Kembla Heights, New South Wales
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Kembla Heights Wollongong, New South Wales |
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 Kembla Heights
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| Coordinates | 34°25′50″S 150°48′25″E / 34.43056°S 150.80694°ECoordinates: 34°25′50″S 150°48′25″E / 34.43056°S 150.80694°E | ||||||||||||||
| Population | 119 (2016 census) | ||||||||||||||
| Postcode(s) | 2526 | ||||||||||||||
| LGA(s) | Wollongong | ||||||||||||||
| State electorate(s) | Keira | ||||||||||||||
| Federal Division(s) | Cunningham | ||||||||||||||
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Kembla Heights/ˈkɛmblə/ is a village west of Wollongong, New South Wales in the Parish of Kembla County of Camden. It is situated along Harry Graham Drive and upper Cordeaux Road and is part of a tourist route that runs along the Illawarra escarpment for a distance between Mount Kembla and Mount Keira. The Dendrobium Colliery (Illawara Coal, South32) is located in Kembla Heights.
The entire village of Kembla Heights is a heritage conservation area under the Wollongong City Council Development Control Plan "Kembla Heights is the most intact mining village in the Wollongong Local Government Area with its simple, consistent late Victorian and early Federation period cottages". It is in fact the last remaining coal mining village that is company owned in the Illawarra today. The southern portion of Cordeaux Road, Kembla Heights, is known as Windy Gully, it is partially company owned and in private ownership and also part of the Kembla Heights Heritage Conservation Area. The historic Windy Gully Cemetery is located in this portion of Kembla Heights and is still company owned.
Kembla Heights is within Dharawal country linking Mt Kemba (the men's mountain) to Mt Keira (the women's mountain) and west to the Cordeaux River Valley that formed a travelling route for Aboriginal people connecting the coast areas to the inland Bargo area.
Timber getters were in the area from the 1810s in search of valuable red cedar (Toona ciliata). Europeans began occupying the landscape for agriculture from the 1850s forming a rural collection of farms associated with the settlement known as American Creek.
With the discovery of oil baring shale and coal the land around Kembla Heights was purchased to become a mining settlement. The Pioneer Kerosene Works (1860–1878) Australia's first shale mining and kerosene manufacturing plant was owned by John Graham and situated at Kembla Heights. This plant was purchased by the Mt Kembla Coal and Oil Company (1878–1913) who developed a new coal mine to the north of Kerosene site, later renamed Mt Kembla Colliery Ltd (1913–1946) and finally purchased by Australian Iron and Steel, AIS (1946–1970).Nebo Colliery (1946–1993) was developed by AIS on the site of the original Kerosene works at Kembla Heights.
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