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Issue No. 135 | 10 May 2002 |
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The Costs of War
Interview: Squaring Off Industrial: Heroes Betrayed History: At The Coalface International: Wobblies With Chinese Characters? Politics: Dancing with Trotsky Economics: You Are What You Eat Poetry: Alexander's Bragtime Band Satire: Stott Despoja Celebrates Engagement With Minor Party Review: Painting Paradise
The Soapbox The Locker Room Postcard Bosswatch Week in Review Tool Shed
 Heaps and Heaps of Hate MailNo ChoiceWho Rules Australia?No Wrap for Song Comp Abbott's Contempt
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History At The CoalfaceBy Jim Marr
***************** "Out they go and the sun starts to come up ... this long line of men following this pipe band, all in their pit clothes, a cloud of dust rising from the road. Seeing the red rays of the rising sun through the bush ... shimmering. If you lived to be a thousand, you'd never forget it ... "I was terrified. In fact I was screaming with terror. The two of us turned back and it was harder to get out than it was to get in - there was only one place where the gravel had washed out under this split fence. Trying to get through this gap in the fence with the police just standing - bash, bash, bash. Well, we got out, rushed across the road and jumped up from the sunken road up onto the paddock. There's no trees and you had to run up to the back of the hill to get away from the shooting. As we were running up, Les Thomas goes down. He's clutching my wrist, he's screaming out. "I've been hit." Jim Comerford, barely a kid at the time, recalls the events of December 16, 1929, when miner Norman Brown was shot dead by police at Rothbury in the Hunter Valley. The words come off the pages of At The Coalface but are the result of a painstaking exercise in oral history conducted by longtime union activists Paddy Gorman, Fred Moore and Ray Harrison. Their book details 12 lives and the stories, in the men's and women's own words, are, by turn, passionate, moving, funny, sad and enlightening. Gorman cares about oral history and urges other unions to get out and contact their old-timers before their experiences are lost forever. "If we don't do it the history of our workplaces and communites will be lost," he warns. "These people have important stories to tell." At The Coalface comes to life, in its original spoken form, when ABC Radio National runs highlights of the miner's stories in its Hindsight program this Sunday at 2.05 pm. The hour-long show will be repeated on Thursday and, again, in the early hours of Friday morning. Social History and Features Unit chief Jane Connors is excited by the project. "The program is totally inspired by the book but we got Freddy Moore to go back and re-do the interviews for broadcast quality," she explained. Moore, a life member of the Miners Federation, South Coast Labor Council and half a dozen other organisations, including the Illawarra Aboriginal Community, doubles up by playing the soundtrack. It is to Moore and Harrison, life-long South Coast miners, that Gorman attributes the depth of At The Coalface. "We didn't just want romantic accounts, we wanted mining life, warts and all," he says. "They trusted Freddy and Ray and opened up in ways they mightn't have with others, including myself. They talk about their triumphs and they talk about their losses and mistakes as well. "If we are going to have credibility, in the end, we have to have the truth." Moore, 79, Harrison, 79, and Gorman have been working on their project since 1986. They have interviewed more than 70 men and women who lived and worked on the South Coast, the Hunter and the Central West. They expect to publish a second volume of At The Coalface next year. The Miners On Radio National's Hindsight this week, a program about coal mining in NSW in the early years of the twentieth century, as told by the retired miners. Through the true stories of the 'black' men, we hear about a life of backbreaking work, danger, fatalities, uncertain employment and meagre pay. But we also learn about the unbreakable industrial and community solidarity in the mining towns of the Hunter and the Illawarra. This program has been directly inspired by the oral history book 'At the Coalface', which was published by the Mining and Energy Division of the CFMEU in 1998. Interviews for this week's Hindsight were conducted by Fred Moore (who also performs traditional tunes on the mouth organ) and narration is by ABC Rugby League commentator and former coal miner Craig Hamilton - ABC Media Release.
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