Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 | Dusted | The human cost of mining in Australia About this episode When a vast coal seam was found running through the escarpment around the NSW town of Wollongong it seemed that this beautiful part of Australia had got lucky. But had it? Van Badham heads back to her hometown to explore the deadly cost of coal mining for those who worked the pit.
Transcript 3,735 words · 13 speakers
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0:12 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Van Batten. Welcome to ABC Rewind and to Dusted, the human story of dust in Australian mines. From gold to coal to asbestos. And today, we head down the coal mines. I spent my youth in the old coal mining community of Wollongong, on the New South Wales south coast. And the job that put me through uni was transcribing hours and hours of stories from the region's retired mine workers, before, as they said, "the dust got 'em".
0:49 Speaker 01 Today, I'm revisiting my old stomping ground and putting coal dust under the microscope.
1:12 Speaker 01 To tell you that story, I make an emotional return home to Wollongong, with some people who really know what they're talking about.
1:21 Speaker 01 Let me introduce you, unionist Paddy Gorman.
1:25 Speaker 02 The coal mining industry was always regarded as one of the most hazardous in the country. There's two things down there that could kill you, there's the dust and there's the explosions.
1:36 Speaker 01 Barry Swan, third generation of a New South Wales coal mining family.
1:41 Speaker 03 I sat with my grandfather the night he died. He fought the ravages of dust disease. He didn't want me to go into coal mining because of the conditions.
1:51 Speaker 01 Medical historian, Kriena Fitzgerald.
1:54 Speaker 04 Anthracosis is a dust disease from coal mining. Your lungs become like the rock that you've been mining. One of the pathologists said if he cut through the lungs, it blunted his scarpal.
2:09 Speaker 01 Dr Pamela Kinnear.
2:11 Speaker 05 There were plenty of people back then who would say, "A good lung full of dust protects you against tuberculosis, isn't a bad thing."
2:20 Speaker 01 And the wonderful radio ballad trio, Singing the Big Hure.
2:44 Speaker 06 There's no denying the enormous impact of coal mining in the history of modern Australia. The discovery of coal by British colonists signaled the continent's economic potential, just at the time the Industrial Revolution was really getting going. When a vast coal seam was found running through the escarpment around Wollongong, it seemed this beautiful place had got lucky too. But had it?
3:12 Speaker 06 I went to the archives of the Miners' Union Library to find out, and turned up an amazing 1940s film.
3:20 Speaker 07 The Illawarra District of New South Wales is a narrow strip of land running along the south coast, washed by the waters of the Pacific and backed by mountains. It is one of the richest districts in Australia. And on the south coast in 1797, coal was first discovered in Australia.
3:38 Speaker 02 The first coal miners were convicts.
3:41 Speaker 07 Coal, the black gold standard of the coast from Helensburgh to Wollongong.
3:45 Speaker 02 In the mid-19th century, the coal fields were opening up throughout New South Wales, including down around the Illawarra, around Wollongong Way, and further out west out towards the Blue Mountains. They needed coal for boats and trains and for just about everything else. So the coal fields had a rapid expansion.
4:04 Speaker 07 This coal is suitable for the making of high-grade coke, and thousands of tonnes a year travel to the coking works.
4:12 Speaker 03 It was all pick shovels and blasting powder.
4:15 Speaker 07 Coke for the blast furnaces at Newcastle and Port Kembla. Coke could be shipped all over Australia as well as abroad.
4:24 Speaker 03 Back in those days, preference of the employer and the employee was get the coal out, bugger the atmosphere. I don't think there was any thought of I'm gonna die from it. That was accepted as the norm.
4:42 Speaker 07 Mine owners on the south coast have drawn huge profits from the earth.
4:46 Speaker 03 It's always dusty.
4:51 Speaker 02 There were shocking conditions in the Illawarra. There was a lot of dust. Now, there wasn't a great deal understood about the damage to the dust, but they knew there were a lot of young men who were coughing their lungs up and who were dying prematurely. And in the very early days, if you see photographs of early miners, you see nearly all the adults had moustaches. And in some cases, they believed that that helped filter the dust. Looking back at it now, you think, "Well, that's crazy." They didn't realise the fine particles that were going into their lungs.
