Newnes: the shale-oil town swallowed by the bush

Newnes is what happens when industry arrives in a wilderness and then leaves again. In the first decade of the twentieth century it was a busy shale-oil town deep in the Wolgan Valley, west of Sydney — with a refinery, a railway and hundreds of workers. Today it is a scatter of stone ruins in a valley that has quietly taken the place back.

Oil from stone

Before Australia had a petroleum industry, it made oil from shale. The Wolgan Valley, with its thick seams of kerosene shale, was one of the richest deposits in the colony. In 1906 a company built a works and a town here, and the settlement was renamed Newnes in 1907 after Sir George Newnes, a British publisher and politician.

At its peak, around 1907, Newnes held about 800 people and produced oil, paraffin and other products from the shale. The company built a railway up the valley to carry the shale and the finished oil, and a power station to run the works. For a few years it was a genuine industrial town in the middle of the bush.

The shale bust

Newnes never quite lived up to its promise. The shale was expensive to mine and refine, and the market for its products was uncertain. The works changed hands and struggled, and in 1931 the operation closed for good. The town emptied, the machinery was sold or scrapped, and the buildings were left where they stood.

What the bush did not take, time did. The railway was pulled up, and the valley returned to the state it had been in before the miners came. Only the stone and concrete of the heaviest structures survived — the oil retorts, the foundations, the old hotel, and the cuttings and tunnels of the railway that once carried the shale down the valley.

Ruins and glow-worms

Newnes today is a camping and walking destination rather than a town. The most famous remnant is the Glowworm Tunnel — a curved railway tunnel on the old line, now home to thousands of glow-worms that light the walls in the dark. The ruins of the refinery and the old Newnes Hotel stand nearby, slowly being covered by moss and ferns.

Newnes is a good example of a kind of abandonment that is almost gentle: not a disaster, not a war, just an industry that did not pay and a valley that was left to itself. The bush is patient, and at Newnes you can watch it winning — much as it is quietly reclaiming the industrial ruins of Frontignan in France.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Anyox: the copper town that burned and was forgotten — Canada
• The Salins de Frontignan: a salt works on the French coast — France
• Wittenoom: the town Australia erased from the map — Australia