The story of this place
On 31 July 1902, a gas explosion ripped through the Mount Kembla coal mine, killing 96 men and boys in what remains Australia's worst land-based industrial disaster. The explosion was so powerful it blew the cage out of the mine shaft. Rescue teams worked for days, but the toxic gases meant that most victims died from asphyxiation rather than the blast itself. Among the dead were boys as young as fourteen, working alongside their fathers and brothers in the underground tunnels. Every year since, the village of Mount Kembla holds the '96 Candles' ceremony — lighting one candle for each life lost. The mine itself had opened in 1865 as Australia's first successful kerosene shale mine, and the mountain holds an even older distinction: in 1803, a koala was scientifically described for the first time from a specimen found on Mount Kembla, one of the earliest recorded encounters between European science and this iconic marsupial.