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Kettle – tar/bitumen

Solid bitumen was imported to Australia from Trinidad in drums slightly smaller than a 220-litre (44-gallon) drum. Each of the bitumen kettles was fitted with a fold-down crane attached to the side. The drums of solid bitumen were lifted by the crane above the wood-fired kettle where they were split and dropped in to be melted. The soluble form could then be sprayed by hand directly onto the previously macadamized roads. Several hundred kilograms of wood, scavenged from roadsides, was used to generate the high temperatures necessary to get the temperature of the tar around 200C. A team of five or six men operated this machine, working the fire, lifting and splitting the drums and decanting the contents.

On the Yorke Peninsula the empty tar/bitumen drums were readily used by farmers as shelters for farm animals, especially pigs.

Oil-fired kettles replaced the earlier wood-fired models. On each side of these kettles a mesh platform folded out into a horizontal position when the kettle was in use. This allowed a worker to stand looking into the top of the kettle. The drums of solid bitumen were manually rolled up a ramp onto these platforms, and the steel drum stripped off the solid bitumen using an axe. The solid ‘slug’ of bitumen was then rolled into the kettle. Loading a kettle was hard, hot manual work. Warren Duncan, Maintenance Supervisor during the 1950s, recalled at least a couple of accidents where employees were badly burnt either by slipping from the filthy mesh platform into the kettle, or by being splashed with hot bitumen when a ‘slug’ of solid bitumen was rolled into the half full kettle.

Drum bitumen was expensive and messy to handle. When bitumen became a by-product of petroleum refining in Australia it replaced drum bitumen and bitumen became much more widely used for road-building.

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