Skip to main content

Coke kilns

Coke Kilns, Newnes Shale-Oil Works, Wollemi National Park

There is a big collection coke ovens (the remains of 90 are visible). These are the inner shell of an original rectangular bench. Locally mined coal was fed into these ovens and turned into coke. Coke was used to fuel the Newnes boiler plant and shale retorts. It was also exported to the Lithgow iron works and the Cobar copper smelter.

Words to walk with:
From To Working Men by Walt Whitman
House-building, measuring, sawing the boards;

Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing, shingle- dressing,

Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, ferrying, flagging of side-walks by flaggers,

The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln,

Coal-mines, and all that is down there,--the lamps in the darkness, echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts looking through smutched faces,

Ironworks, forge-fires in the mountains, or by the river-banks--men around feeling the melt with huge crowbars--lumps of ore, the due combining of ore, limestone, coal--the blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the bottom of the melt at last--the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars of pig-iron, the strong, clean shaped T-rail for railroads;

Oilworks, silkworks, white-lead-works, the sugar-house, steam-saws, the great mills and factories;

Comments

  1. Like a series of wasp nests backed into the hillside ... 90 of them! Golly ... like a cottage-BHP ...

    That Whitman has an unusual structure ... like the word smutched ... bags it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice shots.... going to be in the Sydney area in a week and definitely making a trip to the BM... dont know what i am in for but you made me curious :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would like just one or two for my very own

    ReplyDelete
  4. 90? Wow! What an amazing site this must be! How old are they?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Those are hobbit homes, surely!?

    ReplyDelete
  6. JM, by your standards extremely young ... built in the early 1900s.

    bitingmidge, as AB suggests these could be hobbit homes. You are a bit big to be a hobbit so what on earth would you do with the two you have ordered ... turn them into big pizza ovens?

    Sean these ruins are a bit wide of the mountains so you are unlikely to see these but there is much else of interest around here .. mostly natural wonders.

    Julie, I'm not so sure about cottage. This site was huge in its day.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment