The kilns here are the kind of scale that takes a moment to register. You stand at the base of one and it is just stack and shadow above you, the surrounding valley framed between what is left of the plant and the limestone ridge that fed it for nearly a century.
Cement production at Kandos began in August 1916. The NSW Cement Lime and Coal Company had been registered three years earlier, in May 1913, and had purchased 100 acres from local farmer John Lloyd Junior for £2,000. Original plant machinery was ordered from Krupp Bremen, but when World War I broke out that machinery was interned in Portuguese West Africa. Managing director Frank Oakden travelled to the United States and England to source replacement equipment. The plant that finally opened in 1916 was the second one Kandos installed.
The town of Kandos was built alongside the works. Streets were named for the company directors: Angus Avenue, Buchanan, White, Rodgers, Jaques. The town name itself was an acronym of those directors' surnames until the Postmaster General required a change in 1915 to avoid confusion with Chandos in South Australia. It became Kandos. In 1920 it became the first place in Australia with concrete electricity poles.
Between 1928 and 1932, Kandos was the sole cement supplier to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, under contract to Dorman Long and Co. The Tasmanian Goliath plant at Railton had held a 1924 contract but was excluded; the bridge's Director of Construction, Lawrence Ennis, stated publicly in July 1929 that "Railton cement is not used in the Sydney Harbour Bridge." His 1932 souvenir booklet, Bond of Empire: Story of Construction of Bridge, page 48, lists the suppliers. Kandos Cement Company Ltd is there.
In 2007, Cement Australia invested $10 million in plant modernisation, including a new Kiln 6 stack. It was not enough. On 11 July 2011, CEO Chris Leon told the Kandos workforce the plant would close. Production ceased in September 2011. Ninety-five years after the first cement left the kilns. Ninety-eight redundancies, with 34 workers offered transfers to plants at Gladstone, Bulwer Island, or Railton. The reasons given: dated technology, high fixed costs, considerable distance from market.
Kiln 5, the kiln that made Harbour Bridge cement, was partly salvaged in 2011. Sibelco took the mid-section for the Charbon lime plant, which has since also closed. The remainder is the subject of an ongoing Kandos Museum preservation campaign. The site was sold in June 2025 to Cenagen, which has proposed a waste-to-methanol plant on the 50-hectare footprint. A $1 billion project that would convert 1,500 tonnes of municipal waste per day into approximately 91,000 tonnes of green methanol per year.
The Cementa contemporary art festival has run in Kandos since 2013, founded by writer and curator Ann Finegan. It has made Kandos a point on Australia's contemporary art circuit. That is the town now: the kiln silhouette on the ridge, the festival, and the proposal for something new on the old footprint. The story is still going.
