Preserving Poppet Head Is Precarious Work
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday January 23, 1989
They're calling it "the last Bicentennial project", and it's moving on, literally by inches.
With an elaborate system of steel cables and winches, the old timber poppet head at the Oakey Park mine near Lithgow is slowly being righted. But it's heart-stopping work.
For years, the poppet head, which sent caged miners down the shaft and carried the buckets of coal back up, had been subsiding. Its hand-adzed timbers, tilting crazily towards the ground, now groan and creak ominously as the winches are tightened.
One more pull and the whole structure seems to wobble. Builder Ian Kiernan calls a temporary halt. "It's spooky work," he says, "because we might easily lose the whole thing. But we've all got our escape route planned."
The preservation of the Oakey Park mine head is a Heritage Council project, funded by a grant from the NSW Bicentennial Council. It was built in the 1880s from local hardwood and, judging from the size of the main timbers, Ian Kiernan reckons the trees themselves must have been 45 metres tall.
This is the only timber poppet head left on the western coalfields and, says Kiernan, "I'm buggered if I know how they built it".
With a team of five, he has been working there off and on since November.
"Our brief is just to stabilise it," he says. "There'll be no phoney reproduction work done."
He grabs a stone and taps the timber beams. Some are clearly sound, others rotting.
"We'll inject the unsafe ones with epoxy resin and replace the raking struts and cross ledges which have disappeared with new timber."
The new timber was delivered and paid for in December, thus enabling the project to qualify as a Bicentennial project.
Oakey Park today is a peaceful suburb of Lithgow, with the bright blue steam engine of the Zig Zag Railway occasionally visible on the ridge above, or further down the silver flash of a commuter train.
But towards the end of last century, it was the hub of a small settlement which hosted, besides the coalmine, a primary school, three breweries and a freezing works.
In 1897, there was a temporary shut-down at the mine when the management tried to reduce the miners' pay from one shilling and eightpence a ton to one shilling and sixpence (coal was selling then for four shillings and sixpence a ton).
According to the Lithgow and Hartley Valley Sketchbook, "the miners stopped the would-be strikebreakers (who had come up by train from Sydney) at the creek. After a two-and-a-half mile walk to town, they collected enough money to send them back to the city on the next train."
The mineworkers' pay office still stands on the site, near the more spacious weatherboard house which belonged to the mine manager.
The Heritage Council is considering the feasibility of restoring these buildings as part of a general restoration of the whole site.
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald
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