Courtenay Puckey’s salt works at North Beach Wollongong. In May 1914 the surf club (then known as the Water Rats) applied to Wollongong Council to use the building as club rooms. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society – P02732.
The Illawarra is remarkable for being one of the few places in Australia where images survive of presumed early attempts to manufacture salt.
The above photograph is said to depict the works of Courtenay Puckey – a Wollongong chemist who was presumed to have attempted an experiment at manufacturing salt but far too small to produce commercial quantities. The tall structure may have been originally filed with brushwood.
Salt was once a much less than everyday commodity.
It was considered extraordinarily valuable throughout history, primarily because it was essential for preserving food, allowing societies to survive winters, transport meat/fish and secure food supplies.
Beyond use as a preservative, salt served as a trade commodity (sometimes worth its weight in gold) and was even used as currency.
Soldiers in the Roman army were reputedly sometimes paid with salt instead of money. Their monthly allowance was called “salarium” (“sal” being the Latin word for salt). And thus our modern word “salary” derives from the same root.
Medieval legends contend that Lords of the manor sometimes dined, seated at the head of table, with their vassals. A large and expensive bowl of salt marked the division between the nobility and the slaves deemed to be “Below the Salt”. But I’ve always doubted this for some Barons owned lots of peasants and would have needed an exceedingly large table.
But in Illawarra from the 1820s, cattle barons needed salt to preserve meat while, apparently, the indigenous people generally found it less necessary, although saltbush may have been sometimes used for both culinary and medicinal purposes.
There were neither rock salt deposits nor salt lakes in the Illawarra, so imported salt was used.
By January 1856 the ex-convict Mayor of Wollongong, Robert Haworth, was selling imported “Liverpool Salt”, in first-rate condition, at 13 shillings per 224 pound (100 kg) bag or £6 per ton.
George Brown (of Brownsville) early on tried boiling the salt water of Lake Illawarra. According to his son, he boiled the water in iron boilers of 200 gallons (750 litres) each until it formed into salt.
Brown is also claimed to have “employed a man making salt on the beach” at Wollongong where he had opened the Ship Inn in the early 1830s before moving to the Dapto area.
Filtered sea water, which on average contains only about 2.5 per cent common salt, can be boiled so as to evaporate it and bring the concentration of sodium chloride to a little above 20 per cent per cent. But it takes lots of water and heaps of heat and space to produce salt in large quantities.
This short video shows the simplicity of the process.
John Blaxland (who also owned land in Illawarra), however, had as early as 1807 tried solar evaporation at his Newington works in Sydney using some eight acres (3.2 ha) of shallow basins for this purpose.
Another much more labour-intensive method (but again requiring lots of space to produce salt in any great quantity) is known as the blackthorn graduation process.
It requires the building of long walls enclosing masses of brushwood, most often blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) as its crooked, angular character and many thorns helped to maximise the evaporation surface.
It’s a difficult process to explain simply and briefly but if you’re interested to learn more, this video gives a pretty good example of a modernised version of the process.
Above: Courtney Puckey’s home and salt works opposite Stuart Park and facing Fairy Creek. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society – P15212. Below: Puckey’s home Seafield, photographed from Fairy Creek before vandals destroyed it. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society – P15252.
Courtenay Puckey and his fabled experimental salt works near Fairy Creek are listed today as part of Wollongong’s wonderful Botanic Garden Annex known as Puckey’s Estate.
But it is the very nebulousness of the lingering information about this that makes Puckey interesting, as does his decision to live at his then lonely absolute beachfront Seafield residence on Fairy Creek where he died aged 83 in 1944.
Puckey seems to have been an unusually private and, perhaps, eccentric man but also owned property and even another house called Minna-Ha-Ha in Bourke Street which he sold for £700 in 1920.
But, at Seafield during WWI, Puckey was ludicrously accused of being a German spy silently signalling to submarines off the coast.
What is of most interest to me, however is whether or not at Seafield Puckey was actually hoping to experiment with producing salt in order to produce it in commercial quantities.
Some images said to date from 1910 appear to show what looks like an attempt to use the “thorn-brush graduation method” of producing salt.
Some have suggested that some of the relics today remaining on the site at Puckey’s Estate may have been used for the cultivation of seaweed so that he could extract iodine to utilise in his pharmaceutical practice.
The only contribution I can add to such a debate is that it seems to me that the thing Puckey was most in need of was not salt, but H20. His Seafield house was surrounded by lots of brackish water, but very little fresh was to be conveniently had during any lengthy dry spell.
So, if I was Puckey, I would have been looking for a way to supplement the rain water from his roof and tanks.
But that’s just a theory – so I suggest taking it with a grain of salt.
