Hartley Vale and the Oil-Shale Industry 2.8.1 Hartley Vale Shale Oil Mine and Processing In the second half of the nineteenth century oil products became an indispensable part of life. Today oil is associated first and foremost with the needs of the internal combustion engine. In the Victorian period, paraffin or kerosene became essential for basic home requirements while waxes and lubricating oils were essential to the world of steam engines both on rails and in the factory. Oils from plants, such as olives and rapeseed, and animals, principally whales and seals, had long been known, but the large-scale exploitation of oil wells and oil-shale in the 1850s and 1860s transformed the oil industry and chemical manufacturing more generally.54

Figure 2.24: Plan of Hartley Vale oil-shale works in successive phases. Source: G.H. Eardley and E.M. Stephens, The Shale Railways of New South Wales, Australian Railway Historical Society, Sydney 1974, 16.

The oil-shale deposits of Hartley Vale proved to be among the largest, richest and most consistent in New South Wales. The area had been known to be rich in oil-shale at least since the 1840s and a piece of the shiny black mineral had been exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1854, only three years after James Young had established his Bathgate plant in Scotland to extract oil under his 1850 patent. The New South Wales geologist W. B. Clarke had already examined the Hartley Vale outcrop in 1841 and he published a paper on it in 1861. 54 R.Ian Jack, ‘Joadja, New South Wales: the Paragon of Early Oil-Shale Communities’, Australasian Historical Archaeology, 13, 1995, 31.




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In 1865 Young’s patent had expired and both at Mount Kembla and at Hartley Vale several entrepreneurs sought to gain oil wealth comparable to Young’s. At Hartley Vale two companies were launched within months of each other in the second half of 1865, first the Hartley Kerosene Oil and Paraffine Co. Ltd (HKOPC), then the Western Kerosene Oil Co. (WKOC). The Hartley Kerosene Oil and Paraffine Co. Ltd made the initial running, establishing the Petrolea Vale retorts and refinery in the valley and marketing Star brand kerosene. The rival company, the WKOC, pursued an alternative strategy, opening up mines but building its retorts and refinery in Sydney, at Waterloo, in 1868. The land acquired by the two companies between 1865 and 1871 is shown on Fig. 2.27. The oil refinery in Waterloo continued to process Hartley Vale shale. In 1877, however, new retorts were built in the valley to distil crude oil on the spot, as had been done from 1865 to 1870. Unlike the earlier practice, however, the crude oil was then sent to Waterloo for refining. Innovative railway rolling stock, an early form of oil tanker, was produced to transport the crude. The incline and tramway were modified to cater for the new needs and locomotives were introduced progressively both on Hill Top and on the increasing number of rail-tracks connecting mines and plant in the valley below. The amount of shale raised is reflected in the increasing number of retorts. Five had been built in 1877, 40 more horizontal retorts were brought from Waterloo in 1880 and, when retorting ceased entirely at Waterloo in 1883, there were over 70 retorts at Hartley Vale. In 1885-86 the decision was taken to move the refinery from Waterloo to Hartley Vale and by 1887 the new refinery, under the direction of one of the Fell family who dominated the Australian industry, was producing kerosene and heavy oils in the valley (Fig. 2.24).

Figure 2.25: Aerial view of Hartley Vale oil-shale site and part of the company village, c. 1930s. The Comet inn in the two-storey building in the centre. The refinery site is in the rear left, the retorts, ash-heap and incline are in the rear right. Source: Department of Mineral Resources, photograph, Sydney 0609.




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All this building called for a large supply of bricks and a brickworks flourished, using clays from seams adjacent to the oil shale adits. In 1900, the bricks for the new oil works at Torbane were also made at Hartley Vale. But the Commonwealth Oil Corporation purchased the Hartley Vale operation in 1906 and soon started to develop a new oil-shale works at Newnes. When Newnes became operational, Hartley Vale was closed down in 1913. The site of the 1880s refinery is on the opposite side of Hartley Vale Road (Bells Line) from the retorts and the incline. The line of tramway curving across the flat paddock to the refinery is still very clear. The surviving foundations of brick buildings on the refinery site represent the changes made after the Commonwealth Oil Corporation purchased the plant in 1906 and constructed substantial new buildings, including nine holding tanks on massive bases in 1908-10 (Fig. 2.25). Although very overgrown, there are meaningful remains of the retorts and other plant on the south side of the road. The horizontal retorts are the only ones known to survive in situ in the world, other than at Joadja in the NSW southern highlands.

Figure 2.26: Proposed curtilage for Hartley Vale oil-shale enterprise, including the refinery, the retorting area, the company village, the manager’s house, the incline, the private tramway, the main-line railway station and surviving mines. Source: Central Mapping Authority, 1:25000, Hartley 8930-4N, annotated by Ian Jack, 2009.

