Kōrero: Coal and coal mining

Two late-19th-century West Coast miners pause in their labours. The traditional technique for extracting coal, which miners brought from Britain, depended entirely on muscle power. Miners chopped out coal with picks and then shovelled it into carts. In the sound file, former miners Harold Newbie, Don Dickson, and Hardy Browning from Dobson on the West Coast describe the wet and sooty conditions in which they had worked.

Transcript

Some places in Dobson, the humidity in the places were 80%.

Well it's where it was just running off you. Like that, just running off you. Even walking into the coal face, it was running off you.

And other places in Dobson I worked in and Harald has too, where the water was pouring off. It was just like standing out in he pouring rain or a waterfall, and you just stood there all day shovelling, shovelling and you've got a four or five-hour shift. You only wore a pair of shorts and your boots. You took your singlet off or you cos you got soaked to the hide.

In the Dobson coal there was what we called sooty-backs. It might be about an inch wide and it was just like soot out of a coal range and you're breathing that all day long. And when you were shovelling coal it may be all you could see of your mate, the other side of the coal box was his light. And you're breathing this.

One of the important things you wore was pair of football stockings with the feet cut out. You put them on over the top, pulled the bottom part of the stocking down over the top of your boots so you couldn't get small coal pieces of coal in your boots, you know, and always had a shin pads or an old exercise book or a folded newspaper or something. I can show you my black shins yet. In fact some of them got black noses.

You could always tell a miner!

If you lifted his pants leg and had a look at his shins or had a look at his face because tattoo marks on their face cos when you got hurt, the coal dust got in those wounds and you never could get rid of it really.

It was one occasion where the fellow was left down walls-end[?] after the shift had knocked off. His lamp had gone out through the day, you see and of course you're in complete darkness. All you've got to do is remain motionless.