True Stories: Black Gold, Kindred Spirits
ABC TV
Thursday, September 26, 9.30pm (9SA)
Previewed by Jennifer Thompson
The ABC is bringing an important slice of working-class political history to lounge rooms in the story of the Wonthaggi coal miners in Victoria. Wonthaggi — 150 kilometres from Melbourne — worked the state coal mine from the town's birth in 1909 until 1968, when the mine closed. The film is dedicated to the miners and their families.
Described as one of the largest and most dangerous collieries in Australia, the mine took 80 miners' lives over its time but "bred a solidarity that made Wonthaggi the proud heart of the Miners' Federation". Wonthaggi was opened by the Victorian government as an emergency mine when a strike disrupted the supply from NSW's coalfields, which the rest of Australia depended on. Despite the "geological nightmare" of the underground mine, with thin seams and extreme faulting that made it so dangerous, around 2000 former gold miners flocked there within weeks, establishing the town.
Despite state ownership of the colliery, conditions were far worse than in many of NSW's private mines. They were kept that way by the state government, which maintained contracts for coal with NSW mines to avoid giving Wonthaggi miners a strategic lever to improve their situation. The mine was run by the Railways Department, which had no experience of mining, and, worse, by Robert Menzies, who was the state railway minister during the '30s.
Despite this, the Wonthaggi miners made the site into a centre of militant industrial unionism. During the '30s they defended miners' jobs when management tried to select who would be put off in the depression, targeting the weakest and the most political miners. A tremendous five-month strike followed in 1934, which Menzies aimed to break. The threat of a nationwide strike by miners eventually forced him to back down. He threw up the "Communist bogey", creating the story of red Wonthaggi.
The old miners interviewed say it was only partly true; there were a small number of communists, but the rest were no less interested in fighting to improve safety and conditions in the mine, and in defending their right to militant unionism. In 1938, the miners won an award including safety standards after a six-week strike provoked by a whitewashed inquiry into a disaster that took 13 miners' lives.
The "bogey" was raised again in the 1949 national coal strike to extend the Wonthaggi conditions to other collieries. Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley sent the army in against the strikers and raided Communist Party offices. Leaders of the Miners' Federation were jailed for refusing to hand over union strike funds. The strike was broken when the NSW miners eventually voted to return to work "after two men were given seats in parliament" said a miner from Wonthaggi, where the strike continued for a time.
In 1968, 10 years after the government first tried to close the mine, Wonthaggi was shut. The miners' legacy to coal miners elsewhere was a militant example, and the holiday pay and sick pay won through striking, which other miners later won.
The film is really made by the interviews with old miners about their militant history, the victories and betrayals and the people, including recollections of those killed or injured in the mine. The film also pays a special tribute to a lesser known aspect of the miners' tradition, the establishment of a political women's auxiliary. The first women's auxiliary was established at Wonthaggi during the 1934 strike, and it remains a part of the miners union today. n