The company village adjacent to the works provided accommodation for the workers. Until 1879, when the Comet Inn opened, the village lacked licensed premises. A slab school building had been opened in 1872 and was replaced on company land in 1878-9 by a brick schoolroom designed by Mansfield in 1894. Because of population pressures, a second classroom was added in 1882-3 and a third (the surviving part) in 1894. 55 Although much has disappeared, the grid plan of the company village is still clear enough and the manager’s stone house and a rich variety of workers’ housing, as well as the Comet Inn and part of the school, make Hartley Vale village a highly significant place.

55 State Records NSW, Department of Education, school files, 5/16241 A, 16241.1.




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2.8.2 Hartley Vale Accommodation for Shale Oil Workers Both companies employed miners but only the HKOPC had men working in a processing plant. The total labour force of the WKOC seems to have been 12 miners in 1869, whereas in 1867 the HKOPC already had 31 employees, (comprising 16 miners, 10 in retorting and refining and 5 doing packaging and such like). By 1868 HKOPC was employing 60 men, including transient workers erecting new retorts and stills.56 Although the WKOC needed more construction workers in 1870 when the company built the incline on its own land, the number of WKOC miners needing more permanent homes remained low. These are likely to have been built around the mining area to the east of the HKOPC holdings, but there is no documentation. This was all very informal. It was the HKOPC, with a much larger steady work-force, which found it necessary to create a company village in the 1860s.

Figure 2.27: The land in Hartley Vale held by the two oil-shale companies between 1865 and 1871, showing the company village cross-hatched on the land of the Hartley Kerosene Oil and Paraffine Co., straddling Hartley Vale Road. Base map, 1:25000 Hartley 8930-4N, superimposed with information on land titles partly from Darryl K. Mead, ‘The Technology and Operation of the New South Wales Oil-Shale Industry from 1865-1906 with the Inclusion of Hartley Vale, Airly and Torbane Sites to 1913’, unpublished PhD, University of New South Wales, June 1986, I, 142 Figure 6.1; 162, Figure 6.4; 167 Figure 6.5.

56 Darryl K. Mead, ‘The Technology and Operation of the New South Wales Oil-Shale Industry from 1865-1906 with the Inclusion of Hartley Vale, Airly and Torbane Sites to 1913’, unpublished PhD, University of New South Wales, June 1986, I, 160, 171; II, 569.




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The land laid aside by the HKOPC for workers’ housing was portion 65 in Hartley parish. These 30 acres (12 hectares) had been granted to Joseph Scott in 1856 and was purchased by the HKOPC in 1865.57 The land lay athwart Hartley Vale Road, the terminal part of Bells Line of Road, with some 12 acres to the south and the remaining 18 acres to the north (Fig. 2.28). The site chosen for the village was used at once. By 1866 ‘all the dwelling houses for the men [were] completed’ and the manager’s house was ‘in course of erection’.58 The manager’s house was on the extreme north of portion 65, on the highest land, so that he could survey both the village and the works from his garden (Fig. 2.29): the handsome stone building was occupied by works managers up to the closure of the oil-works in 1913 and still survives as Valley Farm. It is named on the older Hartley 1:25000 map, which also shows the original portion number 65 (Fig. 2.30.

Figure 2.28: The site of the company village in Hartley Vale, on portion 65, parish of Hartley, county of Cook, designated by the Hartley Kerosene Oil and Paraffine Co. in 1866. Map of parish of Hartley, county of Cook, 12th ed., 1957, Lands, OE 06, 11259901.

Figure 2.29: The manager’s house, now Valley Farm (top left), atop an eminence on the north side of Hartley Vale Road overlooking the refinery. The works office is the building with the small chimney in the front left of centre to the west of the refinery. The photograph was taken in 1906. Department of Mineral Resources, photograph Sydney 1005; Mead, PhD thesis, I, 306, Figure 8.14.

57 Map of parish of Hartley, county of Cook, 12th ed. 1957, Lands, OE 06, 11259901. 58 R.P. Whitworth, Bailliere’s New South Wales Gazetteer and Road Guide, Bailliere, Sydney 1866, 256.




