Inspecting plans for the steelworks in 1922. From left: Dr N Kirkwood, Charles Hoskins, N A Lang, M. O’Donnell, W Davies, S R Musgrave. The man sitting is J B Ball. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society – P05474.
While recently researching “water catchment issues” relating to the current Helensburgh Metropolitan Coal Mine’s longwall modifications, I came across a 2023 Region Illawarra article marking the 95th anniversary of the Port Kembla Steelworks, which included the above photograph.
And it’s a photograph about which I have long been curious.
A first puzzle is why on earth is Port Kembla’s Dr Noel Edmund Barton Kirkwood present – and yet seemingly totally disinterested?
The presence of a representative of the O’Donnell family, who had significant land-holdings at Port Kembla, along with Cecil Hoskins and long-term Illawarra Labor parliamentarian Billy Davies, as well as the NSW Minister for Works Richard Thomas Ball, however, is hardly surprising.
Neither is the presence of Standish Richard Musgrave – for in 1911 Musgrave had become managing editor of the Illawarra Mercury and by 1922 president of the Australian Provincial Press Association. Put simply, Musgrave was a much needed PR-asset and able to favourably report that the Hoskins’ brothers were serious about trying to move their Lithgow operations to Port Kembla.
But then I remembered something about Standish Richard Musgrave and also something that was revealed in the Region article.
That article noted that “before Charles Hoskins signed the deal to move his steelworks from Lithgow to Wollongong in the 1920s, another Australian industrial player had been eyeing off Port Kembla as a home base. The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, better known as BHP, looked into basing its steelworks at Port Kembla, but found the issue of water supply too difficult to overcome”.
Now why, I thought, would a company then as big as BHP be unable to solve the issue of water supply yet the Hoskins brothers felt they could?
And then I remembered an obscure detail I had read that when Standish Richard Musgrave emigrated to Australia he was accompanied by his cousin, Richard Harris and a man of that name just so happened in 1922 to be the prosecuting officer for the NSW Water Board.
That also started me wondering why the long-term Wollongong Mayor Norman Smith was not present in the photo and why future Wollongong Mayor William Alexander Lang was instead – particularly when I knew that Smith was the Illawarra representative on the Water Board from 1926 and that in 1928 W A Lang replaced him in that role.
These appointments just before construction of the Steelworks was to get under way could well have been mere coincidence. But then I also learned that G & C Hoskins Ltd had, as early as 1916, purchased Wongawilli Colliery once owned by Andrew Lang, who was W A Lang’s father.
Early work on the Port Kembla Steelworks in April 1927. Photo: From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society – P06901.
Charles Hoskins had stated in 1922 there was “no district he had seen which was so adapted for industrial undertakings” as Port Kembla.
But a reading of the reports of a 1923 Parliamentary Inquiry at which Wollongong Mayor Norman Smith was in attendance again reminded me of Region’s mention of “issues with water supply”.
This 1923 inquiry asked Charles Hoskins if he was aware that “the Water Board objected” to his proposed Illawarra cross-country railway “on account of interference with the water catchment area”.
Mayor Smith and Charles Hoskins were indeed very much aware of this as they had in 1921 both objected to what they believed was the Water Board’s alienation of Illawarra’s water catchment to augment “the metropolitan water supply”.
Both were of the view that “the industrial life of the district” depended upon Hoskins’ “access to a good water supply”.
At the same 1923 inquiry, Mr A A Lysaght – who in 1927 became the Labor Party’s NSW Attorney General – remarked that as Mr Hoskins’ ironworks “was moving to the district, and he wanted a water supply” the “Government would find it for him”.
So when in 1927 the Hoskins’ brothers applied to the Water Board for a licence to build a dam on Allan’s Creek for the works it was building at Port Kembla, they again stated the construction of the works depended upon “a sufficient water supply”.
The Water Board “decided that it would itself build the dam” and that “the total cost of a supply from Allan’s Creek and American Creek was estimated at £164,000”, according to the Illawarra Mercury in February 1927.
Whether or not this was all simply coincidence will likely never be known but – as it was in the early 1920s with the proposed move of the Hoskins’ operations from Lithgow to Port Kembla – there can be little doubt that “water issues” remain at the heart of the expansion of industrial development and mining not only in Illawarra but throughout Australia.
Remarkably, I also learned that it is claimed that Sydney is the only major city in the world that allows mining under its water catchment areas.
