Chapter 6
I Construction During The Settlement Years
II The Use Of Timber As A Structural Material
III Structural Steel
i The Entertainment Centres at Sydney and Brisbane
ii The Centrepoint Tower, Sydney
iii The Merivale Rail Bridge - Brisbane
IV Concrete Technology
V Housing
VI Industrialised Pre-cast Concrete Housing
VII Ports And Harbours
VIII Roads
IX Heavy Foundations
X Bridges
XI Sewerage
XII Water Engineering
XIII Railways
XIV Major Buildings
XV Airports
XVI Thermal Power Stations
XVII Materials Handling
XVIII Oil Industry
XIX The Snowy Mountains Scheme
XX The Sydney Opera House
XXI The Sydney Harbour Bridge
XXII Hamersley Iron
XXIII North West Shelf
Sources and References
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The history of iron production in Australia started with the commissioning in 1848 of a small blast furnace for the Fitzroy Iron Works at Mittagong in N.S.W. Another blast furnace was built in Lithgow in 1875, but the first steel was not produced until 1900, when Mr. W. Sandford completed the first steel furnace at Lithgow. All these early attempts to produce iron and steel failed because they could not compete with cheap iron and steel imported from England, often at low freight rates as back-loading on the wool and grain clippers. In 1908 Messrs. G. & C. Hoskins, encouraged by the N.S.W. Government, took over the Sandford works and by 1925 had developed an integrated steel works at Lithgow, drawing iron ore supplies from a number of locations in N.S.W. and Tasmania. The works became Australian Iron & Steel Ltd. in 1928 and produced approximately 100,000 tons of iron and steel per year. Steel produced at Lithgow was used to produce railway rails, armaments, large diameter steel locking bar water mains for Sydney and Brisbane and reinforcing bars for many notable Sydney buildings, some of which are still standing. In 1915 the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited commissioned its first blast furnace at Newcastle and in 1935 took over A.I. & S. Limited which, by this time, had built a new steel works at Port Kembla.
Organisations in Australian Science at Work - Australian Iron and Steel Pty Ltd (A.I.S.); Fitzroy Iron Works, Mittagong; G. & C. Hoskins Ltd
People in Bright Sparcs - Cameron, I. G.; Sandford, W.
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Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering |  |
© 1988 Print Edition page 321, Online Edition 2000
Published by Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, using the Web Academic Resource Publisher
http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/320.html