There is only so much shoreline around the harbour that can be used as berths and sites for industry so the the trick is to make more.

Put simply this is done by taking rocks, soil and other substances and dropping them in the water near the shore to “build” new land.

Along Foreshore Road at Port Kembla sits hundreds of tonnes of rock from the Wollongong Central shopping centre excavation phase that will eventually be used to reclaim land around the port.

A large part of the Cement Australia plant opened in the outer harbour in 2013 is actually built on an area that used to be water.

Immediately south of Cement Australia is Red Beach, where a humpback whale lies somewhere under the sand.

READ MORE: The dangerous work of a Port Kembla marine pilot

Back in 1993 the dead female, shark bites on her flesh, washed ashore at Bulgo Beach near Otford.

Not long afterwards, a king tide washed it out to sea again before she was found floating in a shipping lane at Port Kembla, so rescuers had it dragged up to Red Beach.

Former aerial patrol pilot Brad Kenyon co-ordinated the operation – and called on some unusual help.

“I called my mate David from Guests Garage and said, ‘bring your truck – you’ve got to tow a 30-tonne whale off the beach’," Mr Kenyon told the Mercury back in 2009.

"He said, ‘you're joking' and I said, ‘no mate, I'm not'.

“He came down with his semi-trailer tow truck and the whale was so big it snapped a cable.”

A large trench was dug in the sand at Red Beach, with a view to burying the whale in case a research group in the years ahead wanted a complete skeleton.

At the time, the Australian Museum did not have a complete whale skeleton,” Kenyon said, “and they are incredibly expensive to buy, so we buried it, hoping it would one day go in the museum.”

So that was the plan.

Fast-forward to 2009 and the Port Kembla Port Corporation (PKPC) became quite keen to find the whale skeleton and dig it up.

READ MORE: Digging into the history of the harbour

The State Government had just announced plans to develop the outer harbour and turn the Red Beach area into docks, so the corporation wanted to have one last go at finding the whale before any development happened which would make it forever irretrievable.

“As we started to move into this planning phase for the outer harbour we thought it was time to have a proper look for it,” PKPC sustainability manager Trevor Brown said at the time.

“Staff recalled that we’d had a whale carcass buried at Red Beach and the intention had always been for the skeleton to be dug out and offered to people like the museum or local scientists.”

The PKPC brought an expert who finds and exhumes war graves down from Sydney to co-ordinate the search.

“So we hired an excavator for a day, basically digging some trenches through the beach where staff who had been here at the time thought it would be,” Mr Brown said.

But the whale remained stubbornly hidden.

“It is a bit of a mystery because we've had people report that after storms, walking along there, they've seen bones sticking out,” Mr Brown said.

“But it's difficult for people to locate themselves on the beach and be sure of where exactly it was.”

Contact was made with the organisations that helped bury the whale, in the hope someone would remember where they put it. But that came to nothing.

“We've been back in touch with the Australian Museum, but the people who were involved at the time are no longer there," Mr Brown said at the time.

He added that the search would end until someone actually knew where it was.

To this day, the location of the whale remains a mystery. A spokesman from NSW Ports said almost a decade later the skeleton still had not been found.