Port Kembla, Sydney’s Port Botany and Newcastle Harbour are the three major commercial ports on the New South Wales coast. Apart from the decreasingly used Port Jackson, which is a natural harbour, Newcastle Port Botany and Port Kembla are man-made and dependent on constructed breakwaters to remain working harbours in all but exceptional weather conditions. 
  Port Kembla ranks ninth in Australian ports with an average of 24 million tonnes of cargo moving annually. This is carried by more than 1,300 vessels. It is a major industrial port with the largest steelworks in Australia adjacent to the harbour. Nearly 20 million tons of coal and six million tons of grain are exported from the port annually. 
  The dominant feature of Port Kembla is the building of an outer and an inner harbour and the relationship between the port and the growth of industry around it. These days, the berths of the outer harbour are no longer functional; in fact many have disappeared. However, there is a place for recreational boating enthusiasts with a protected boat harbour and a boat ramp near the Port Kembla harbour police station that is adjacent to the eastern breakwater. The first company to use the ‘harbour’ was the Mount Kembla Coal and Oil Company. Between 1881-1883 they completed a railway from their Mr Kembla mine to the sea where they constructed a coal-loading jetty at Red Point (Kembla Bay). The mine gave its name to the ‘harbour’; Port Kembla. This was followed between 1886-1889 with the Southern Coal Company’s building of a railway from its Mt Keira mine to Kembla Bay and included the construction of their coal-loading jetty, completed in 1887. 

  In 1913, Mount Kembla Coal and Oil changed its name to Mt Kembla Collieries Limited and in 1946 it was bought by Australian Iron & Steel (AI&S). 
  The Mount Lyell Coke Company established a coke battery near the original Mt Kembla jetty in 1899 and the coke ovens supplied 500 tonnes of coke per week for use in their cooper smelters at Queenstown, Tasmania. In 1908, copper refining was transferred to Electrolytic Refining and Smelting Company (ER&S) that had set up in Port Kembla. ER&S employed a different and cheaper chemical process for the refining process. By 1926, the coke ovens were redundant and were dismantled. 
  In 1907, the Electrolytic Refining and Smelting Company produced the first batch of refined copper in February 1909 from blister copper, from both Mt Lyell and Mt Morgan. With the fluctuations in world copper prices, the volume of copper produced showed considerable variation.  The most prominent, extant feature of the copper refining works is the very big smoke stack aimed at dispersing the gaseous emissions at a greater height so as to minimize its effect on the population in the Port Kembla area. With Tileman & Company as builders, this chimney, built in the early 1960s, rises 200m above ground level and has a total weight of 14,000 tonnes. 
  In 1918 Metal Manufacturers began producing copper wire by building a rolling mill with a capacity to produce 8,000 tonnes of copper wine annually. The raw copper was supplied to Metal Manufacturers by ER&S and after 1959 the raw product also came from the Mount Isa refinery established at Townsville. 
  A by-product of the copper refining process is sulphuric acid so ER&S in partnership with Mt Morgan Gold Mining Company formed Australian Fertilizers Limited (AFL) in June 1920. Their product was superphosphate that they began producing in 1921. They imported the sulphur from the USA and the phosphate from Nauru. The company is now a multinational known as Incitec Pivot. 
  ER&S sold their Port Kembla works to Southern Copper in September 1990 but because of environmental difficulties with the plant, Southern Copper closed in February 1995 with on-going worries about environmental controls. A new company, Port Kembla Copper, was formed in 1996 and, with more modern technology, took over the refining process with reduced emissions. This company began operations in 2000. Iron and steel were not produced at Port Kembla until 1928. However, in 1916 Hoskins Iron and Steel Co, originally from Lithgow, bought a coalmine near Dapto and built a large battery of coke ovens there to supply coke for their Lithgow operation. By 1924 they bought 160ha of land at Port Kembla where they planned to build their first blast furnace. As their capital became exhausted, Hoskins formed a partnership with Howard Smith Ltd, Dorman Long & Company Ltd and Baldwins Ltd. The new company was called Australian Iron and Steel Co Ltd (AI&S). 
  AI&S entered into an agreement with the NSW government where the government built a railway from Moss Vale to Port Kembla (for the carriage of limestone) and the company promised further expansion of its ironworks at Port Kembla. AI&S had difficulty competing with BHP’s Newcastle ironworks so a merger between AI&S and BHP was confirmed on 18 October 1935 with AI&S becoming a fully owned subsidiary of BHP. Today the company is known as Bluescope Steel. 
  In 1936, there was need for further expansion so AI&S purchased more land from the government in the area surrounding Tom Thumb Lagoon. Additional coke ovens were added in 1950 and 1953 and another blast furnace came into production in August 1952. This additional iron and steel provided the raw product for a new hot and cold strip mill and tinplate plant. That land was reclaimed from the Tom Thumb Lagoon. This mill came into operation 1954/55. There are now a total of four blast furnaces at Port Kembla. 