5:22 Speaker 08 The curse of underground is the dust.
5:27 Speaker 08 Dust is the giant killer, but it doesn't strike all at once, but he likes his time.
5:38 Speaker 06 Conditions in New South Wales coal mines in the early days of the 20th century were basic, brutal and dangerous, just like they were in England, Scotland and Wales. But when the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s hit, coal mining families like Barry Swans were so desperate for work, they migrated to the Illawarra in droves.
6:03 Speaker 03 My grandfather arrived in Australia from Scotland in 1922 and found work at South Bullock Coal Mine, which is on the south coast.
6:16 Speaker 03 I can remember my pop coming home
6:20 Speaker 03 in his pit clothes and he was covered in coal dust.
6:25 Speaker 03 My nan had had the copper going and he'd get in the bath and as kids, we took great pleasure in going in there and rinsing top down with the water out of the copper.
6:40 Speaker 03 You can feel it getting into your eyes and your throat and you come out of the baths and you're blowing it out your nose and spitting it out.
6:49 Speaker 02 Those early miners brought many of their traditions and their collectivism with them.
6:55 Speaker 06 And once settled in Australia, the migrants began to raise their collective voice.
7:00 Speaker 04 I think it was well understood in places like Wales and England that miners were dying of anthracosis. But I think one of the problems is that often the symptoms don't occur until you've been in the industry for quite a while.
7:16 Speaker 06 The mining companies seemed well aware of the long time lapse between first entering a mine and developing symptoms of disease. Because they played for time, they found loopholes and promoted medical opinion that questioned the workers' claims.
7:33 Speaker 05 Really, from the 1920s through the 30s, the arguments about whether coal dust itself was a kind of substance that could cause lung disease was really a matter of dispute.
7:46 Speaker 02 When a coal miner would go to a doctor with a bad cough or persistent chest pain or something like that, the first question they were asked by the doctor was, "Are you a smoker?" And if you were, and an awful lot of them were, most of them were actually, first thing they'd say, "Well, that's it, you know, put it down to smoking."
8:06 Speaker 02 Dust diseases were an older miners' lot in life.
8:12 Speaker 02 A boy would leave school at 14.
8:14 Speaker 09 School days over, come on then, John.
8:19 Speaker 02 Follow his dad and his uncles and his older brothers.
8:22 Speaker 09 Time to be getting your fit boots on.
8:25 Speaker 02 Into the mines.
8:26 Speaker 09 On with your shirt and wool skin trousers, time you was on your way.
8:33 Speaker 02 Many people were prematurely aged.
8:35 Speaker 09 Time you was learning the fitman's job and earning the fitman's pay.
8:41 Speaker 03 My uncles of my dad's era, they stayed in the mines and... And they, one of them dropped dead, walking up to the pit hill.
9:04 Speaker 03 You knew when dad was going out to work, especially on the colder autumn and winter days, you could hear the hawking and the spitting and the coughing as they were getting ready to go to work. They either rode a push bike or worked, and you could hear them going up the hill, coughing and carrying on. So it was quite evident there was a problem, and it was in the mines.
9:37 Speaker 06 No one went into the mines expecting to live too long, but the sheer physical toughness demanded by the work encouraged a culture of solidarity amongst the workers. Barry Swan.
9:49 Speaker 03 The dust was always something that the miners campaigned about. They campaigned about it in the 30s and the 40s.
9:59 Speaker 06 They wanted the mine to take responsibility because they wanted compensation.
10:05 Speaker 03 Companies being as they are, they fought every case to the maximum to resist a compensation payment to a dusted mine.
10:15 Speaker 05 The employers argued very strongly that what was going on in the industrial disputes was what they called a dust hysteria.
10:25 Speaker 06 But the miners fought the disinformation campaigns, insisting that the truth about dust come out. Their self-produced newsreels stated short and horrifying facts, painting the companies as black as their lungs were.
