History of Mt Mulligan
Mount Mulligan, 170 klms
west of Cairns, via Mareeba/Dimbulah is an impressive landmark
whose underlying coal deposits supported a small mining town
from 1914 until 1958. On the
19th September 1921, a massive coal dust explosion
in the Mount Mulligan mine killed all seventy-five or perhaps
seventy-six men working underground. The disaster was the
greatest Queensland has ever seen. The town was situated at
the foot of the mountain, a flat-topped, red-brown cliff which
rarely failed to attract comment from
visitors.
Mount Mulligan was a
distinctive town because it was concerned entirely with coal
mining, which wasn’t conducted anywhere else in the North. It
was considered to be the absolute dead end and therefore,
never attracted incidental travellers or commerce. The mine
was never profitable and spent much of its life in the shadow
of financial ruin. Mount Mulligan is chiefly remembered for
the day seventy five miners died & the horror of that day,
which left a deep impression on the entire community all those
who assisted in the disaster. It has been noted that before
this disaster, no deaths had occurred at Mount Mulligan and
there was no cemetery. The ground was quickly consecrated and
the burials held. Even today to visit that graveyard and read
the headstones, is enough to make the devil weep.
It is also interesting to
note that the day before, the game of cricket was called off,
but in the cool of the evening, an impromptu party was held in
the local hall and the town sung and danced until midnight.
The single men had returned to the hotels still in high
spirits and some had pillow fights. It was to be their send
off. If only they knew.
THE
DISASTER
Monday, 19th
September 1921, was the beginning of a new cavil at Mount
Mulligan. The cavil is an old coalmining
practice, intended to equalize every miner’s opportunity to
improve his earnings. As Mount Mulligan miners were paid by
piece-work, that is by weight of coal produced per man, the
working conditions in different areas of the mine could
greatly affect the miner’s income. In areas where the coal was
shotty – full of stone pieces, which had to be picked or
washed out – or lay in broken strata, less coal could be
produced in a working day than in areas where a clean seam of
coal lay horizontally. The distance of the working coal-face
from the ropeway was another consideration, since the time
spent in wheeling a full coal-skip to the ropeway was
obviously time not available for extracting
coal.
Four times each year the
miners cavilled, or balloted, for their positions in the
mine. Dividing themselves into working
pairs, a hewer and a wheeler, the men placed their names in a
hat. In the presence of the manager and two
union scrutineers, the pairs of names were drawn in an order
corresponding to numbered positions in the mine
working. Not all miners were cavilled.
Coal-cutting machine operators were a specially qualified
group, who could only rotate among a
limited number of machine working positions, and some other
underground workers such as electricians, carpenters and
clippers – who attached the skips to the endless rope – did
work not directly involved with coal extraction and were paid
a day rate.
The beginning of a new
cavil is a time of confusion. Men have to
become accustomed to a new working place and often a new
workmate. There is usually an abandoned mess to clean up in
the new area, since the previous occupants’ last day’s work
has rarely been conscientiously completed. An unfamiliar
environment is confusing in any circumstances, but in the
black labyrinth of a coalmine a change of scene induces a
fumbling period of disorientation even among veteran
miners. Confusion is exacerbated, too, by
the absence of men from the cavil or from the first working
day. Mount Mulligan had a reputation as a
difficult mine because of its relatively thin, shotty coal
seams and its isolation, and the end of a cavil was a likely
time for restless miners to seek more congenial conditions in
the South, with or without informing the
management. An influenza epidemic was
affecting Mount Mulligan in 1921, and a number of miners were
at home or hospitalized in Mareeba, thus contributing further
to the uncertainty of the new
cavil.
52 names were cavilled at
Mount Mulligan on Friday, 16th September, and 74
miners reported to the mine on the following Monday
morning. Mostly carrying their own tools,
they picked up carbide lamps at the mine entrance, collected
the explosives they needed from the store a short distance
inside the tunnel, and dispersed into the workings to find
their new places.
There were four main
working areas in the mine. The Middle of
Number Two seam was most fully developed, with roadways
extending north and south from the central axis of the mine,
the main dip, where the endless ropeway ran.
North of the dip was Beattie’s Machine Wall, where a
Sullivan longwall machine was operating.
Thirteen men were to work in this section.
South of the dip were two longwall faces, Fitzpatrick’s
Machine Wall, where the other longwall machine and sixteen men
were working, and the Bottom or South Section, which was
developed for longwall working, but was being cut by hand in
September 1921. Sixteen men were working on
the straight longwall pick-face there, and another eight on
the stepped pick-face immediately east of
it.
The Top or Number One
seam workings were of smaller extent and developed on an
irregular bord-and-pillar plan. Thirteen men worked there with
a shortwall coal-cutting machine. Another eight men were
employed in or around the main dip, in the middle
seam.
