Kembla Heights 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 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 WollongongLocal 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.
History
Kembla Heights is within Dharawal country linking Mt Kemba to Mt Keira 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 ''. Europeans began occupying the landscape for agriculture from the 1850s forming a rural collection of farms associated with the settlement known as American Creek.
Mining
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 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 who developed a new coal mine to the north of Kerosene site, later renamed Mt Kembla Colliery Ltd and finally purchased by Australian Iron and Steel, AIS. Nebo Colliery was developed by AIS on the site of the original Kerosene works at Kembla Heights.
Mt Kembla Coal and Oil Company's mine in Kembla Heights was the site of the worst industrial accident in Australia's history, the Mt Kembla Mine Disaster. The disaster took place on Thursday 31 July 1902, at precisely three minutes past two o'clock in the afternoon. The disaster was caused by gas seeping undetected from the coal seam in a disused area of the mine that had been mined out. A rock fall pushed the gas out into the tunnels where men were working. When the gas reached the naked flame of colliery workers light, it ignited instantly and caused a series of further gas and coal dust explosions. The initial blast killed some instantly, but the majority died from Carbon monoxide poisoning which penetrated the tunnels from the incomplete combustion of fuel. Windy Gully cemetery was created on a half acre of company land to receive the bodies of the victims of the Mt Kembla Mine Disaster of 1902. In all, about a third of the victims were buried at Windy Gully, most either Presbyterian or Methodist. It was originally known as the Kembla Heights Cemetery or Presbyterian Cemetery.
