The coastal coal-carrying trade of New South Wales involved the shipping of coal—mainly for local consumption but also for export or coal bunkering—by sea to Sydney from the northern and southern coal fields of New South Wales. It took place in the 19th and 20th centuries. It should not be confused with the export coal trade, which still exists today. There was also an interstate trade, carrying coal and coke to other Australian states that did not have local sources of black coal.
Coal was found to the north and south of Sydney in the last years of the 18th century by colonial settlers. Coal seams run under Sydney but at great depth and mining these seams, although it was done for a time at the Balmain Colliery, proved impractical. As Sydney grew in size as a city and as a major port, coal was needed for steamships, town gas production and other industrial uses.
Small ships—colloquially called sixty-milers—carried coal to Sydney from coal ports that were established on the northern and southern coalfields of New South Wales. The coastal trade was well established by the time Sydney was first linked to the coalfields by railways. Significant customers for coal were situated on the foreshores of Sydney Harbour, the Parramatta River, and to a lesser extent Botany Bay. Steamships using Sydney loaded bunker coal there.
During the heyday of the coastal trade, Sydney was dependent upon a constant supply of coal arriving by sea, particularly for the production of town gas and for bunkering operations. As the uses of coal declined, so did the coastal trade in the last three decades of the 20th century. It ended finally, around the turn of the 21st century, and is now largely forgotten. Few remnants of the once extensive coastal coal-carrying trade exist today.
Discovery of coal by colonists in New South Wales Coal was used as a fuel by the Awabakal people, the original inhabitants and traditional owners of what is now Lake Macquarie and Newcastle. Their word for coal was "nikkin". Evidence of coal use has been found in beach and dune middens, on Lake Macquarie at Swansea Heads and Ham's Beach, and on the Central Coast at Mooney Beach.
A group of escaped convicts led by a married couple William and Mary Bryant were the first Europeans to find and use Australian coal, at the end of March 1791. They found "fine burning coal" near a "little creek" with cabbage tree palms 'about 2 degrees' north of Sydney, "after two days sailing". This first hand account of the discovery—written by one of the party James Martin—was found in a collection of manuscripts and published in 1937. The escapees never returned to Sydney and their discovery of the coal remained unknown, until after they were recaptured at Kupang. William Bryant also wrote an account that is now lost but William Bligh—later a governor of New South Wales—saw it, when he visited Kupang in 1792. Bligh made a summary of Bryant's account in his log and quoted him as saying, "Walking along shore towards the entrance of the Creek we found several large pieces of Coal—seeing so many pieces we thought it was not unlikely to find a Mine, and searching about a little, we found a place where we picked up with an Ax as good Coals as any in England—took some to the fire and they burned exceedingly well". It is likely that the location was near the entrance to Glenrock Lagoon, where coal is exposed, low in the sea cliff, and which was later the site of the Burwood Colliery.
Survivors of the wreck of the Sydney Cove reported seeing coal south of Sydney, after completing their 700 km trek along the coast in May 1797. The explorer George Bass was tasked to confirm the discovery, and, in July 1797, he reported seeing a coal seam "six foot deep in the face of a steep cliff which was traced for eight miles in length" (Sites where coal outcrops are visible along the coast south of Sydney include Coalcliff, where coal outcrops in the sea-cliff, and near the ocean pool at Wombarra and at Bell's Point and Brickyard Point, both at Austinmer, where coal outcrops in the headlands.)
In September of the same year, Lieutenant John Shortland reported coal outcropping on the southern side of the Hunter River—first known as the Coal River—near to its mouth, at what is now Newcastle. Shortland's "discovery" may have been prompted by an earlier report—provided by a party of fishermen in 1796—of a river with coal, to the north of Sydney and south from Port Stephens, but he is credited with the discovery of the Hunter River and the northern coalfields.
In July 1800, Captain William Reid—mistaking Moon Island for Nobbys Head and the entrance to Lake Macquarie at Swansea Heads for the mouth of the Hunter River—obtained his cargo of coal for Sydney from a seam outcropping in the southern headland at the lake's entrance—a headland since known as "Reid's Mistake"—and so accidentally revealed to the settlers the coastal coalfields of Lake Macquarie. Awabakal people had used the coal at Swansea Heads for over a thousand years. It was only upon his return to Sydney that Reid found that he had not travelled far enough north to have reached the Hunter River.
Coal was also found during July 1801 by the expedition, led by Lieutenant-Colonel William Paterson, to the Hunter Valley inland from Newcastle. This area would later become the vast South Maitland Coalfields.
The discovery of the western coalfields did not occur until after the Blue Mountains had been crossed in 1813. Coal outcrops low in the cliffs of some valleys of the Blue Mountains and on their western side near Lithgow. In fact, it is the erosion of these relatively soft coal measures that results in the sandstone cliff faces so characteristic of the Blue Mountains. William Lawson found what he thought was coal near Mt York, in the area later known as Hartley Vale, in 1822, but it was actually oil shale. However, at least by 1832, an attempt had been made to mine coal near the western base of Mount York, in the Vale of Clwydd, but it was found impractical due to transport difficulties. Apart from limited local use, western coal could not be exploited until the railway from Sydney crossed the Blue Mountains in 1869, and soon after that there were mines in the area around Lithgow.
