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| Statue of a miner outside
the Kurri Kurri Workers Club |
Kurri Kurri (including Weston, Buchanan and
Brunkerville)
Once important mining town in the Hunter Valley
Located 145 km from Sydney and 11.5 km from Cessnock, Kurri
Kurri is an old coalmining town. In conjunction with
neighbouring Weston it has a population of 13 628.
Depending on which source is consulted it is variously
believed that the original inhabitants of the area were the
Darkinjang, Awabakal or Wanaruah peoples. The town was named
in 1902 by District Surveyor T. Smith who chose the name
because he believed it meant 'hurry along' in a local
dialect.
The very first European landholder in the area was
Benjamin Blackburn who was granted 400 acres on the banks of
Wallis Creek at Richmond Vale.
Coal was discovered in the district by William Keene in
1856 but the full potential of the Greta coal seam was not
recognised until 1886 when T.W. Edgeworth David did some
exploratory work. The first colliery of the South Maitland
Coal Field (East Greta) was opened in 1891 and many others
followed after the turn of the century.
Kurri Kurri was laid out on Crown land in 1902 to serve
the growing community of miners and their families who were
living in makeshift accommodation since taking up employment
at the recently opened collieries in the area. Stanford and
Pelaw Main had been opened in 1901.
Land sales commenced in 1903 and within one year Kurri
Kurri had a population of 1300. With 5885 inhabitants by
1911 it soon became one of NSW's larger towns.
Weston sprang up in 1903 around the Australian
Agricultural Company's Hebburn No.1 Colliery which opened in
1902. A private town, it was laid out on a portion of the
Weston family's 640-acre estate which they acquired in 1856.
Nearby Abermain also developed in 1903 around Abermain
colliery. Plans for a colliery called Silkstone on the site
were first put forward in 1886 but had failed due to
insufficient capital and the distance from the railway line.
The latter had been extended to the area in 1902-1904.
Work was dangerous in the mines and there have been
several bad accidents (see entry on
Cessnock). Six men were killed and many others left
jobless after an explosion and fire at Stanford Merthyr Mine
in 1905. There is a monument to their memory in Kurri Kurri
cemetery.
Richmond Main set a world record for a vertical shaft
mine in 1926 by hauling up 3400 tons in one eight-hour
shift. It was, at one time, the largest shaft mine in the
Southern Hemisphere employing 1200 men and boys, 200 pit
horses and state-of-the-art technology. The local mining
operations were very large, even by world standards.
The Great Depression dealt a severe blow to the industry
and mechanisation after World War II saw major job losses in
the 1950s. Thus the population of 9607 in 1933 had declined
to 7903 by 1954. The pits began to close from the late 1950s
- Stanford Main in 1957, Pelaw Main in 1962 and Richmond
Main in 1967. Wine slowly supplanted coal as the centrepiece
of the regional economy as demand fell and large open-cut
mines began to open in the upper Hunter region.
A large aluminium smelter was completed in 1972 and is
still a major source of local employment.
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Kurri Kurri
