It’s hard to believe now but there was once a plan to turn Lake Illawarra into a harbour capable of docking large ocean-going vessels. Photo: Region.
There are lot of things in Illawarra’s history that seem highly unlikely.
One that recently shocked me is that the word “Illawarra” turns-up in a document titled Reports of Obstruction to Navigation sent to The Commander of the Titanic, on 13 March 1912.
It read: “Please note the following reports: British steamer Bengore Head, from St John NB which passed the Tuskar March 7, reported having on board the crew of the Norwegian barque Illawarra, Leith for Valparaiso, which vessel was abandoned in Lat 50.51 N, Long 12.49 W, dangerous to navigation.”
Sadly Captain Edward John Smith – on the strength of the advertising madness that the Titanic was an unsinkable ship – appears to have paid little heed.
But the most bizarre thing I’ve come across in Illawarra’s history is the extraordinary scheme by a cabal of British and Australian investors, including the first Australian Prime Minister Edmund Barton, to turn Lake Illawarra into a harbour capable on its western shore of docking large ocean-going vessels.
Presumably the Brits pretended they had no idea of the shallow depth of Lake Illawarra and that the cost of both dredging a channel all the way from the sea to Elizabeth Point near Tallawarra (as well as endlessly keeping that channel open) would bankrupt even the wealth of all the pharaohs of Egypt.
Nonetheless, the NSW Parliament passed a law to allow the Illawarra Land and Harbour Corporation to go ahead with the scheme. Work even began on a breakwater at Windang and in 1895 an expensive railway was completed on the western side of the lake.
The line, of course, never got used and no coal was ever shipped.
A director of the company, Thomas Andrew de Wolf, was even forced to reveal to a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1898 that one of the largest shareholders was “very badly insolvent” and that the company’s liquidator had found “a number irregularities”.
And so the whole ridiculous mine, jetty and harbour scheme was completely abandoned by 1902.
Yet the ludicrous harbour scheme had mysteriously encouraged the Smelting Company of Australia to build a smelter at Kanahooka, using foreign capital.
So without a harbour, zinciferous Broken Hill lead sulphide ore was transported by rail to Dapto station. The company then began to process base metals and gold-bearing pyrite telluride ores from Western Australia and other sources at Kanahooka instead of Port Kembla, which actually possessed a buildable large harbour.
The unlikely Kanahooka locale became the first place in Illawarra to get a blast furnace.
Without massive corruption the scam surely could not have been allowed to waste so much time and money and many mug investors must have got severely burned.
Mullet Creek in the foreground of Kanahooka Smelting Works. From left: Sulphuric acid plant, offices, roasting plant and blast furnace plant. Photo: From The Australasian (Melbourne) 11 December 1897.
But some of the big wigs may have done OK by making some very questionable transactions involving directors of their respective major companies including the supposedly bankrupt John Starr de Wolf in England.
His son, Thomas Andrew de Wolf, now also a director of the Kanahooka Smelter, pretended the smelter was only constructed because of the promise of the Lake Illawarra harbour – even though he himself had been until 1894 a founding director of the very company which had failed to construct the port and was, by 1898, managing director of the English company which actually owned it.
Perhaps the corporation’s attempt to sell a subdivision of 288 allotments in 1897 meant the scheme was also, in part, a real estate scam masked as philanthropic public works to both alleviate unemployment and advance Australian industry after the major economic depression of the 1890s.
But too late – in 1898, a NSW Government Select Committee discovered that 99 per cent of the shares in the company were in fact owned by an English company named the Harbour and Railway Corporation Limited.
Yet stranger things in the llawarra may still come to pass.
Suggestions that it will be possible to combine Port Kembla’s current motor vehicle delivery function and grain terminal facility with the port as a possible cruise ship destination, as well a potential port for nuclear submarines sound, at best, unlikely.
And if you add the now stalled plans as a base for offshore wind farms with the very recent suggestion to transfer the functions of Sydney’s Glebe Island (with its supply terminal for cement, gypsum, and sugar) to Port Kembla, it demonstrates just how far some crowded imaginations can stretch.
But, then again, some 40 years I was very wrong in thinking that those with an eye to the future might wish to use the vast green swards of fertile farm land at West Dapto to make it possible for Illawarra residents to eat organic vegetables grown little more than 15 km from central Wollongong.
Instead, residential suburbs have mushroomed instead of veggies and West Dapto and beyond will eventually become the largest population centre in the region – that is if it hasn’t already got there.
So the “believe the impossible” mantra seems capable of clouding at least some people’s vision and, even if a project does prove genuinely impossible, there is usually some individual keen to make a few fast bucks in the interim.
