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Pearsons Lookout offers
outstanding views of the Capertree Valley and Gardens of Stone National Park
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Capertee
(including Capertee Valley and Glen Davis)
A small town on the edge of the largest enclosed
valley in the Southern Hemisphere.
Capertee is a quiet little tablelands village,
located 186 km north-west of Sydney and 42 km north of Lithgow. It sits on the peak of the Great
Dividing Range, about 800 m above sea-level and has a population of
about 180 people. The water from the western slopes flows west to the
Murray while the eastern slopes drain into the Pacific Ocean. Grazing,
farming, timbergetting and the local mines and power stations
constitute the basis of the local economy.
The district was occupied by the Wiradjuri people prior to
white settlement. The first European in the immediate vicinity was
James Blackman who journeyed north from his depot at what is now Wallerawang towards Mudgee in 1821. Blackman's Flats and
Blackman's Crown still bear his name. As they traversed the steep slope
of the latter, the party would have seen the Capertee Valley stretched
out below them.
Sir John Jamison, a wealthy grazier and entrepreneur,
established a large cattle station known as 'Capita' in the 1820s. The
Corlis and Gallagher families fled Ireland's potato famine and took up
land in the valley in the late 1840s. Both established enormous sheep
properties focused on wool-growing and exerted a great influence over
the valley.
One of the few sources of good water was found near the
intersection of the roads north to Mudgee and east into the valley. A
resting place developed here, known as Capertee Camp.
In 1851 a 48-kg gold nugget was discovered in the area by an
Aboriginal prospector and other finds were then made on the Turon River
and nearby creeks. This greatly increased traffic on the Mudgee road
and inns began to appear. Capertee village sprang from one such inn -
James Shervey's, which was known to be in existence at Capertee Camp by
1870. A post office opened in 1875 though by 1880 there were still no
more than a dozen buildings in the village.
The railway arrived from Wallerawang in 1882. Consequently
Capertee acquired a school; albeit in the form of a tent, which was
replaced by a pre-fab building in 1883.
More importantly, the railway enabled the exploitation of the
area's known mineral resources - coal, limestone and oil shale. The
latter was discovered on the future site of Glen Davis in 1873. The
first mining tunnel at that site was established in 1881 and other
mines began to open around Capertee in the 1890s, including one on
Blackman's Crown.
Capertee naturally benefited from the economic activity
although there was little development other than the opening of a
police station, lock-up and courthouse.
Two other small villages soon sprang up around the new mines
- Airly Village, about 8km east of Capertee and Torbane which acquired
a railway siding. By 1898, about 200 men were working on the Torbane
project. It is thought that between 1896 and 1903, 140 000 tons of oil
shale were extracted. For shelter the miners used caves formed by
erosion in the sandstone cliffs.
However, shale production went into decline around
1903 as it is the nature of oil shale seams to narrow out rapidly from
the section of greatest thickness and hence to soon become uneconomical
to pursue.
By 1913 work at the mines had virtually ceased. A new
company did build an aerial railway to the Torbane siding and
established a retort in 1924 but it was a short-lived venture.
Nonetheless the population did not go into a rapid decline. Locals
sustained themselves by sundry ventures and, despite the hard times,
enrolment at the school peaked at 82 in 1920 (it was down to 9 in
1970).
During the Great Depression refugees from the high rents and
unemployment of the cities built mud huts and camped along the Turon
River.
After the works at Newnes closed down in the early 1920s
agitation increased for a reopening of the Capertee works as it was the
only source of oil in Australia. A committee was set up in 1933 to
investigate the feasibility. Its report in 1934 led to the formation of
National Oil Proprietary Ltd (NOP) in 1937. Although the committee
recommended re-establishing the Newnes works, the other option was
eventually chosen - that being the old oil shale tunnel established in
1881 at the eastern rim of the Capertee Valley (i.e., Glen Davis).
The degree of government assistance and concessions indicate
that the enterprise was to be of no great commercial success. Looming
war may have increased desire for independent fuel resources but the
proposed production levels were not that significant. Nonetheless the
works were opened in 1938 and a town of about 2500 people quickly
developed around the works which employed 1600 people at their peak in
the 1940s. It was named Glen Davis after the Davis Gelatine interests
who headed NOP.
Supplies were already running out by 1949 and the end of
Chifley's Labor Government meant the end of heavy and on-going
assistance from the government. Costs were high, output was low and
cheap crude oil was available from the Middle East. Consequently the
works closed in 1952. The machinery was stripped in 1953, leaving the
ruins which remain today.