The Inner Harbour 

  The inner harbour was first proposed by the Lord Mayor of Wollongong, William Wiley, in 1887. The plan then was to join the Belmore Basin in Wollongong to the northern end of an excavated Tom Thumb Lagoon by means of a canal, 10m wide, 5m deep at low tide and 2.5km long. Other events, including the building of the wharves and then breakwaters at Port Kembla, overtook this proposal. 
  As early as 1916, the Public Works designed an inner harbour that was to be created by the dredging of Tom Thumb Lagoon. This was seen as an option for the future if trade were to expand through Port Kembla. 
  An outer harbour was created by the construction of breakwaters between 1901 and 1937. This gave an area of protected waters of 145ha into which six wharves were eventually built. 
  Ships using the outer harbour were usually limited to between 6,000 and 10,000 tonnes as the jetties were unable to cope with larger and deeper-draft vessels. Thus, there were many ships wishing to use the port but a congested harbour was often the reality. 
  An interdepartmental committee met in 1950 and recommended the construction of an inner harbour in Tom Thumb Lagoon. These recommendations were adopted in late 1955 and the necessary legislation passed (The Inner Harbour Act. 1955). The Act also entitled BHP to a 99-year lease and allowed them to construct wharves or berths within the harbour frontage on their leased land. 
  Plans for the inner harbour were to be of two stages. Stage 1 was to be completed by March 1960 and Stage 2 by April 1965. The inner harbour would be nearly 50ha in area and have a depth of 11m at low tide. The remaining area of 8.5ha would have a depth of nearly 10m at low tide. This would leave 33ha for future extensions. 
  As with most grand schemes, there were variations to the original, principally because BHP claimed that by 1958 they would be using ships with deadweight of 41,500 tonnes. This meant greater depth at the BHP berths and a widening of the channel between the outer and inner harbour. Consequently, the entrance channel was widened from 108m to 123m. 
  In 1959, the expansion of the coal trade from the Illawarra to Japan was a looming reality and a decision was made to create a coal loading facility in the inner harbour. 
  This decision brought about more changes to the original plan. The No 1 coal loader was opened on 27 December 1964 and the second on 22 November 1982. 
  The decision as to how to excavate the lagoon to create the inner harbour came down in favour of dredging and the Gahagan Dredging Corporation of New York was contracted in April 1957. This contract did not involve the removal of rock between the inner and outer harbours. This specialised job was contracted to MacDonald Constructions in March 1958. Dredging began with three dredges working a 24-hour day, six days a week – the seventh day being used for maintenance. BHP had the opportunity of constructing its wharves before the Lagoon was excavated. 
  The inner harbour was opened on 28 November 1960 and the first ship to enter was the SS Iron Yampi with a cargo of nearly 11,000 tonnes of ore from Yampi Sound in Western Australia. 
  Change and development are ongoing at Port Kembla. In 1971, the Roll-on Roll-off berth was commissioned and between 1972-1975 the harbour was deepened to 15.2m. A multi-purpose berth was opened in 1983 and the grain terminal berth was opened in February 1990. 
  Expansion is still taking place. The car carriers, now discharging at White Bay in Sydney, will be moved to Port Kembla. The infrastructure, including the laying of railway tracks, is well advanced on a site west of the grain terminal. 
  I was surprised when I approached security for permission to take photos of the facilities. I was told that the whole area was a secure site and had the same level of security as an international airport. Permission to photograph was denied. However, I was able to get all the photos I required by photographing from the southern side of the inner harbour. There, it is a public road and there are no restrictions. _ Next month: A backward glance at Port Kembla. 

*Gregory Blaxell is an historian and author. He has been boating offshore and in the harbour for more than 25 years. His latest book is The River: Sydney Cove to Parramatta.