The use of carbide lamps
with their exposed flame was potentially hazardous in a
coalmine, but was accepted in Mount Mulligan by both
management and miners as involving a very remote risk whose
alternatives were undesirable. Carbide
lamps gave a bright white light, far more comfortable for
vision than the dim orange glow of the gauze-enclosed safety
lamp, little changed from Sir Humphry Davy’s prototype of
1815; and the Queensland miner’s preference for convenience
over safety has been amply documented. The
Queensland Colliery Employees’ Union opposed the use of
Davy-type safety lamps for mining, as after long periods of
working by their poor light, men developed a condition known
as Miners’ Nystagmus, an involuntary rapid flickering movement
of the eyes, which severely impaired vision.
From Chillagoe Limited’s point of view the use of
safety lamps was distinctly undesirable, because a court
decision was expected on a 25% loading to be paid to employees
working with them.
In any case, flammable
gas had never been encountered in the Mount Mulligan mine, a
circumstance rare in coalmines, and one which partly explains
the disregard of Mount Mulligan miners for a number of safety
precautions which were observed as a matter of course by
miners elsewhere. As the mine had been
closed since the previous Friday, the Underground Deputy,
Frank Grant, with another miner had passed along the working
faces and wheeling roads an hour earlier with a safety lamp to
check for traces of gas. As usual, none was
encountered. Shortly after 8am all 74
miners had entered the mine to commence work, and were joined
by Tom Evans, the Underground Manager, who began the
administrative work attendant on the new cavil in his cabin,
about a hundred metres inside the
entrance.
At lease one person in
the town of Mount Mulligan saw the explosion
occur. At 9.25 am the children of the Mount
Mulligan school were on parade before the commencement of
lessons, listening to the headmaster, Neil Smith, as he
conducted the morning devotional and patriotic
ritual. His assistant, Nellie Hourston, was
gazing into the distance, her attention wandering.
Suddenly she was startled by an eruption of black dust
half a mile away at the foot of the mountain, in plain view
from the school verandah. Pieces of timber
and sheets of roofing iron were visible, tumbling end over end
high in the air. She interrupted Smith to
draw his attention to the sight, and as she did so they heard
the sound of a violent explosion. Smith ran
immediately to the mine, leaving her to care for the
newly-orphaned children of Mount
Mulligan.
The explosion at Mount
Mulligan was clearly heard in Kingborough, twenty kilometres
from the coalmine.
The response to it was
the instinctive one, with the women and surviving men of the
town forgetting everything else and converging on the point
where the ropeway entered the mountain face.
The first runners met a dazed and coal-blackened man
stumbling down the ropeway from the mine.
George Morrison was employed by Chillagoe Limited as a
blacksmith and tool sharpener. He occupied
a small wooden hut a few paces from the mine entrance where he
maintained picks and other tools for the men working
below. Near the blacksmith’s hut stood the
junction box, which regulated electrical current to the
coal-cutting machines, and Morrison had frequently complained
of the flashes and bangs from the fuses blowing in the
mysterious equipment beside him.
Preoccupied with his own ordeal, he mumbled to the
rescuers who bore him away “I told them that bloody thing
would blow up one day.” Nearly unscathed
but badly shocked, Morrison had almost no recollection of the
explosion when questioned by the Royal Commissioners a
fortnight later.
Watson, the General
Manager, was inspecting the work of the bricklayers on the
cokeworks foundations when the explosion occurred, and reached
the mine entrance before the crowd gathered around
it. The violence of the explosion was
manifest in the surroundings. Heavy black
smoke rolled from the mine’s two openings.
The steel winding drums, two tonnes in weight, which
had worked the old haulage system, had been blasted from their
timber framework above the mine entrance, and lay twenty
metres down the ropeway. A mound of stone,
earth and broken timber blocked the mouth of the adit, and it
appeared that a massive collapse had occurred in the
mine. The fan had been ejected from its
shattered concrete housing and lay twisted among the trees, 40
metres in front of the ventilating tunnel.
The whole area before the mine entrance had been coated
with fine coal-dust and seared by flame – grass was burning 60
metres from the entrance. Watson was
sufficiently experienced to infer from this scene what
conditions had prevailed in the mine.
Standing on a shale dump near the entrance, he told the
gathering crowd: “You’d better all go home.
I hold out no hope for any man.”
Among the first to arrive
at the Mount Mulligan mine entrance in the minutes after the
explosion were the engineer, Jim Harris and his brother Jack,
a carpenter, together with the brothers Plunkett, both surface
workers. With them was a group of men
unknown to the local people, who had recently arrived in Mount
Mulligan to seek work. Watson would allow
only a small group of experienced men to investigate the
smoking mine, so, posting others to guard the entrance, he,
Harris and one of the new men climbed over the debris at the
mouth and entered the tunnel. Inside the
adit, much of the timber had been dislodged by the blast and
piles of stone from the roof obstructed the
ropeway. The atmosphere was heavy with
afterdamp and smoke obstructed vision. A
clipper, Neville Ruming, lay dead beside a skip a short
distance inside the mine.
