'Black Gold, Kindred Spirits', was judged by its toughest critics last week....the miners who lived through the times that film depicts.

And it was judged a success, for its honesty in protraying the atrocious conditions forced on miners and the way they and their wives responded.

And I expect that it was enjoyed for its tough judgment of mine management, which many former miners would argue is long overdue.

The film is a poignant account of the high and low points in Wonthaggi's 58 years as a black coal mining town. At the heart of 'Black Gold, Kindred Spirits' are former miners and their wives, telling their stories to the camera.

The film uses rare archival footage of the mines and dramatic stills to press home the miner's accounts. It traces the history of the mine, from the sinking of the first shaft in 1909 and overnight appearance of tent town, to the day in 1968 when Jim Donohue, Leo Vivian and Aldo Luna became the last miners to rise up from the ground beneath Wonthaggi.

The film's primary purpose is to recall how the miners coped with working, day after day, year after year, in pits that were among the most uncomfortable and dangerous in Australia. It recounts how, out of those awful conditions, the constant accidents and frequent maimings and death, was forged a spirit and a solidarity that led to some of the most enlightened and progressive industrial legislation in Australia.

'Black Gold, Kindred Spirits' also recalls the horrors, such as the Number 20 Shaft explosion in 1937, when 13 men died 700 feet underground.

And, 60 years on. it allows the former miners to say what they always felt: that the explosion was due to the type of cost-cutting and ineffieciency that put cheap coal for the railways ahead of safety of those who won it. It is a film that had been a long time coming.

Eight years in the making had added to the poignancy of the end product, because some of the miners featured have since died.

'Black Gold, Kindred Spirits' will be a wonderfully effective means of bringing home to visitors to Wonthaggi's State Coal Mine tourism attraction just what the thousands of miners who toiled beneath this town endured.

And it should remind a wider audience of the qualities required of workers when they set out to achieve improved conditions.