'Black Gold, Kindred Spirits'

Q Were the horses special?

Oh yeah, we had a I had a black horse, a mare, black mare and I could unhook her at the shaft and let her go into the work place and when I got there she'd be standing there waiting for, but she wouldn't move until I give her half of my orange, ah half of my apple and she'd work like digger until lunch time and then I'd sit down, and she'd want half an apple again and I used tit in the middle where the men were and the horse would just walk over their feet to it until the men banded me then, they made me sit right on along the outside so that the horse wouldn't stand on them, she was a good horse that one and I was put over to Western area and she came over one day there, and I'm damn sure she knew me and anyway I worked it so that I got her and I had her then until I went off wheeling altogether and went onto the pumps, electrical work.

Q The sense of comradeship in Wonthaggi was strong wasn't it?

Oh the comradeship was fantastic, you could walk into the Workman's Club on a Saturday afternoon and you could speak to every man in that bar and if anything went wrong well like I told you my brother-in-law, his place went on fire, burnt down, and they rallied around they give them food, clothing, money and they even found him a house for to go into, all in three or four days. It was fantastic the comradeship that's in that mine, yeah I've never, well I've never known of it since I've been out of the mine for a few years now and I've never known of comradeship like that anywhere else.

Oh yeah it was all the winding gear and everything went on fire and the blokes from the shops, it took them four days and they had it all working again but the fellas down below well they had to come up and it was over eleven hundred feet and they had to come up the ladders they had to take everything out of their bags and their pockets that would fall because if it fell, well, it can knock the next man off the ladder altogether and he could be killed and these ladders they were about 30 feet apart and every 60 feet there would be either an electrician or a rope splicer all the way up or a deputy and that sort of thing that helped the men because some of them men were old men and they were by the time they got half way up those ladders they were gasping for breath and some of them, they would only get up two or three ladder lengths and they'd be crying, and you would have to stop everything and get them men back down below because they couldn't, well whether it was claustrophobia or not I don't know, because it was only pretty narrow for em to go up and oh some of them had sat down at the bottom of that shaft for nearly six hours before they'd get up out of that place.

Q How did you come to Wonthaggi?

Well I was born in England and I came out here with our parents and two sisters and that was 1928, my father was a coal miner in England and a they had a surplus of coal over there and they were out of work so he came out here to Australia to the land of milk and honey and that's how we started here in Wonthaggi and we have been in Wonthaggi ever since and he was here when the 49 strike was on he use to go over there and give em a hand and ah well we had, we had tucker fair bit of tucker, we had more than what they had in N.S.W. and we went out or I went out there where we use to go round the cockies getting money and whatever they could give us and this fella at Leongatha, Leongatha South, and he give us this paddock full of onions he says you can have them onions he said if you pick em, and I says right I says we can pick em so we I came home and ah told the union and next morning we had Jock Rogers' bus and thirty men and they were there all day getting onions out of, out of this paddock. We had to run the bus home then come back for the men, that's how many we got, but by Jesus everybody had a bag full of onions for a while and others went out and to er, Bolding out here, he'd kill a bullock or something like that and he would always put half into the miners union for the men, he had more amateur butchers cutting up meat there than you ever saw in your life.

When the strike was on all the miners had their sugar bags for work they used to bring them over for the Broad Committee as we used to call it then and instead of just a sugar bag we used to call it the gunny bag parade. And this is when once a week those men would come over or every miner would come over and they'd go down to the back of the union theatre and go through the hall and they'd get a shovel full of spuds or shovel full of onions, a great hunk of pumpkin or some meat.

Q During the 49 strike, how did you get the strike money out?

Oh yeah. I used to laugh at that they used to, the police used to stop trucks coming up from Melbourne and they used to search all the bags and search all the truck and everything. But they never used to look in where the bags of sugar were; cause they'd take the stitching out of the bag and they'd put all the money into that and they do all the stitching up again they never thought of looking into the bags and that's how we used to transport most of our money up from Melbourne and my mate ah, Perc Richards he had his truck and he had a whole heap of money underneath the seat of his truck and he's going backwards and forwards passing all the time and they never ever knew that that money was there and it wasn't until, ooh, well after the strike that somebody blurted to them you told them that how they used to trick the police and all this sort of thing but those police never had a clue how that money was getting into the town.

Q Wonthaggi had a reputation for being communist?