At the entrance to the
Manager’s cabin, the party found two more men, alive, but
barely conscious. Evans was lying in the
doorway, badly burnt, with a piece of timber driven into his
chest, its end protruding above his collar.
The books and papers in his office were flung into a
scorched pile in a corner. Near Evans lay a
miner, Martin O’Grady, obviously severely injured and
extensively burned. Stretcher parties were
called into the mine to remove the two men, and Evans, lucid
at times as he was carried out, tried to recite from his
memory of the cavil sheet the positions of the men in the
workings. O’Grady died within a few
hours.
The first party continued
a few hundred metres further and found a fourth man, Robert
Thompson. He was dead.
All were now feeling the effects of carbon monoxide
poisoning, and as a stretcher party returned for Thompson’s
body a heavy fall of stone was heard not far ahead of them,
and a wave of afterdamp rolled up the dip.
Watson ordered the entire group from the mine,
convinced by now that no-one else could be found alive and
that further exploration must await adequate ventilation of
the mine.
In the hours following
the disaster, the telegraph lines became overloaded with
competing messages to police, mines, medical and company
officials, relaying garbled accounts of the explosion and
requesting assistance. The railway
telegraph system, connecting the Mount Mulligan Stationmaster,
Franklin, with the Cairns Traffic Manager, Hooper, provided
one of the more reliable means of communication.
One of the first messages received outside Mount
Mulligan was from Franklin:
"Explosion throughout the
whole of the mine, presumably caused by gas.
The mine is wrecked, and there is much debris to clear
before any entry can be effected. About 100
men in the mine are entombed, and there is little hope of
their recovery alive. One body has been
recovered. Two persons are injured
seriously, and are unconscious. Relief
workers are proceeding from Dimbulah, also railway
lengthsmen. The explosion was heard 14
miles away."
Volunteers poured into
Mount Mulligan as word of the disaster spread by direct
observation, telegraph and rumour. First to
arrive were a group of miners from the Tyrconnel goldmine at
Kingsborough, who came by pump-car from
Thornborough. A train from Mareeba brought
doctors, nurses, ambulance men and volunteer rescue workers,
and returned in the late afternoon with the mortally injured
Evans and the body of Ruming. The most
useful piece of equipment with the Mareeba party was a
ten-inch electric ventilating fan from the Biboohra meatworks,
which Harris rigged at the mine entrance during the
night.
At about 10.30pm a train
from Cairns brought more doctors, a police party and a group
of twenty volunteers, many of whom were Cairns waterside
workers. A Cairns undertaker, H.M.
Svendsen, had been requested by telegraph to provide 60
coffins for Mount Mulligan, but only six were
available. A further 25 coffins followed on
a later train, as did five more fans and six oxygen
cylinders. Forty miners from the Chillagoe
district arrive with Laun at 2am on Tuesday, bringing more
electric fans and gasmasks. In all, about
300 volunteers reached Mount Mulligan. Only
skilled miners were permitted to enter the mine, and the
remainder were employed in grave digging and other surface
work.
By 5am on Tuesday, the
mine atmosphere was considered safe for the entry of rescue
workers. Harris and Laun formed two
parties, and dividing the underground workings into districts,
commenced a systematic search of the mine.
This was a task involving days of walking and digging,
for in seven years’ production the Mount Mulligan mine had
expanded into miles of tunnels on two levels, and progress was
impeded in many places by falls of rock and
timber. Bewildered by their surroundings,
and numbed by the horror of their task, they could do little
more than stay together as a group, ready to provide labour
when a body was found or some temporary repair had to be
made. On Tuesday, the main dip was cleared
of dead, and the air current was directed into Beatties’s
Wall.
By Tuesday night, 22
bodies had been removed from the mine. The
74th man was taken out on Friday morning, and the
entire mine workings were searched repeatedly.
There were no more to be found. When
each body was found, they were disinfected with phenol,
carried from the mine on stretchers, placed in coffins and
wheeled on skips down the ropeway to the goods shed beside the
railway. There each body was numbered and
identified if possible. When the workmen
were unable to identify a man, the wives of missing miners
were brought from the mine entrance to view the
body. Twelve of the dead were buried as
‘unidentified’.
The origin of the Mount
Mulligan explosion has never been established beyond doubt,
but the principal theories all postulate some neglect of
elementary safety precautions. The means of
propagation of the explosion was undoubtedly the presence of
coal-dust in the mine. In other words,
someone in the mine made a careless mistake, which might
perhaps have injured one or two miners. The
circumstances prevailing in the mine at the time,
instantaneously transformed this error into a huge explosion
involving the very dust particles on the floor, walls and
roof, which killed every man who happened to have cavilled a
place that morning in the miles of tunnels which made up the
mine. |
