The Fitzroy Iron Works at Mittagong, New South Wales, was the first commercial iron smelting works in Australia. It first operated in 1848.
From 1848 to around 1910, various owners and lessees attempted to achieve profitable operations but ultimately none succeeded. More than once, new managers repeated more or less the same mistakes made by earlier ones. Over the second half of the 19th century, the name 'Fitzroy Iron Works' became almost synonymous with lost opportunities, repeated failure, lost capital, misplaced trust, and general misfortune.
The Fitzroy Iron Works was—several times—a commercial failure, but it played a part in laying the foundations of the later success of the Australian iron and steel industry, and it was important in the growth of the township of Mittagong.
Relics of the old iron-works discovered during excavations for the redevelopment of its site, during 2004, have been preserved and are on display. There are also some remnants and a commemorative cairn at the adjacent site of its former blast furnace.
Location Just southwest of the current Mittagong town, the original mine deposit was located just south of the Main Road. The Iron Works were established on the north side of Old Hume Highway and Mt Alexander.
History
Discovery of the iron ore deposit (1833)
In 1833, the surveyor Jacques noted the presence of iron ore in the course of making a deviation of the Old South Road to the new town of Berrima. The deposit was located near a bridge (Ironstone Bridge) on what was later called Iron Mines Creek and was associated with carbonated chalybeate (iron-rich) mineral springs. Compared with contemporary English iron ore resources, the deposit was a rich one, with grades between 44% and 57% iron.
The Fitz Roy Iron Mine and its early operations (1848–1851) In 1848, a local man John Thomas Neale, a Sydney businessmen Thomas Holmes, and the brothers Thomas Tipple Smith and William Tipple Smith formed a partnership to exploit the iron ore deposit. The Smith brothers were sons of the English geologist William Smith. William Tipple Smith later claimed to have discovered gold, at Ophir, in 1848. He did have gold samples in his possession, before the gold rush triggered by Hargraves's well-publicised discovery nearby in 1851. However, Tipple Smith declined to tell the government the location that was the source of his gold, at the time that he found it, in 1848.
William Povey, an ironworks expert, was engaged as manager and some samples of iron products had been sent to Sydney by late 1848. This was not the first iron smelted from Australian iron ore, but it was the first such iron smelted commercially in Australia.
A report of February 1849 says that iron was smelted using a "Cataline furnace". A Catalan forge was a type of bloomery that included a tuyere through which air under pressure was injected, making it intermediate between earlier bloomery technology and a primitive blast furnace. The fuel used was charcoal. A Catalan forge was operated at temperatures below the melting point of iron and so did not produce molten ‘pig-iron’ (except unintentionally, if the iron melted). The product it made was ‘sponge iron’ (direct reduced iron), which accumulated at the base of the furnace as a ‘bloom’. Sponge iron either could be ‘worked’ to create wrought iron or melted in a cupola furnace to make cast-iron products. Unlike ‘pig-iron’, sponge iron did not contain an excess of carbon and so generally did not need ‘puddling’ before conversion to wrought iron. By the mid-19th century, the Catalan forge was already a largely obsolete smelting technology—the hot-blast furnace had been invented in 1828—but a Catalan forge was relatively simple to construct and operate (refer to illustration).
The subsequent processing of the smelted iron that was used to make the initial samples, in 1848, probably was largely manual—probably using what was essentially a blacksmith's forge— as there was no tilt hammer at the works until 1852.
Governor FitzRoy visited the works in late January 1849. During the visit, he was presented with "an elegant knife, containing twelve different instruments, of colonial workmanship, (mounted in colonial gold) the steel of which was smelted from the ore taken from the Fitz Roy mine". The partners had named their works—originally known as the Ironstone Bridge Ironworks— the Fitz Roy Iron Mine in his honour.
Meanwhile, the partners went about trying to raise capital to allow operation on a larger scale. A prospectus for the Fitz Roy Iron Mine Company was released in February 1849.
Quarrying of ore, brickmaking and erecting a larger Catalan forge to smelt the iron were in progress, when Governor FitzRoy again made visit to the works in March 1850. A cupola furnace and a foundry had been built to process the 'sponge iron' as cast-iron and a tilt hammer was on order from England. A tilt hammer was a type of large, powered mechanical hammer that was used to work the 'sponge iron' bloom and convert it to wrought iron, a process known as 'shingling'.
In commemoration of Governor FitzRoy's visit in March 1850 to officially open the works, fifty cast-iron doorstops, in the form of a lion restant — the lion being a heraldic animal associated with the FitzRoy family—were cast from imported pig-iron that was melted in the cupola furnace.
Fitz Roy Iron Mine Company (1851–1854) One founding partner, John Neale left and 15 new shareholders took up a holding in the Fitzroy Iron Mine Company, which was registered on 16 September 1851. William Tipple Smith had a stroke in 1849; he was not actively involved in the new company and died in 1852.