10:43 Speaker 07 Every year, over 200 miners are forced to leave the pit because they are dusted. The average age of a dusted miner has fallen from 50 years to 40. For over 50 years, mine owners on the South Coast have drawn huge profits from the earth.
10:59 Speaker 07 But for the miner, the dividend is death.
11:04 Speaker 06 It was the 1930s, and the mine owners were getting worried about the rising militancy of unionised workers. They went into damage control. Pamela Kinnear was astounded by the lengths the companies went to.
11:19 Speaker 05 They started to mobilise all of the medical opinion that was around to say, "This can't possibly be true because coal dust doesn't cause disease. It's an inert substance, there's no basis for saying coal dust causes disease." The employers really made use of the medical disputes and the lack of a single consensus about the role of coal dust in causing occupational disease.
11:48 Speaker 02 Around the late 1930s, early 1940s, mechanisation came in and you had machines on the ground and duck-bayed at even models.
11:59 Speaker 06 And yet, by the outbreak of the Second World War, the Conservative Menzies government sided with the mine owners, trying to silence the troublesome workers.
12:10 Speaker 05 The fight to have coal dust recognised as a legitimate occupational hazard went on for a number of years.
12:18 Speaker 07 Because of the dust, production is forced. Because of the dust, young men are going to other jobs. Ted Whitehouse, 65, 40 years in the mine, seven years dusted.
12:34 Speaker 06 With the war ongoing and expanding, there were growing demands on Australia for more power, more steel, and a reliable workforce to produce them.
12:45 Speaker 06 When John Curtin replaced Menzies as Prime Minister in 1941, his new Labor government started listening to the coal miners.
12:53 Speaker 02 Conservative governments always favoured the mining companies. And when Labor governments come in like Curtin and Chifley, the miners had great expectations.
13:08 Speaker 05 There were some really important legislative amendments that happened in 1941. Laws to allow dust disease to be more easily compensated.
13:17 Speaker 02 And that led in part to the miners being forced, blue collar workers, to get a pension at 60 years of age. Because they realised that environment, if you'd been working in it from when you were 14 years of age, if you made it to 60 years of age. And there were not many miners who actually lived beyond 65.
13:47 Speaker 07 I think if I cut my fingers and it bled, it would just come out black.
14:05 Speaker 06 With the end of World War II came the death of John Curtin. But with his replacement, Ben Chifley, the new Labor leadership was ready to address more of the miners' complaints.
14:17 Speaker 06 The response of the mining companies was, of course, to seek legal counsel.
14:26 Speaker 05 When the Chifley government came in, they put a Royal Commission in place in 1946 to examine the coal industry and the reorganisation of it, and the role that the health issues were playing.
14:38 Speaker 06 The company's evidence convinced the Royal Commission, but it did not convince the Prime Minister.
14:45 Speaker 05 The Chifley government said, "I'm not having that. We think there's enough of a problem here that we're going to step in anyway."
14:52 Speaker 06 And like all government decisions, there was an economic imperative.
15:01 Speaker 05 After the war, Australia basically decided it was going to leave behind its "develop off the sheep's back" notion, and instead it was going to be an industrial, a modern industrial nation. We were going to become a domestic exporter of coal as well, but also we needed our own coal for our own rebuilding. We had a housing problem, we needed to industrialise, we needed steel for that. So coal was suddenly central to our vision of ourselves as a nation, which allowed the workers again to say, "Well, if that's true, then you've got to do something about the fact that we're dying in the mines."
15:44 Speaker 07 They have waited, waited for legislation that will give them the rights to live their few remaining years in comfort and security. The delegates return and they tell the miners that the government has agreed to introduce measures ensuring safety methods in mines.
15:59 Speaker 06 Prime Minister Ben Shifley became a hero to the mining towns, but the love did not last long. The promised legislation was in writing, but action was slow, and the miners' frustration came to a head a few months later.
16:15 Speaker 03 Now, in 1946, there were two coal miners at Coromel Mine, which is down the southern coalfields. They died within two days of each other from pneumonococcosis, or black lungs, as we call it nowadays, and that was the trigger point for more action.
