Miners & quarrymen

Coastal districts with mining and quarry operations and ports used to export coal are strongly associated with ocean baths. One of the early names for Newcastle was Coal River and Newcastle was soon the main coal port in NSW. The Merewether Baths are opposite the entry to an old mine tunnel. Coal seams are visible near the Coalcliff and Cape Horn  baths in the northern Illawarra,  where the string of mining villages created a string of ocean baths.  At Wollongong, a tramway once ran from the Mt Pleasant coal mine past the Men's Baths and the Continental Baths down to the harbour. Ocean baths were understandably appealing to men with dusty, dirty jobs like mining and quarrying and no ready access to any better bathing facilities at work or home. 

Kiama was a quarrying rather than a mining town, producing the blue metal needed for the NSW railways. Kiama's Pheasant Point baths are located near the site of an old blue metal quarry and the main pedestrian access to Kiama's Blow Hole Point baths was once by a path that led under the blue metal hoppers at the harbour. Kiama once had a major dust problem, due to blue metal being carted from the quarries down the main street of the town to the harbour and this would have added to the appeal of a dip in the ocean baths. Quarries were also important part of the Shellharbour economy.

Skills associated with mining and quarrying could be applied to the creation of ocean baths, especially when the mines were not being worked full time. There were complaints when this was not the case. In the 1930s, when Shellharbour lamented the failure to use the skills of local men on the new Shellharbour Baths managed as an employment relief project by neighbouring Central Illawarra Shire.

Other forms of mining in and around the ocean baths were:
- shell-grit mining, and
- silica mining, which inadvertently enlarged the Bogey Hole at Mollymook on the NSW south coast.
 

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