Glen Davis is a village in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. The village is located in the local government area of the City of Lithgow. It is located 250 km north-west of Sydney and approximately 80 kilometres north of Lithgow. The name is also applied to the surrounding area, for postal and statistical purposes. In the , Glen Davis had a population of 354 but this fell to 115 in the 2016 census.
Location
Glen Davis is situated in the Capertee Valley, from which the Capertee River flows. Glen Davis is located north of Lithgow, New South Wales, off the road to Mudgee. It lies just to the east of the Great Dividing Range, as the Capertee River is part of the Hawkesbury-Nepean river system. The nearest other town is Capertee, which formerly had the closest connection to Glen Davis by rail.
Its location was due originally to the presence of deposits of oil shale and coal nearby. Disadvantages of Glen Davis's location were its relative remoteness, its relatively low rainfall, and, paradoxically, that the lower part of its site is subject to flooding during heavy rains.
History
Before Glen Davis
Aboriginal and early settler history
The Wiradjuri people are the original inhabitants of the Capertee Valley and the location now known as Glen Davis. The valley is in the north-eastern corner of the traditional lands of the Wiradjiri, near the boundary with the Darkinyung lands.
European settlers colonised and took over land in the valley, beginning in the 1820s, and progressively cleared the land on the valley floor for grazing and European agriculture.
Early mining and North Newnes
In 1865, oil shale was found in the Capertee Valley, on both the northern and southern sides. It was first mined there in 1881, including from a adit in the southern side of the valley, known as 'MP1', which would many years later be the site of the Glen Davis shale mine.
During the early 20th-Century, a small settlement known as North Newnes existed in the Capertee Valley close to the portal of a tunnel that was being driven to connect the valley with the oil shale operations in the Wolgan Valley at Newnes (then also known as South Newnes). The two settlements were connected by a bridle track between the two valleys. The tunnel, known as 'Lang's Tunnel'—begun first in the 1890s—lay west of the later oil shale mine; it had a length of , by the time that work on it was abandoned in September 1906. The miners had left the site by November 1908. The site of North Newnes was probably on higher ground above the future site Glen Davis township. Shale mining took place in the valley as late as 1923.
None of these early ventures produced significant amounts of shale, as getting the shale out of the remote valley for processing was not economic.
Shale oil town (1938–1952) From 1938, the area adjacent to the site of Glen Davis became the centre of a revival of the oil shale industry. The town was established under an Act of the N.S.W. Parliament in December 1939. It was named after George Francis Davis. Glen Davis was notable because it was the first time that there had been an attempt in N.S.W. to create a completely new town based on town planning principles.
Construction of the Glen Davis Oil Shale Works began in 1938, before the town existed, and the earliest workers had to live in tents or otherwise make their own housing. This shanty housing often made use of white-washed hessian bagging and other inexpensive materials that were to hand, and the area became known at the 'Bag Town'. It was not within the neat planned township but on the opposite side of the Capertee River, on river flats prone to flooding. The settlement known as 'Glen Davis' thus came to consist of the planned town of Glen Davis, on the southern side of the river, the 'Bag Town' on the northern side, and a little to the east—between the town centre and the works, on land owned by National Oil Proprietary Limited—an area of staff and employee housing. There was also a planned industrial area to the north-west of the town centre.
The Glen Davis Oil Shale Works first made shale oil in January 1940. The post office for the town opened on 1 March 1939. The school opened in January 1940. Land sales in the town occurred in March 1940 but none of the residential sites were sold at the time. Conditions of sale for residential blocks were relaxed later in 1940. Houses later built there were financed and constructed under a cooperative building scheme, under which no deposit was required but equity was allocated based on the value of rental payments made.