This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
33.47797° S, 150.13558° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
You are invited to sit in it, which tells you how big it is.
The current NSW tourism listing explicitly asks visitors to sit in the Big Miner's Lamp at the Seven Valleys Visitor Information Centre – so the object is furniture as well as monument, integrated with the centre rather than standing beside it.
A safety lamp is a subject with real weight. The Davy lamp and its successors were designed so that a flame could burn inside a mesh screen without igniting the methane that collects in coal workings. It is the single object that made deep coal mining survivable, and the flame's behaviour inside the gauze also told a miner when the air was going bad. Every underground coalfield in the world ran on it.
Lithgow's claim to it is absolute. This is where New South Wales' western coalfield meets the bottom of the Blue Mountains descent, and the town was an industrial centre from the 1870s – coal, then the state's first blast furnace and steelworks, then the Small Arms Factory. The Zig Zag Railway was built to get all of it over the mountains.
That industrial history came at the usual cost, and a mining town choosing a safety lamp rather than a miner, a pick or a lump of coal is choosing the thing that kept people alive.
The catalogue's other mining objects lean toward the work or the reward – the Kelso panner, the Croydon nugget, the Glenden bucket. A lamp is about survival, which is a different statement.
The lamp's dimensions, maker and installation date are not recorded.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The current NSW tourism listing explicitly invites visitors to sit in the Big Miner’s Lamp at the Seven Valleys Visitor Information Centre.
ACCESS
The Big Miner’s Lamp stands at the Seven Valleys Visitor Information Centre precinct in Lithgow. Navigate to the independently mapped visitor centre at 1137 Great Western Highway and use its visitor access/parking; the lamp is about 20 metres away.
