'Black Gold, Kindred Spirits'

Q The shop-keepers helped the miners out in 49?

Well it wasn't just the '49 strike it was through all the strikes of the mine, the shop-keepers stuck to the miners very well. And anyone that needed credit, got it and one man named Arthur MacDougall that had a shop in the town; a grocery shop for many, many years, and he told me that there was only ever two miners that ever skipped town but some of them really battled to pay off the bill that they'd ran-up, sometimes only a few shillings a week but he had the highest praise for the Wonthaggi people, the miners in general.

Q Was there a special spirit in Wonthaggi?

My wife, her mother died when she was only six and her father was left four girls and young boy, so instead of breaking the family up he housed them in boarding houses, there were several big boarding houses around the town, and the Sheila's sister would tell you there was never an unpleasant incident it was drawback as far as she was concerned it like having forty fathers they couldn't take a trick, anything they did there was all these eyes watching them, and all those men, nationalities from all over the world and they looked after these kids which was a wonderful thing with ah, miners are supposed to be a rough-neck lot, yet not one unpleasant incident.

Oh absolutely terrific, they'd ah, you had to be dependent on other people while you were working in the mine and on occasions if you played footy on a Saturday and you had a fight with the other bloke and you had to work belong side him on the Monday mornings so you had to forget it all by Monday mornings. But ah it was just the sort of town if one bloke had a quid the rest of them had a quid. And anyone in want they always got a helping hand.

Q What were the conditions like in Western Area?

Oh yeah, they used to call the Western Area the Mother-in-law, because it was cold and miserable, it was shallow mine and most of it was very wet and low seems. And when you were working on these seams you had to crawl in upward of fifty feet in places. And Western Area seams were about 18 inches high, now it wasn't bad for little blokes like me, but it was agony for some of the big men because you had no say where you worked, every three months there was ballot for working places, this was the cut out any favouritism so this was just the draw of the sweep to where you worked and what conditions you worked in..

Q Do you remember when 20 Shaft went up?

There was stop work meeting at the mine it was lovely sunny day so I was riding my bike out to visit some friends, just out of the town and all of sudden this big cloud of dust came up and ah I though my God something's gone on, so I went back into the town and I was just on the outskirts of the town and of course it went through the town like wildfire that 20 Shaft had blown up.

When the shaft blew one of the fellows that was working down there Horrie Riland went up to get something that had been left on the surface, and just as he stepped onto the surface out of the cage, and the explosion took place and that hurled him up against the wall of the brace building, so if it had have happened three or four seconds earlier, he would have been in the cage, and the cage was shot right up into the poppet legs, so apart from a bad shaking up and scare, that's all that happened to him. Twenty years later when we were working in old workings or breaking through to the old workings and you could see a lot of the havoc that was caused brought by the force of the explosion, timbers charred brick walls smashed down and so on.

END OF INTERVIEW
Date: 1995