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In 1871 the assets of the two original companies were merged in a new company, the New South Wales Shale and Oil Co. [SOC], which initially did no processing at Hartley Vale and employed between 30 and 40 men. In Greville’s country gazetteer for 1875-77 a workforce of 37 is listed by name and occupation:

Manager Richard Fryer Overseer John Hebrun or Hepburn Engineer Mark Hardman Miners 25 named men Splitters 4 named men, including James Annesley senior and junior Labourers 4 named men Blacksmith John Annesley.59

With the resumption of burning the oil-shale in local retorts from 1877 onwards, the workforce at Hartley Vale increased to over 100. After 1883, the company ceased to send any raw shale to the refinery at Waterloo and in 1887 a new refinery opened at Hartley Vale. The number of miners in the 1880s and 1890s is much better documented than the number of processing workers and fluctuated according to the market between a low of 43 in 1887 and a high of 140 in 1893. In 1883, there were 70 miners and some 80 processing workers.60 The total work force in the early 1870s therefore seems not to have exceeded 40; after 1877 it grew irregularly to over 150 and probably over 200 at certain times, such as 1893. A number of the employees, such as the Annesleys, were married with families and occupied houses in the 30 acres allotted. Twenty of the men who worked at the refinery were photographed as a group around 1890 (Fig. 2.31). The base of the main chimney seen on Figure 2.29 is on the right and behind the men are the stands of four of the horizontal stills, which remain a prominent feature of the refinery site today.

Figure 2.30: The manager’s house, now called Valley Farm, built in 1866 on the northern boundary of the 30 acres of portion 65. After 1871, the manager of the New South Wales Shale and Oil Co. lived there. 1:25000 map, Hartley 8930-4N.

In the 1870s there had been a lot of mobility in the labour force, partly because of the dictatorial manner of the semi-illiterate works manager, Richard Fryer. The local schoolmaster reported in 1876 that:

Mr Fryer says ‘every one here must obey him’ and ‘he will have no one here that will not do as he wishes’. Mr Fryer is simply a tyrant. The people are in terror of him, consequently they are always coming and going – fresh hands almost every day.61

59 Edgar Ray, Greville’s Official Post Office Directory and Gazetteer of New South Wales, 1875 to 1877, Greville, Sydney n.d., 330-331; Mead, PhD thesis, II, 5, Appendix 3.2. 60 Mead, PhD thesis, I, 259, Figure 8.2; 268. 61 State Records NSW, School Files, Hartley Vale, 5/16241A, 16 November 1876.




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But this regime of terror did not survive the 1870s and there is no evidence that turnover remained so high. There was much rough behaviour among the young adults and a good deal of absenteeism among the school children. Out of 60 pupils in 1878 only 49 attended school regularly and this might slump to 30 for a variety of reasons.62 Nonetheless, the workers had built a slab and bark school house doubling as a community hall and a church and in 1878 the company gave 2 acres, which were presumably still vacant, on the south-west side of the village site to the Department of Public Instruction for a more substantial school building and a master’s residence.

Figure 2.31: Twenty of the refinery workers photographed in front of the stills around 1890. Lithgow Regional Library; Mead, PhD thesis, I, 282, Figure 8.11.

The schoolhouse which Mansfield designed in 1878 for 60 pupils was too small by 1882 and a further extension was necessary in 1894. The three stages of the school building are indexes of the more settled nature of the workforce and the periods of economic success in the oil industry.63 The demand for an evening school for young adults is also an indication of the maturing of Hartley Vale village. Thirty local men, aged between 18 and 30, petitioned successfully for evening tuition in 1886. All but two of them worked for the Shale and Oil Co., which sponsored their petition. Of the 28 men, fourteen were miners, seven labourers, two bricklayers, while there was one blacksmith, one retortman, one carpenter, one wheeler and one fireman. Although the evening class closed in 1887 and reopened only once, in 1890, the petition gives a rare and attractive glimpse into the community which occupied the company’s housing.64 The company village south of Hartley Vale Road had a grid-pattern with named streets. Wood Street still retains its identity, while the main road was called J. R. Street within the village.65 Only two shale-workers’ cottages survive within the village area: a modest two-room timber cottage (LHS, B 006) and, to its north,

62 State Records NSW, School Files, Hartley Vale, 5/16241A, 1876-1878. 63 Ian Jack, ‘Greater Lithgow Heritage Study’, 1997- 8, B 004; State Records NSW, School Files, Hartley Vale, 5/16241A and B. 64 State Records NSW, School Files, Hartley Vale, 5/16241A, 24 September 1886. 65 State Records NSW, School Files, Hartley Vale, 5/16241A, 9 March 1894.




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the stone cottage known as Vizzard’s (B 007) with a slab building adjacent. The ruins of a stone cottage to the south on the verge of uncleared land (A 006) also once housed a shale-worker’s family. A row of buildings appeared along the north side of Hartley Vale Road, including the Comet Inn (B 003), the first licensed premises in the village, which opened in 1879 and proudly bore the name of the premium brand of kerosene manufactured by the Shale and Oil Co. On the west side of the northern sector of the village Allen Road led, and still leads, to the manager’s house (B 010). Photographic evidence suggests that there were few or no houses on the 16 or so acres between the back of the Comet Inn and the manager’s house (Fig. 2.32).

