Cheap Energy, Cheap Nature: Newcastle/Awabakal Coals in Colonial Capitalism, 1850–1880

We live in a time of socioecological crisis—one that demands new, ‘urgent’ histories. In light of this context, and calls to return to histories of capitalism and nature, it is surprising that there has been traditionally so little attention to the relationship between coal, colonialism and capitalism—especially in Australia. The relative neglect of the colonial coal mines in Australian (political) economic historiography demonstrates a conceptual failure to appreciate the socioecological nature of production. Much has been made of the rapid expansion of the colony’s pastoral economy, gold rushes and urbanisation as being integral to Australia’s historical developmental trajectory. Each of these narratives, however, suffers from an energy ‘blind-spot’: these stories lack an explanation for the emergence of the energy regime that underpinned these other processes of economic growth. This chapter considers the emergence of a coal economy in the colonies of eastern Australia, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emergence of a fossil fuel economy is situated within the broader socioecology of colonial capitalism—one overwhelmingly defined by the contradictory relations of ‘Cheap Nature’.