My new collection of poetry, With Hymns and Coal, is about to be launched and it is a work of fiction based on some factual events. The poems are a suite or cycle of poems all set on one day in 1958 when a coal mine closed down in the fictional town of Hebburn. There is a town called Hebburn in Northumberland in England and that town gave its name to two coalmines near Weston in the South Maitland Coalfields of NSW. Hebburn No 1 closed on the same day as the fictional Monkton pit in this suite of poems
Why the fiction and the change of names? The answer is simple – this is not a historical record but the telling of a story.
Are the people real? Yes and no in so far as they are archetypes drawn from my memory of the people that I grew up with. I have posted previously about growing up in a coal town populated primarily by people who originated from the British Isles and if they weren’t British, they were European. There were characters with names like Geordie and Jumma, which are common for Northumberland which was where many of the men of Weston came from.
My paternal grandfather came from a family that had been in the region since the 1830’s and my first ancestor to arrive in Australia was a convict from Enniskillen in what is now Northern Island, My paternal grandmother was born in Scotland and, on my mother’s side, there is a mixture of English and Scottish ancestors.
I never knew my father’s parents, as both of them had died before I was born.
My father and his father both worked at Hebburn No 1 and my father later worked at Hebburn No 2. My mother’s father worked at Hebburn No 2. Some of the stories in these poems are based on stories I remember Pa Little telling me when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time with him camping and catching rabbits that were sold for their fur to be used in Akubra hats.
When I wrote the poems, I had a mental image of the town where I grew up but there are some fundamental differences. The town did have two pubs and I have chosen to portray them as being frequented by either Roman Catholic (and primarily Irish) patrons or, protestant Welsh and Geordies. I have given them the names of Pride of Erin and Pride of Merthyr. There were two pubs in Weston but, like many towns in NSW, the pubs were distinguished by the brand of beer that they served with the Criterion being a Tooheys pub and the Aberdare a Tooths pub. My family were all Toohey’s drinkers.
My memories aren’t perfect and the stories I was told were undoubtedly embellished with the re-tellings and some of the events in these poems are complete inventions. Some years ago I attended a writing residency where it appears most of the other attendees were writing memoir or pieces based on memoir. I read some excerpts from an early version of my novel Erosion (due for publication in Spring) and when it came time for feedback, none of the feedback was about the writing, the technique, the storytelling, structure or language but was all about how I coped emotionally with the things that were written in the first person and I had to tell everyone that it was a work of fiction. I still think some of the people thought that I was lying because I did not want to talk about the impact of the events of the story – it was a funny residency where most of the workshop time seemed to be therapy sessions for various traumas.
Writing about the Coalfields is an interesting process. There is a degree of nostalgia because, I suppose, I had a happy childhood and lived in a community. Of course, the community was fairly homogenous, what some far right politicians would call mono-cultural and I certainly don’t subscribe to monoculturalism at all and really embrace the vibrancy of a multicultural modern Australia. I don’t shy away from the fact that the place where I grew up has remained relatively clannish and insular. It is interesting that most of my friends who finished high school and went on to further study do not live in the town where many who did not finish high school, who did not leave for education or training, continue to live there.
With Hymns and Memories is not uncritical of the past but it does acknowledge some of the strengths of a working class community with a strong sense of solidarity.
The poems range over the course of a day from the pre-dawn until late at night and follow a series of characters – coalminers and their families, shopkeepers and civic officials and it is about life and death in a community.
You can read my previous blog, just a coal town here This Is Just A Coal Town
With Hymns and Coal will be available on Amazon soon. Look out for launch details.