Figure 2.32: The north-east part of Hartley village area in c. 1890. The double-storey Comet Inn is in the left foreground; the manager’s house (Valley Farm) is just off the photograph to the left up on the knoll with four isolated trees. The land between, which is the eastern half of the village area north of the main road, is vacant, except for the inn’s outbuildings. The image is taken from the south. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Small Picture File.

On the other hand, as population increased in the late Victorian period, an increasing number of houses were built on company land in the area to the east of the designated village, along both sides of Hartley Vale Road and within the retorting area to the south of the road and the refinery to the north (Fig. 2.33). In the refinery paddock, there was a cluster of identical cottages built by the company close to Hartley Vale Road of which there are clear archaeological remains today (Fig. 2.34). Two of the buildings shown in Figure 2.33 survive in recognizable form. The long cottage on the south side of Hartley Vale Road on the far right (B 002) is in fact a duplex, containing brick accommodation for two workers and their families (Figure 2.35). Embraced by the bend in the road beyond, and also on the south side, is Mummulgum (B 001), the attractive brick home of the assistant mine-manager (Fig. 2.36).




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Figure 2.33: Hartley Vale workers’ housing between the village area proper (which ends at the bend in Hartley Vale Road in the centre foreground) and the refinery in the centre rear. The cottages on the refinery site (arrowed) are close to the north side of the road in the distant right, but are obscured by the smoke from the refinery chimney. The photograph was taken from the south in c. 1890. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Small Picture File.

Figure 2.34: Foundations and scattered bricks are all that remain of the cottages shown in Figure 2.33.

Photograph by Ian Jack, May 2009.




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Figure 2.35: Workers’ duplex in sandstock brick to the east of the Comet Inn, which is shown in the

background. The duplex has been much altered in appearance since this photograph was taken from the north-east in 1976. Photograph by Maureen Byrne.

Figure 2.36: Mummulgum, built for the assistant mine-manager c. 1870s, photographed in 1979. Photograph by Ian Jack, GL1/13.

Conclusion It is plain that a sizable community of workmen and their families occupied a variety of styles of company homes on both sides of Hartley Vale Road within the land owned by the successive oil companies. The official village area on portion 65 was well populated to the south of the main road, but to the north there were houses only along the roadside, with a substantial gap of some 16 acres up to the manager’s house at the extreme north of the designated village. No company houses are known to the west of portion 65, but to the east, on company land, there were numerous homes on both sides of the road and within the work areas around the refinery to the north and the retorts to the south. No provision for unmarried men’s barracks or other quarters is known from documents or identifiable on historic photographs, although this is a feature of Joadja. There is a likelihood that informal huts constructed by the workers themselves also existed, particularly in the retorting precinct and along Lockyers Road and Lawsons Long Alley, both of which ran for a significant distance within company lands.




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2.9 Darling Causeway The Darling Causeway is a remarkable narrow ridgeway running from Mount Victoria north to Bell. The Grose River rises on its eastern escarpment, the River Lett on its western (Fig 2.37). The Causeway is a decisive watershed. At the same time it is the only route which connects the north and south sides of the Grose River gorge after the Lapstone monocline or Kurrajong Heights has been scaled from the coastal plain. Coxs Road and its successors, consolidated as the Great Western Highway, have run to the south of the Grose gorge from 1814 to the present day, and almost all the small urban settlements of the Blue Mountains have developed along this Highway over the last century and a half. Archibald Bell, with Aboriginal assistance, created an alternative route across the Mountains north of the Grose in 1823.66 Bells Line of Road remained primarily a stock-route during the nineteenth century and is still very lightly populated. Bell was the first European to realize the potential utility of what was not yet named the Darling Causeway and brought his new road along the northern part of the Causeway from what is now the village of Bell. From the Darling Causeway, Bells Line of Road turned down into Hartley Vale, following the headwaters of the River Lett on what is now Hartley Vale Road (Fig. 2.4).

Figure 2.37: The Darling Causeway, running north from Mount Victoria to Bell, in relation to the Grose River gorge on the right and to Hartley Vale on the left. Peter Stanbury, ed., The Blue Mountains: Grand Adventure for All, Macleay Museum, Sydney and Second Back Row Press, Leura, 1988, 66.

In 1827, however, Hamilton Hume saw the potential of the Causeway. Hume was already a well-known explorer, who in his twenties had enlarged the government’s knowledge of the Southern Highlands and had discovered the Goulburn Plains (with James Meehan), the Yass Plains (with 66 R. Else-Mitchell, ‘The Discovery of Bell’s Line, 1823: a Note and a Document’, Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society, 66, 1980-1, 92-3.




