You are invited to participate in a project aiming to reconstruct, analyse, and interpret work, family and everyday life in shale mining communities in and around the Jamison Valley, near Katoomba, NSW, between 1880-1914. By combining archaeological, archival and oral evidence of shale-mining settlements in Australia, it will provide new insights into labour and community history, gender, transiency, and migration. As the first collaborative scholarly and community-based inquiry focused on shale-mining settlements and their demise, the project offers to produce a narrative of everyday working and family life accessible to the local community that can contribute to conservation of industrial heritage and cultural heritage tourism.
Project description
This project is the first collaborative and multidisciplinary, scholarly and community-based study of a forgotten shale-mining settlement in the environmentally and culturally significant Jamison and Megalong Valleys. It aims to advance knowledge and enable cross-generational engagement with the history and heritage of the shale mining industrial landscapes in order to improve our understanding of the long-term impact of deindustrialisation.
