December 2011
For our bushwalk in November we headed back towards Wollongong, this time to circle Mount Kembla.
The walk included not only lovely rainforest and fabulous views, but also some serious and really sad coal mining history.
The easiest place to park is at the Kembla Lookout off Cordeaux Road; from there the view back to the ocean over the Dapto Plain is spectacular (although marred by power lines). The trails to both the Ring track and the Summit walk start from here, but we turned left to take the easier one, just 5.5 kms, although the notice board did call it a medium walk.
The path starts as a steep zigzag decline into the rainforest down quite a few mossy steps but there is a chain link rail to help.
The forest floor is covered in cabbage tree palms and stinging nettles and there is a beautiful tall red cedar close to the path.
Once down the stairs the walk becomes easy and fairly flat, but be careful to watch out for camouflaged brown snakes on the leaf litter.
A little over a kilometre later there is a pond on the left where the pit ponies for the Mt Kembla colliery were once watered. The trail then widens and heads through bushland where John Benjamin farmed 33 acres from 1908 to 1953, growing vegetables, fruit and grazed his animals. The forest has since grown wildly and completely covers the spot where the house must have once stood.
However a little further on there are carefully preserved remains of the Southern Coal Company Mine. Here coal was mined for three years from 1887 but it proved to be of poor quality and now both the 700 metre mine shaft and the ventilation tunnel are boarded up. It is still possible to look through the grating and see the magnificent brick arched entranceway and the carved rock retaining walls.
Back on the track the vegetation changes to blue gums rather than rainforest trees and the path leaves the Illawarra Escarpment State Conservation Area (no dogs allowed) and enters private property: permission is given to cross this land but only when walkers keep to the path.
The final stage of the Ring Track is to walk back to the car along Cordeaux Road.
This means that you pass the Windy Gully Cemetery where some of the victims who perished in the 1902 Mt Kembla Mine disaster were buried. This “was the worst non-natural land disaster in Australia’s history.
Caused by the igniting of methane gas by a naked lamp, the series of coal dust explosions killed 96 men and boys on July 31, leaving 33 widows and 120 children fatherless”, two of the dead were rescuers who had tried to help (from Best Bush, Coast and Village Walks of the Illawarra by Gillian and John Souter p103) There are lovely Coachwood trees to look at along the rest of the road and even the remains of cottages which housed the 1880s workingmen’s club.
A couple of the more adventurous of us carried on with the summit track, 3.4kms but graded as hard on the notice board. The rest of us drove back into Mount Kembla village and explored the memorials and cemetery there to read more about the disaster: one headstone listed not only a father but his two sons who died with him, aged only 14 and 16 – a poignant reminder of the hard life then, even for children who had to work in the mines.
Luckily we had booked for lunch at the heritage listed 1898 Mount Kembla Village Hotel for a change from cheese and pickle sandwiches and we really enjoyed ourselves.
This hotel is the oldest weatherboard hotel in the Illawarra and the restaurant has the Sydney Morning Herald’s 2011 Good Pub Food Guide’s Best Pub by Country Region award and the Best Use of Local Produce (Highest Honour of three schooners and overall 18/20).
We certainly know how to live!
Why don’t you join us next year for some of our walks, we’d love to have you come along.
Lee Sharam