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Barber and Broughton) and the Murray River (on his expedition with William Hovell to Port Phillip in 1824-25).67 In August 1827 Governor Darling offered a land-grant or comparable inducement to anyone who could find a better route to Bathurst.68 Hume, who was now thirty years old, publicly accepted the challenge and the Sydney Gazette described him as:

the Australian Mungo Park...in quest of discovering some pass across the mountains to Bathurst, more facile and less dangerous that the only one at present unavoidable…Such men are real patriots.69

The patriot rode around the western escarpment and did some intelligent and wide-ranging investigation in late September and early October 1827.

Figure 2.38: In Surveyor Larmer’s map of 1832, Hume’s proposed line of road along the Darling Causeway and then westwards along two possible routes is clearly shown in pale colour at the bottom and right-hand edges of this detail from a large map. North is to the right. Source: State Records NSW, Map 5029.

67 S.H. Hume, ‘Hume, Hamilton (1797-1873)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, I, Melbourne University Press, Carlton 1966, 564-565. 68 Sydney Gazette, 13 August 1827; Frank O’Grady, ‘Hamilton Hume’, Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society, 49 v, January 1964, 351. 69 Sydney Gazette, 19 September 1827; O’Grady, ‘Hamilton Hume’, 351.




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Hume proposed a new route which by-passed the perils of Mount York which instead went north from Mount Victoria up the Causeway to join Bells Line of Road, then turned west on the approximate line of the present Chifley Road but continued north-west onto the Newnes Plateau (Fig. 2.38).70 Hume tactfully named the ridge Darling’s Causeway and publicised his ‘discovery’ in the Sydney Gazette of 14 December 1827.71 He did not acknowledge that Archibald Bell and Robert Hoddle had already marked out a road on the northern third of the Causeway. Nonetheless, although he was not the discoverer of the Darling Causeway, Hamilton Hume was the first person to have seen virtue in what, 40 years later, became the railway route from Mount Victoria to Bell (Fig. 2.39). Hume and Thomas Mitchell became firm friends and over a fortnight in November 1827 Hume showed Mitchell (who was not yet Surveyor-General) the country around and beyond Mount Victoria, including the Darling Causeway. On 29 November 1827 Mitchell reported to Darling that:

As a line of road to Bathurst, which should avoid Mounts York and Blaxland, and also Cox's River, the line of Mr Hume seems to me the most eligible that can be found.

But Mitchell then goes on to tell the Governor of riding down the future Victoria Pass and extols the virtues of a straighter road, so that:

….cattle would travel in a valley abundant in water and grass [Hartley Valley], and have a shorter journey to perform on mountains, where both these articles are very scarce. The road marked by Mr. Hume [along Darling Causeway] would not possess these advantages; the road on which it would continue is of the same formation, and its ravines are of the same character as the mountains...between Emu Ford and Mount York…In nearly every part, precipices of sandstone render it inaccessible from the valley, and confine the traveller to the mountains.72

As a result, Mitchell refined his preference for Victoria Pass and in 1829-30 successfully insisted on that route. Despite the fact that Hume had been rewarded with an estate near Yass in 1828 as a reward from Darling for his proposed road along Darling Causeway, Mitchell quite clearly did not take any steps, once he became Surveyor-General in 1829, to improve the stretch of Darling

Figure 2.39: Hume’s route across the Darling Causeway in 1827, detail of Figure 2.38. State Records NSW, Map 5029.

70 SRNSW, Map 5029. 71 Sydney Gazette, 14 December 1827; Brian Fox, Blue Mountains Geographical Dictionary, author, Bathurst 2006, 88. 72 Thomas L. Mitchell, Report upon the Progress made in Roads, and in the Construction of Public Works, in New South Wales, from the year 1827 to June, 1855, Sydney 1856, 6-7.




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Causeway from Mount Victoria north to Hartley Vale Road [Bells Line of Road]. The road gangs at Mount Victoria were entirely occupied with the huge operation of building Victoria Pass.73 There is no reason to suppose that there was any further incentive to develop the southern part of the Causeway until after the railway was extended from Mount Victoria in the 1860s. Bells Line of Road from Collitt’s Inn up Hartley Vale Road and north along part of the Darling Causeway to Bell was in use as a drove road from the 1830s onwards, but there is no evidence of anything more than a rough track south along the Causeway into Mount Victoria in the early Victorian period.

Figure 2.40: The railway across the Darling Causeway from Mount Victoria to Bell. R.F. Wylie and C.C. Singleton, ‘The Railway Crossing of the Blue Mountains, 5. Blackheath to Bell’, Bulletin of Australian Railway Historical Society, 248, June 1958, 87.

73 William C. Foster, Sir Thomas Livingston Mitchell and his World, 1792-1855, Institution of Surveyors NSW, Sydney 1985, 118-120, 140-144, 162-163.