Open-cut coalmines had also been established in the
valley but these began to dwindle in the postwar years due to
competition from continuous operation mining overseas. Nonetheless
Capertee again survived. A heavy tax on road freight greatly benefited
Capertee railway station. Furthermore wool prices soared during the
Korean War (1950-53) and changes in working hours for rail crews
resulted in crew changes taking place at Capertee where many took up accommodation.
However, in the 1960s, wool prices declined,
the introduction of diesel trains changed work patterns on the railways
and local sheep farmers suffered from a new emphasis on cattle.
Consequently the town diminished significantly.
In the seventies, some of the old properties
were subdivided and sold as hobby farms and retirement retreats to city
dwellers, bringing people into the valley, though mostly at weekends.
When oil prices increased after 1975, coalmining took an upturn and new
mines opened, though the industry has been in decline since the
mid-1980s. An open-cut gold mine briefly operated atop a mesa in the
valley though it closed in the early 1980s due to the collapse of gold
prices. A diamond mine is now operating at Airly.
Things to see:
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St Judes Catholic Church
built out of corrugated iron
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Capertee Village
The highway is the main street. There's a school, a
police station (the solitary policeman covers a territory of about 5000
square kilometres), the adjacent courthouse, a memorial hall, a
bushfire brigade, a post office, a railway station just off the
highway, the pub, a garage and a couple of tiny churches.
Life centres around the pub and the school. The pub first
appeared around 1870. It was burned down twice and the present
structure (built in the 1930s) incorporates some of the sandstone from
the second building (c. 1895).
The school was opened in 1882, although the present school
house dates from 1923. The Kookaburra army recruiting march of 1916
camped on the floor of the Capertee school en route to Sydney. During
that war 52 local men (a goodly proportion) joined the armed services.
The memorial hall was built in 1951 as a tribute to the 80
men who enlisted in the wars of the 20th century. The bricks were
collected from the abandoned shale refining retorts at neighbouring
Torbane. The old lock-up (1897) can still be seen behind the modern
police station.
Pearsons Lookout
Just 2 km south of town, on the Mudgee Rd, is
Pearsons Lookout. It furnishes outstanding views of the Capertree
Valley to the east. Nearly 30 km across it is the largest enclosed
valley in Australia. Rising dramatically from the valley floor is
Pantoneys Crown, a column-like, flat-topped mountain, named after
William Pantoney, one of the members of the first European expedition
through the area - that of John Blackman in 1821.
Gardens of Stone National Park
Recently gazetted, the Gardens of Stone National Park
includes Pantoneys Crown Nature Reserve. It is a very beautiful
wilderness area of limestone outcrops, precipitous sandstone cliffs,
pagoda-like rock formations and a diversity of fauna and flora. The
area is ideal for bushwalking, particularly in the MacLeans Pass area,
although there are no marked trails nor facilities (be sure to take a
map and compass). You can walk to Pantoneys Crown from Baal Bone Gap.
The access road is pretty much 4WD-only. It is signposted
'Gardens of Stone National Park' at Ben Bullen where the Mudgee Rd
crosses the railway line. It leads through to the Wolgan Valley Rd
which heads north-east from Lidsdale to Newnes. For further information
and a map ring the Blackheath National Parks and Wildlife Service
Office, tel: (02) 4787 8877.
Turon Gates Camping Area
Just 1 km north of Capertee is a gravel road on the left
that heads west for 12 km to the Turon Gates Camping Area on the Turon
River (where gold was discovered in the 1850s). There are log cabins
and camping sites, with opportunities for horseriding, canoeing,
fishing, sailing and bushwalking, tel: (02) 6359 0142.
Glen Davis
Glen Davis is an old shale-mining ghost town on the
Capertee River, 35 km east of Capertee at the eastern rim of the
Capertee Valley.
The first mining tunnel, established in 1881, later became
the basis of the major mining enterprise which opened in 1938. A town
of some 2500 people developed around the mine, which was named Glen
Davis after the Davis Gelatine interests who headed the mining
consortium (for further information on the mine and its history see the
general introduction to Glen Davis).
The operation closed down in 1952 due to high costs
and the increasingly small output, leaving what remains today -
crumbling furnace ruins, retorts and collapsed shafts covered in
vegetation and surrounded by steep sandstone cliffs and a profuse array
of birdlife.
Glen Davis has a picnic-barbecue-camping area with
an amenities block and a privately run museum with displays relating to
the town and shale mining history. It is usually only open on weekends
and entry is free.
There is a bushwalking trail (22 km return) to Newnes up
the Green Gully, in the Wollemi National Park, following the old
pipeline track. There are lyrebirds, cycads, banksia serrata and
assorted eucalyptus. Information on this walk is available from the
museum.