Yeah well people here oh cripes about twenty I suppose that was communists and our miner's union was powerful union at that time. Yeah everybody thought Wonthaggi was a communist town, this because we had our leaders, they were communists and a couple of other miners was communists, but they were all Labor people in this town it was Labor strong-hold. And ah, there was a communist bloke come up from Melbourne and ah, he was going to have two meetings, one in the morning and one at night, so that would help, the afternoon shift could see him and the day-shift could see him, ah hear him. And ah when he come in at the night-time all the returned soldiers went to shouting and yelling at the back of the hall and they wouldn't let him speak so what they done they hear, they ah called a meeting for next morning and ah bought the mine out so everybody in the Miner's Union was there at the meeting and the returned soldiers wasn't game to do anything about that, because we had quite a few good blokes in our union too that could've thrown them out if we had needed to. But no our, this wasn't, this wasn't communist town, far from it, you could count the communists practically on your one hand, Wattie Doig was one, Harry Bell, they were real communists they, that's what they though of and that's what they tried to, well they didn't push it down your throat, but they'd tell you what they were doing Russia and all this sort of bloody thing sometimes the men used to laugh at it and all this sort of business, but they stuck to their guns and with Idris Williams he was a communist, old Bob Hamilton, they were communists well that was, they made, just because they were communists they made the whole bloody lot of us communists and when Idris Williams went up to N.S.W all them buggers were communists up there too, oh cripes, it was a communist bogey that was brought here by bloody Menzies, and it stuck here for quite a while before we could get rid of that.

Q What about Prime Minister, Robert Menzies?

Well he was a bloody Royalist, and he didn't want any communist country coming, any communists coming into a Royalist country and all this sort of thing, he wanted this for England and to stay England, and he didn't want communism, Christ look at the fun he had when he got Petrov up in bloody Darwin that was only for the, that was only there for the ah, for the elections that were coming on he was going to get beat, only for that, and that would of beat him yeah.

Q You were saying that the soldiers were on your side?

Ah yeah when we come out on strike they had the soldiers come into the mines up in N.S.W. cause most of them were open cuts and a the soldiers would go in there and I think a lot of them were our way, they didn't want to go in but in the army they had to go in and how some of the trucks would fall over the side of the road and drop down and how the road would be blocked they'd put the explosives in the wrong place and all the coal and stuff would come down and block all the roads and they had to be cleared away and it cost the government millions to get their mines back into working order, it would have been better for them to give us the rise in wages and they'd have saved money, yeah yeah oh we always reckoned it was good that cause at least we had somebody on our side yeah.

Q Do you remember some falls of stone?

Oh yeah, there was two blokes in the east section, Hunter and Playce, that was their name like, and they were coming towards each other ur MacDonald and Duncan yeah and they were coming towards each other and this Duncan then they fired a shot because they knock, you had to knock on the coal and tell the other blokes to get out, but they wouldn't get out they were that hungry they were wanting money and the shots went well we heard it come through you could hear a shot blow through like that we had to rush down in there and we run over one man because we couldn't see him, the coal was all over the top of him and that was Hunter and Playce he was still at the face well I had to run out to the top of the section where I was working and tell the Deputy and he had to send a man out for to get the err stretchers and come down and carry them men out and one bloke this Andrew Playce we had to tie him to the stretcher with rope we had to take the reins off the horse and tie it round because he was jumping and kicking that much and he never ever went down the mine again him and his mate they never, never went down they were both given jobs on the surface when they went near a shaft or anything like that they use to shake.

Yeah we had an Italian chap I cant remember his name now but I can remember this incident in Wardills Flat they called it, he was in there and he had been working on his own and he never came out for lunch for crib time you know, so we went in to have a look to see if he was all right and all the stone was down on top of him and he was crying and shouting out so we couldn't do nothing so we had to run out and get help and come in. And they got him out we got him on the stretcher and he we thought he was all right he looked good and he was crying a bit when we got to the shaft he stopped crying so we never thought of him we just said oh well he's quietened down, but the poor bugger was dead yeah, that was the worst incident that I had, yeah, never forget him.

Q Were the conditions bad?

Ooh they were fantastic......those….they were atrocious in fact, because, 18 inches a lot of the places, some of them went up to two feet and three feet but you were lucky to get them and they'd be sitting, well, crawling into get the coal out of there they'd be laying on their sides shoveling the coal out and then they had to get on their knees for to shovel the coal into the skips, and they, they'd have to take couple sets of clothing for to change for to go out to the shaft because at the shaft it was freezing especially in the winter time God strike it was worse than being in a cool room but anyway they use to suffer it and they use to get, get to work there and how they didn't have pneumonia colds and that I will never know.

Oh yeah I've seen some of the men in them places on their knees for nearly eight hours at a time and the knees use to get sore because bits of coal would get into their trousers and nick their knees oh god I've seen some men with some awful knees in that place and at night time they could hardly walk out to the pit, out of the shaft, god they use to suffer, a lot of them men.

Q Alan Birt tells says he taught you square dancing on the shaft cage?

Oh, yeah, with Alan, too bad he's gone now but he when the folk dancing came in square dancing he learnt me on the top of a cage - that's the cage that goes up and down the shaft you know and he learnt me to ur square dance on top of one of them and we were square dancing this day coming up we got to the top and ah Jesus embarrassed, here's a whole crowd of visitors standing there watching us -doing this, ah gosh it was funny that day, ha they only give us a good clap, ha but we reckon it was all right ha ha ha . But we were forbidden to do it again because they were frightened, the cage, we might go down the side of it you know, ah God.

END OF INTERVIEW
Date: September 1995