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What changed all this was the decision by Whitton to build the western railway along the Darling Causeway and to build the Great Zig Zag down into Lithgow Valley. The contract to extend the rail line from Blackheath to Mount Victoria, then, via the Darling Causeway, to Bell and on to Mount Clarence was given to William Watkins on 19 January 1865. This section 4 was supposed to be completed by the end of 1866.74 In the event, the track from Blackheath as far as Mount Victoria station was not opened for regular traffic until May 1868, but work had been in progress along the Causeway and beyond for some time. In November 1868, the Sydney Morning Herald published special reports by a correspondent about progress on section 4, including the Darling Causeway (Fig. 2.40), and also on section 5, which included the Great Zig Zag. The account of work completed on section 4 appeared on 4 November:

A very convenient station-house, together with goods shed, and all necessary appliances, have been erected at Mount Victoria, where there is at present a thriving little community. Just beyond the station the line diverges from the main road, and proceeds in a northerly direction upon the Darling Causeway Range to avoid the steep descent into the Hartley Valley and to the steep ascent beyond. Passing through a number of cuttings, some of them pretty large, through sandstone rock interlaced with bands of ironstone rock, and over several embankments, we come to the tunnel through Mount Clarence, at about a mile from the end of the contract [for section 4].75

The rails were laid across the Causeway, close, sometimes very close, to the existing track and road and on their eastern side. Bells Line of Road and the track from the top of Hartley Vale Road south to Mount Victoria ran to the west of the new tracks (Fig. 2.41).

Figure 2.41: The railway and road from Mount Victoria (on right) northwards, surveyed in 1884. North is to the left. Department of Lands, Plan Room, Plan R 2940.1603.

As a result, when the rail curved west at what became Bell it had to cross the line of Bells Line of Road. Because the road was not considered important, no level crossing was installed, so the north end of the Darling Causeway roadway was effectively closed to all wheeled traffic. The arrangement did not impede the passage of mobs of cattle or flocks of sheep or of pedestrians and horse-riders but drays and carriages were unable to cross. When the Governor, Lord Belmore, and his Countess, came to witness the monumental dynamite explosion which destroyed a faulty tunnel at the Great Zig Zag on 16 September 1868, they came by train to Mount Victoria and then by horse-drawn carriages not along the Darling Causeway but down Victoria Pass, through Bowenfels and round to Lithgow Valley. When they returned in the evening by the same route, the Governor, his wife and their party all had to walk up the final stretch of Victoria Pass since ‘the horses were knocked up’.76

74 Report of Engineer in Chief, appendix I to ‘Report on the Construction and Progress of the Railways of New South Wales from 1866 to 1871 inclusive’, Votes and Proceedings of Legislative Assembly of NSW for 1872-1873, III 523-524. 75 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 1868, 5 column 3. 76 Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September 1868, 5; reprinted in William A. Bayley, The Great Zig Zag Railway at Lithgow, Austrail Publications, Bulli 1977, 42-48.




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Just at this time, Mount Wilson was being surveyed with a view to sub-division. The surveyor, Edward Wyndham, camped in the area from May to September 1868 and developed a route up to Mount Wilson along the ridge from Bells Line of Road south of the later Bell (Fig. 2.37). In October 1868, Wyndham complained to his superior, Surveyor-General Adams, in quite strong terms:

Having recently visited Mt. Wilson, I found that the road leading thither from One Tree Hill [Mount Victoria] is being closed by the Railway Department – they having made no provision for a level crossing over the railway at the junction of Bell’s Road and Darling’s Causeway. The rails are now laid and the road is rendered totally impassable for vehicles, and will evidently be closed altogether as soon as the works are completed at the locality in question. It appears to me to be very desirable that a level crossing should be provided at this point before the land, lately surveyed by me at Mount Wilson, is offered for sale, as, otherwise, there will be scarcely any way of access thereto.77