16:38 Speaker 10 Then a man tries to rush forward to attack a newsreel cameraman. This cameraman...
16:43 Speaker 05 You had this kind of confluence of factors that came into play.
16:47 Speaker 07 Inadequate health measures, low wages, bad conditions.
16:51 Speaker 02 It led to the forest of what we call the Great Dust Demonstrations in the late 1940s.
16:58 Speaker 07 Their wives and daughters march with them. They know that unless there is safety in the mine, men will sit down on the job, mines will be idle, factories will stop work. Without coal, the whole nation will be paralysed.
17:12 Speaker 03 What had been a campaign for decades suddenly reached a crescendo, and there was mass meetings.
17:20 Speaker 07 Miners demand that the government act now.
17:26 Speaker 05 It's fascinating going back through the archives and the newspapers of the time and seeing these images of these massive coal mine protests down the main streets of Sydney. They were demanding that the legislative standard for the exposure to dust that had been put into the Coal Mines Regulation Act, they demanded that the act be amended to enforce that and that employers actually be made to comply to stop the amount of dust in the mines themselves.
17:57 Speaker 02 They realised that you had to have proper water suppressants to contain the dust. But there were also rules introduced that made it possible to measure the amount of dust that there were in particular places. And you weren't allowed to work in those until you could get those dust levels, this is the theory, those dust levels down to what they called permissible levels.
18:22 Speaker 05 Chifley was very supportive of the miners. The other thing that was going on in Australia at the time, especially in the mining unions, is that they were being populated by a sort of a communist ethos. So the Communist Party of Australia was quite linked to the mining unions. So Chifley and his government were quite worried about having to sort of pacify, to some extent, the workers' demands. Because if they didn't pacify the workers' demands, that would give fuel to the sort of communist influence in the mining unions.
19:02 Speaker 10 Police push forward as the crowd becomes noisier. The communists clash with spectators. Crawlers are hustled away as more fights break out in six different sectors.
19:09 Speaker 06 Now it was 1949. The Soviets were testing an atomic bomb, the Cold War was heating up, and the fear of communism was catching in the electorate. While the perils of coal dust had been recognised, the union was now pushing for industrial compliance with worker involvement. Shifley's government was on notice.
19:33 Speaker 10 A crowd of around forty thousand people gathered at an ALP rally on the coal strike. Communists are present in force and while most onlookers are attentive...
19:40 Speaker 02 The government knew it had to create something and that's when the compromise was reached around the formation of the Joint Coal Board and its associated powers. A joint coal board will regulate the mines and they'll ensure proper health and safety standards. Control of dust and regulations governing the amount of dust that was permissible in certain areas had to be enforced. You could almost trace historically the improvements in the coal industry by the growth of unionism.
20:15 Speaker 11 And then when he saw the result, well damn, there was a sense of pride.
20:30 Speaker 03 And the Joint Coal Board was charged with modernising the industry and addressing the health problems of the industry.
20:45 Speaker 03 To monitor the health of anybody who came into the industry after that.
20:55 Speaker 03 Queensland was offered to come into it, but they declined.
21:14 Speaker 05 The Joint Coal Board had a very, very active tripartite committee. It was a dust standing committee that consisted of employers, medical officers and workers. It was a real corporatist approach, a real tripartite approach to saying, let's solve this together. It was incredibly successful, incredibly cooperative process for a number of years. And Queensland did not have anything like that in place.
21:43 Speaker 06 At the time of the Joint Coal Board's formation, most of Australia's coal was produced in New South Wales, with pockets of brown coal mined in Victoria and South Australia. Queensland had the biggest part of the rest of the industry. The tripartite board formed without them and fostered two decades of successful cooperation. It saw Australia's international reputation for safety standards rise.
22:10 Speaker 05 In 1968, the Australians announced to a major pneumoconiosis conference that Australia had virtually eradicated coal dust disease from its industry. The Queensland industry had not been recording cases at the time, and so it looked like a fairly reasonable thing to say Australia's got control of this. And what's important, there were no new cases emerging at that time.
