In the early hours of a Monday morning in March 1898, the sound of a major explosion rocked Dudley, a small mining town just south of Newcastle. As plumes of black smoke spewed from the shaft of the Dudley Colliery, the mothers, wives, and children of workers ran to the site. Fifteen identity tags hung […]
Measuring a little over one metre tall this photographic portrait is of Charles Rasp (1846-1907), the man credited with finding silver at Broken Hill and establishing the now British-owned mining company BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary Company) in 1885. For decades the settler population at Broken Hill has celebrated Rasp as the city’s ‘founding father’, including […]
Richard Sneddon drove his horse and cart to the back door of the bakery of the West Wallsend Cooperative Society and filled his baskets with fresh loaves, which had been baked and neatly stacked on trollies the previous afternoon. Around the town, Richard left bread at the houses of co-op members, and collected the small […]
Underground coal mines are dangerous workplaces. The pit ponies used to work coal were no less at risk than the miners. The pit pony’s job was to haul the coal wagons, or skips, and equipment in and out of the mine. This old, well-worn and hardened leather strap had a crucial role to play when […]
Tess Alfonsi is recorded as Broken Hill’s first woman miner – a designation that is all the weightier given the historic domination of mining by men. She worked the Triple Chance Mine with a hammer-tap drill, hid a pistol in her skirt when she paid the wages and protected her mine from claim jumpers with […]
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