This letter was sent on to John Whitton, the Engineer in Chief of the railways. He proposed building not a level crossing but a bridge and undertook that ‘a platform near the bridge can be erected if considered necessary’.78 Nothing, however, was done. In 1870 62 allotments in Mount Wilson were offered for sale but only one lot was sold immediately. In 1875 interest revived and a number of prominent and influential people bought land with a view to building a country retreat. The purchasers included Surveyor-General Adams himself and five others of his department and two Treasury officials, as well as politicians, judges, other lawyers and well-to-do businessmen.79 Suddenly the Commissioners for the Railway solved the problems at Bell. A station called Mount Wilson and a bridge taking Bells Line of Road over the railway were opened in 1875, just as country retreats were being constructed at Mount Wilson. Not only this, but work was done in the same year to make the entire road along Darling Causeway viable for wheeled traffic.80 There were further improvements made to the station arrangements in 1877 and 1885, the name of the station was changed to Bell in 1889 and on duplication of the line in 1911 the station was moved westwards to its present site, but the critical year was 1875.81 Although the wealthy owners of Mount Wilson houses, their caretakers and gardeners, now had train access to Sydney from Bells Line of Road, Mount Victoria was the nearest service village and its cemetery was also used by the Mount Wilson folk until their own church was built in 1916. So the road right along Darling Causeway became important for the first time after 1875. There is, accordingly, a high degree of probability that the impressive stone retaining wall which has been located during the present study on the west side of the Darling Causeway road some 2km north of Mount Victoria was a necessary part of the roadworks in 1875, to prevent subsidence on a very narrow part of the ridge. A rock-fall on the sandstone face adjacent to the road would have also threatened the railway, immediately to the east.

77 Quoted in C.H. Currey, Mount Wilson, New South Wales: its Location, Settlement and Development, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1968, 30. 78 Currey, Mount Wilson, 30. 79 Ian Jack. ‘Mount Wilson’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2006, online. 80 R.F. Wylie and C.C. Singleton, ‘The Railway Crossing of the Blue Mountains, 5. Blackheath to Bell’, Bulletin of Australian Railway Historical Society, 248, June 1958, 93. 81 Wylie and Singleton, ‘The Railway Crossing of the Blue Mountains, 5. Blackheath to Bell’, 93.




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Figure 2.42: The original 1866 plan for the railway across Darling Causeway in the area of the retaining wall, which is above the track. North is to the right. State Records NSW, State Rail, NRS 15307/1/83, sheet 37.

Figure 2.43: Another copy, with later annotations, of the 1866 plan of the railway across Darling Causeway in the area of the retaining wall. The road is marked in pencil. North is to the right. State Records NSW, State Rail, NRS 15307/1/84, sheet 37.




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Figure 2.44: The detailed 1884 survey of the 1875 road just west of the railway reserve across Darling Causeway in the area of the retaining wall. The legend along the roadway within portion 290 in Hartley parish reads: ‘RES. ROAD 50 LINKS WIDE’. Within portions 333 and 58 to 61, the legend reads: ‘BOUNDARY ROAD 100 LINKS WIDE’. North is to the left. Department of Lands, Plan Room. Plan R 2940.103.

Although the circumstantial case is strong, the evidence for the construction of the retaining wall is incomplete. No road-building specifications or detailed accounts seem to have survived. The surviving plans of the railway and the road between 1866 and 1884 do not show the retaining wall, but that is not unexpected (Figs 2.42, 2.43, 2.44). Subsequent works were done to the railway along the Causeway, adjusting curves when the line was duplicated between Mount Victoria and Hartley Vale Road with its shale-oil railway station in 1910 and further duplicated between Hartley Vale station and Bell in 1911 (Fig. 2.40). These changes to the rail line were well to the north of the retaining wall and cannot be shown to be relevant to its construction. The conclusion, therefore, is that the retaining wall was not built by convicts in the 1830s but was constructed by paid road gangs in 1875 primarily as a result of pressure from the influential property owners of Mount Wilson for better access to their hill station.




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2.10 The Dam at the (Piddington) Grange, Mount Victoria William Piddington was an affluent bachelor. Prominent as a book dealer in the colony from 1838 onwards, he entered politics in mid-life and represented the Hawkesbury (which included part of the Blue Mountains) in the Legislative Assembly from 1858 until 1877. Subsequently, thanks to the patronage of Sir Henry Parkes (whom he had served twice as Colonial Treasurer), he was a member of the Legislative Council from 1879 until his death in 1887.82 Before the railway was built, he regularly rode around the Mountains, along with his close friends, James Milson jr (the son of Milson of Milsons Point) and JP Roxburgh. John Pirie Roxburgh was a Sydney solicitor, who shared Piddington’s enthusiasm for yachting as well as fresh air in the Mountains. The three men purchased the Toll House at Mount Victoria in the 1850s and, although they leased it to the innkeeper George Sheppeard, came to Mount Victoria regularly.83 Figure 2.45: The central part of Mount Victoria village, showing the portions acquired by Piddington,

Milson and Antilla Roxburgh. Original portions outlined in blue, later acquisitions outlined in purple. Map of parish of Hartley, county of Cook, 2nd ed. 1888, Lands PMap OE06 11260701.

John Roxburgh died in January 1873,84 but Piddington remained on good terms with his widow, Antilla. Piddington, Milson and Antilla Roxburgh decided to invest in the village area of Mount Victoria, north of the highway, and acquired grants of portions 123, 130, 201 and 260 in the parish of Hartley, county of Cook. These are all in the triangle between the main road and the Darling

82 D.I. McDonald, ‘Piddington, William Richman (1815-1887)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, V, Melbourne University Press, Carlton 1974, 443-444. 83 R.A. Goddard, The Life and Times of James Milson, 1955, 106, 147; Ebena Isles, Mount Victoria, Mount Victoria & District Historical Society, Mount Victoria 1988, 2-3. 84 Brisbane Courier, 26 September 1881, 3.




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Causeway. The trio were also granted portions 129 and 200 to the east of the railway line and they bought Mary Finn’s central 40 acres, portion 168, where the Victoria and Albert and the Imperial Hotel now stand (Fig. 2.45).85 Piddington decided to build a substantial house for himself on the northern part of portion 123 (Fig. 2.46). Piddington Grange, designed by John Horbury Hunt, took shape in 1876.86 Piddington developed a walking trail north-west into the bush down to Fairy Dell in 1879 (Fig. 2.47)

Figure 2.46: The location of Piddington Grange, shown under its later name The Grange. It is on the edge of the settled land within Mount Victoria village. The dam is on the upper left, just above the portion number 260. Mount Wilson, 2 inches to 1 mile, 1966-1969, 8930-1N.

Figure 2.47: The dotted line from Grange north-west to Fairy Dell is the track blazed by Piddington in 1879. It is now bisected by a modern access road to the Sewage Treatment Works. Jim Smith, How to See the Blue Mountains, 2nd ed., Katoomba 1989, 88.

85 Map of parish of Hartley, county of Cook, 2nd ed. 1888, Lands PMap OE06 11260701. 86 Peter Reynolds, Lesley Muir and Joy Hughes (John Horbury Hunt: Radical Architect, 1838-1904, 134) date the house to 1887, but Hunt built a house for Piddington in 1876 and a door-hinge bears that date. I have discussed the date with Dr Reynolds, who agrees that there is merit in 1876.




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A dam was constructed above Fairy Dell, on Piddington’s portion 260 and its triangular shape is shown clearly on the current 1:25000 map (Fig. 2.48). The date of construction is not documented, but it is described as ‘very old’ by Jim Smith and certainly was in existence by 1909, when it is quite gratuitously sketched in on the 7th edition of the Hartley parish map. Its location on the 1909 map is not precisely accurate, since it straddles the northern part of portion 130 and the southern part of portion 260, but there is no mistaking its long triangular shape (Fig. 2.48). The dam is therefore likely to have been built either by Piddington himself before he died in 1887 or by the next owner of the property, F.C. Jarrett, editor of the Building and Engineering Journal.87

Figure 2.48: The triangular dam is sketched on the parish map of 1909, overlapping portions 130 and 260. The house called The Grange is on portion 123. Map of parish of Hartley, county of Cook, 7th ed. 1909, Lands PMap OE06 11260401.

The dam was entirely private, the largest of all the private dams in the Mountains and is likely to have been recreational.88 The railway had already solved their most acute water problems at Mount Victoria station by diverting the source of the Grose River along the Darling Causeway and bringing it to a small reservoir to the east of the station.89 The village of Mount Victoria had no reticulated water until a large tank high up near the Trig Station to the south of the highway was constructed in the 1940s.90 87 Reynolds, Muir and Hughes, John Horbury Hunt, 135. 88 Jim Smith, David Beaver & Chris Betteridge, ‘Tracks into History: Conservation Management Plan for Walking Tracks of State Heritage Significance in the Blue Mountains’, report to National Parks and Wildlife Service, July 2004, 79. 89 C.C. Singleton, ‘Station Arrangements on the Blue Mountains’, Australasian Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, XXIII no.143, September 1949, 33. 90 Information courtesy of Miss Jean Arthur of Mount Victoria and District Historical Society.




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When The Grange became a guesthouse in the early twentieth century, it passed through a number of hands. Around 1912 the local Progress Association was advertising an attraction of the Fairy Dell as ‘large dams’91 (the second dam is under the Falls themselves to the north of the dam under current scrutiny). In 1924 Mrs M. Grosvenor advertised swimming as an attraction for visitors at The Grange, along with tennis and billiards.92 The dam is likely to have been this swimming facility. The property went into decline during the Depression in the 1930s and there is no historical evidence that the dam was used by the Scripture Union or by Barker College, the present occupants of The Grange.

91 Mount Victoria Progress Association, Mount Victoria Directory, Mount Victoria [c.1912], 2. 92 Gwen Silvey, Happy Days: Blue Mountains Guesthouses Remembered, Kingsclear Books, Crows Nest 1996, 31, 106.


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Figure 2.49: Chronological mapping, pre-1850


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Figure 2.52: Chronological mapping

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