By September 1852, the tilt hammer, and 40 hp engine to drive it, was in the process of erection at the works. The company had produced about 100 blooms weighing in total two tons, when the tilt hammer—critical to the operation—broke and could not be repaired. It became apparent that the use of charcoal as a fuel was expensive and a larger scale of production would be necessary for profitable operation.
Fitz Roy Iron & Coal Mining Company (1854–1858) The capital of the company was increased in 1854 and the company was reincorporated as the Fitz Roy Iron & Coal Mining Company. This was to allow rolling equipment to be ordered from England but it also involved a change in control of the company, with the Sydney merchant Frederick John Rothery becoming the largest shareholder and chairman of the board. An issue of shares to the public was not as successful as expected, and to progress the work a loan for £6,000 was taken out, with the Directors taking personal responsibility for it. Later Rothery lent the company another £3,500.
The company purchased from Mr. Povey for £1000, three new tilt hammers that had been brought out from England 16 months earlier, and Povey agreed to take up £500 of shares in the new company.
In 1855, the company used its cupola furnace as a small blast-furnace to smelt some iron ore into pig-iron, which was puddled and then sent to the Sydney works of P. N. Russell & Co., where it was used to make anchors, which with some ore samples and other manufactured items—including razors and a carriage axle—were exhibits at the 1855 Paris Exhibition. This was probably the first time pig-iron had been smelted from Australian iron ore.
The new directors commissioned an engineering report "on the Company's mines, and on the machinery necessary for working them" from Mr. James Henry Thomas, resident engineer at the Government Dry Dock on Cockatoo Island. In August 1855, the board decided against erecting a blast furnace—on grounds of cost—and instead to erect six puddling furnaces and one reheat furnace. Unusually, it was intended to use the reverberatory ‘puddling’ furnaces for direct reduction smelting of the ore. Thomas provided this description of ore smelting c.1856. “The method hitherto adopted for the reduction of the ores of the Fitz Roy mines, has been, first, to crush into small pieces, and with 25 per cent, of charcoal it is placed in a reverberatory furnace similar to that employed in England for puddling, and the iron before you this evening is the produce of this mode of manufacture. This plan has been adopted (although producing but small quantities) owing to the slight cost of construction compared to the comparative great outlay required in the erection of a blast furnace with it necessary apparatus for blowing, &c.”
A reverberatory furnace used coal as a fuel—without first coking the coal as is needed for a blast furnace—and such a furnace could be reused as a 'puddling furnace' later to process pig-iron from a blast furnace; perhaps, as well as capital cost, these were factors in the decision. Foremost in the directors minds was getting iron—even in relatively small quantities—to market in Sydney.
In anticipation of the new reverberatory furnaces and rolling mills, sourcing of supplies of coal became a priority for the company. Transport to Sydney, in the absence of a rail connection, was also a significant difficulty for the works.
There followed a period of acrimonious dispute between the board of directors and other shareholders, during which the works continued to operate, but little progress was achieved in improving the plant. By 1855, only a total of only three tons of wrought iron had been made. Once the chairman resigned in 1856, and tried to foreclose on his mortgage over the works, operations ceased.
In late April 1856, William Povey became the first of those who would be bankrupted through their involvement in the ironworks over the following half-century.
In 1857, a shareholder and Sydney contractor William Henry Johnson bought the assets but could not refloat the company. He installed the rolling mill that had been ordered under the previous management but could not proceed further through lack of capital. The rolling mill was powered by a 40-horsepower steam engine and had sets of rolls for merchant bars, plate and double-headed rails. It was the first rolling mill installed in Australia for making wrought iron products but—having been left idle—was not the first to enter production.
Around July 1858, a trial smelting of ore took place and 16 hundredweight of "No. 1 iron" was smelted from 2 tons 8 hundredweight of ore; it is almost certain that the "blast furnace" involved in this trial was the existing cupola furnace. Indeed, the works still lacked a blast furnace—the essential first part of the commercial iron-making process—although in other respects it had, by then, the remaining elements of an integrated ironworks.
The discovery of coal nearby, in 1853, and potentially lower transport costs to Sydney—as the railhead of the Main Southern Railway moved progressively closer to Mittagong—led to renewed optimism that a blast furnace could be operated profitably at the works. Johnson received promises of financial support—from William Terrey, Thomas Chalder and Joseph Cartwright—and efforts continued to float a new company; any further progress depended upon obtaining more capital.
Fitzroy Iron Works Company (1859–1869) Despite the lack of earlier success, the potential of the mine and the growth of railways in the colony suggested a successful business model would be for the works to produce iron rails. In December 1859, prospectus for the ‘Fitz Roy Ironworks Company’ was published. The prospectus included reference to another report, by J. H. Thomas, dated 6 June 1859, which was quoted as praising the ore and the iron made from it and mentioned that the iron would be used for repairs to railway machinery.