22:41 Speaker 06 Fast forward through to the 1970s and constructive collaboration began to unravel. After a series of economic shocks, the 1980s saw employers seize the opportunity to reassert themselves. Now the mining companies wanted to self-regulate, complaining about a nanny state telling them what to do. The Australian Coal Association formed to represent the coal producers. But the broader mining community was concerned that by dismantling the Joint Coal Board, the positive health benefits from a cooperative worker-employer relationship would be dismantled as well.
23:25 Speaker 06 Barry Swan watched the changing of the guard.
23:28 Speaker 03 In 1990, with the arrival of Paul Keating as Prime Minister and a deregulation agenda, along comes the Coal Association with a woman at the helm who actually told me, "No such thing as a dusted coal miner, they're all malingorous." I had a vision of my grandfather dying. Eventually, she moved out of the coal industry and went into the asbestos industry with hearties. I don't have to tell you who she was, but you'll see what her reaction was towards asbestos-affected people.
24:03 Speaker 06 And you can bet we'll be following that asbestos trail in the next episode of Dusted. But back at the now self-regulating Australian coalface, you'll never guess what happened next. A few years ago, Paddy Gorman was called back from retirement to visit Queensland's coal mines because miners were getting sick.
24:27 Speaker 02 We were horrified by the first few cases that we discovered of black lung re-emerging in Queensland. At that time, the Minerals Council, which was the employer's body, accused us of scaremongering and exaggerating things.
24:46 Speaker 05 As far as I can tell, Queensland was not running any kind of surveillance system on its workforce for dust disease at all. We were told that the first new case of black lung disease had emerged in Queensland. This is not just a re-emergence, it's a re-identification of a problem that has been there for a long time.
25:12 Speaker 02 The people who have been identified, and even at this stage, those 350, they're only the type of the iceberg. And there's still up to 25,000 out there. It's similar to what's happened with the silica walkers and with the James Hardy walkers, with the asbestos. I mean, it's the same game being played out in different industries. And it's an absolute disgrace and an absolute abrogation of responsibility from these big employers who are making a fortune from them to actually look after them and try and support them.
25:45 Speaker 01 The return of black lung to Australia shows that if the employers aren't forced to keep the mines safe, they don't keep the mines safe.
25:53 Speaker 05 Because it's slow and gradual onset and not as interesting as an explosion, it's harder to make an exciting story from. But it's easy to make an absolutely heartbreaking story when you find people who are suffering dust disease. It is one of the worst diseases to encounter in anybody.
26:18 Speaker 03 If you said, "Here's a clean piece of paper, write the plan on it." Well, I'd start off with this. To the mine workers, when you come to get a job at the mine, be aware, this can happen. People think, "Oh, I'm gonna get crushed by some coal." Odds are, you won't. But the odds are, you could be breathing in respirable dust. You can't see that, but it's there.
26:44 Speaker 01 Our last word goes to Barry Swan, who's still supporting the younger miners, even though he's now fighting for his own life.
26:53 Speaker 03 Black lung disease. It's incurable, but it's bloody avoidable.
27:01 Speaker 12 Out of the dirt and darkness I was born, go down. Out of the hard black coal face I was torn, go down. Lived in the shade of the high-pit heap, I'm still down there where the seams are deep, but digging the coal, away in the hole, go down.
27:23 Speaker 01 You've been listening to Settling the Dust, the second show of our Dusted series. Songs were from the radio ballad "The Big Hua" by Ewan McCall, Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker. Additional music was by David Bates. The sound engineer was John Jacobs and the programme was produced by Roz Bluit. And I'd like to dedicate this episode to the memory of Wollongong mine workers Freddie Moore and Ray Harrison, who gave this scrubby kid a job and so much else to so many more. This has been an ABC Rewind production. I'm Van Badham, thanks for joining me today, see you next time.
28:07 Speaker 12 Cold dust flows in the veins where the blood should run. Go down. Five steel ribs and an iron backbone. Teeth that can bite through rock and black stone. Work in me time, away in the mine. Go down.
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