STEAM POWERED PEOPLE MOVERS FOR SYDNEY We learn that the Works Department is making arrangements for the construction of a temporary tramway from the Redfern terminus to Hunter-Street, to be used by visitors to the International Exhibition. They expect to be able to get the motors from
Read more →
How many nuts and bolts are there in the Sydney Harbour Bridge? Well, oddly enough, only a handful. Rivets were used instead, some 6,000,000 of them. The majority of the steel for the bridge’s girders came from Britain, but the government contract stated that all rivets were
Read more →
I visited Eskbank House Museum in Lithgow recently. The oldest part of the colonial Georgian house was built circa 1842, from local sandstone. The original owner was Mr Thomas Brown, who established the Eskbank Colliery. There is a lot of early Lithgow history on display, but
Read more →
The sculptor Tom Bass (1916-2010) was born in Lithgow. Richard Neville (1941-2016) spent much of his later life in the Blue Mountains village of Blackheath. Both men were associated with a work of art regarded as one
Read more →
‘I did but see her passing by…’ Prime Minister of Australia R.M. Menzies. (1963) Early in February 1954, a group of WWI diggers travelled down to Sydney to see the young Queen Elizabeth. She was on her first tour of Australia, following the coronation. Describing the occasion
Read more →
Engineer George Morris arrived in Australia in the 1890s. He settled in Sydney, marrying Priscilla Walker in 1903. The couple then moved to Lithgow, in the Blue Mountains, where George was initially employed at the town’s blast furnace. In 1910 he left, to open a foundry in
Read more →
Dave McSorley was a local barber in Lithgow. He was also a heavy-weight boxer, and consummate showman. He once wagered that he could clean shave 1,000 men without a break. In the end he ran out of bristling chins, but still managed 420 shaves in 54½ hours,
Read more →
BLAST FURNACE SPELLS START OF THE STEEL INDUSTRY On May 13 1907, the Lithgow Blast Furnace , built by William Sandford Ltd., was officially opened by the Premier of New South Wales, Sir Joseph Carruthers. It was essentially the birth of Australia’s steel industry, and a day
Read more →
A LONG, HOT SUMMER. It has been such a dry winter here in the Blue Mountains. We have already had one total fire ban day and it’s only September. I notice my husband quietly clearing undergrowth, and testing the petrol fueled water pump. I’m glad he does
Read more →
On the afternoon of August 18 1937, Mrs Dorothy Bunyan of Lithgow attended a funeral. It was a particularly sad occasion; the child of Mr Brown, of one of the local school teachers, had died. She hurried home because her nine year old son Donald was due home from primary school.
Read more →