By 1847, especially through the work of a clergyman and geologist, William Branwhite Clarke, it was a becoming understood that there was a major coal resource, at widely dispersed locations within the Sydney Basin.
That coal had been found so readily, by colonial settlers with no experience of mining and little knowledge of their new country, so soon after the first European settlement, implied that the resource was widespread and plentiful. That proved true; an immense coal resource existed in New South Wales. Coal is still being mined within the Sydney Basin more than two centuries later. Some individual mines had been worked for well over a century. Indeed, it is only the more recent increased rate of extraction—for the export market—that will see the exhaustion of commercially viable reserves that can be extracted without unacceptable environmental damage, before the middle of the 21st century.
Reasons for the trade
Coal for Sydney Coal was needed in Sydney to feed the production of town gas (from 1841 to 1971), as bunker coal for steamships, and as fuel for industrial and hospital heating boilers. Brickworks were a significant user of coal as a fuel. In the C19th and very early C20th, there was also some demand for coal as a fuel for domestic heating. Some coal also was trans-shipped and exported from Sydney.
Coal seams extend under Sydney but the huge depth of these seams has resulted in only very limited mining activity in Sydney. The coal seams of the Sydney Basin outcrop to the north, south and west of Sydney. The Metropolitan Colliery, 45 km south of Sydney at Helensburgh, is the closest commercially viable coal mine.
Given the short distances involved, it is not immediately obvious why coal would be carried to Sydney by sea. Not all coal consumed in Sydney arrived by ship; the railways also carried coal to Sydney. However, the main railway lines from Sydney to the north and south were not completed until the 1880s, largely due to the significant work needed to carry those railways across the Hawkesbury and Georges rivers. By that time, some mines were already well established and connected to nearby ports by local rail lines, the shipping trade was well established, and many major customers already had facilities on the waterfront of the natural port of Sydney Harbour and were without a rail siding. Some mines had been designed to ship coal by sea only, for example Coalcliff (up to 1910), the Wallarah Colliery at Catherine Hill Bay, and the two collieries on the left bank of the Hunter River, at Tomago and Stockton. Most of the local rail lines to the mines were privately owned and used rolling stock that was not to the standards expected of main line rail operations—for example wagons without air brakes—and operation over government-owned lines was restricted to specific lines and not allowed on others.
Coal bunkering of steamships in Sydney Harbour was a natural fit for the coastal coal trade. Sixty-milers could moor alongside a steamship and directly transfer coal to the ship's bunkers. In 1909, the first of three mechanised coal hulks that would coal ships in Sydney was introduced. After 1920, coal could be off-loaded and ships bunkered at the purpose-built bunkering facility, the Ball's Head Coal Loader. Coal bunkering also took place at a "coal wharf" at Pyrmont.
The New South Wales Government Railways were large users of coal, after the first steam-powered railway in New South Wales opened in 1855. But once the railway from Sydney reached the western coal-fields in 1869, and later the other coal fields, they had no need for coal carried in ships. In 1916, the Railway Commissioners set up their own mine, the Railway Mine, later known as the State Mine, on the western coal-fields at Lithgow. Coal was carried by rail to coal stages—ranging from massive structures to small stockpiles—at locations where steam locomotives were refuelled.
Four of the electrical power stations in Sydney—Bunnerong on Botany Bay, and White Bay, Pyrmont and Ultimo on Sydney Harbour—were supplied with coal by rail. All these power stations were situated close to the waterfront but that was to obtain cooling water not port access. Two of the power stations—Ultimo and White Bay—initially were operated by the railways and tramways and all the power stations in Sydney were built after the rail connections from the coalfields to Sydney were completed. While the Bunnerong Power Station was being built, drilling was carried out to a depth of 2,730 feet (832 m) in an attempt to find suitable coal below the area of the power station site; although a seam of "burnt" coal—destroyed by an intruding volcanic dyke—was found at a depth of 2,600 feet (792 m), these efforts were unsuccessful, and it too was supplied with its coal by rail.
The other power station, at Balmain—originally owned by Electric Light and Power Supply Corporation—had no rail siding. It was coal-fired but also raised some steam by incinerating garbage. Its coal was landed from barges at the waterfront until 1965 and at least some of the coal for the Balmain Power Station came by sea; around 1919 that included coal from the Cardiff Colliery, which was shipped from Lake Macquarie.
Coal and coke for the other states In parallel to the coastal trade to Sydney, there was an interstate coastal trade in coal and coke from the same ports to other Australian states, particularly Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania where black coal was needed for steamship coal bunkering, rail transport and industrial purposes and coke was needed for smelting ores.