This Is Just A Coal Town

I grew up in a coal town and, like it or not, the town is fundamentally part of me, it is in my blood and yes, I left the small coal town of my childhood and travelled, not too far, first to work in the huge, hot and noisy steel mills and later to sit in lecture halls, reading English and Drama and later again, I travelled another hundred miles to learn all about the making of theatre and then I came back, to the lecture halls and later for a while, to the steel mills and then to other jobs and other careers and now I am in the twilight of my working years and they no longer mine coal in the town of my childhood and they have not mined coal there for over fifty years, but in my heart, it is still a coal town.

David Bridie wrote in a song about a different coal town that the bleak was beautiful. I am not sure if my town would ever be called beautiful nor was it particularly bleak. It was just a town, a familiar place, home.

When I was boy, going to a two storied red brick primary school, nearly every child there had a father who worked in one of the local coal mines. Amongst my friends, there were fathers who had different jobs, one was the town’s doctor, one owned a clothes shop, and one was a boilermaker who was later to become a poet and university lecturer but most of the father’s were miners. I had one friend in Primary School whose father was the manager of the pit where my father worked and my grandfather, a lifelong Communist and former member of the Communist Party of Australia did not approve of this friendship with this boy – the class divide was very real in that small coal town (the older brother of this boy grew up to become a Senator in a very right wing populist political party – my grandfather would not be a bit surprised).

As somebody who chairs the board of an arts organisation, I am often caught up in discussions about accepting, if it were to be offered, money from ‘dirty coal’. Our organisation questions if we would take money for arts projects from coal interests and although my hometown is no longer coal town, my regional city is the largest coal exporting port in the world, and the economy of my city is based very much on coal.

Dirty coal – of course, I accept all the evidence about global warming and fossil fuel and I despair when I see the beautiful fertile lands of the Hunter Valley and Liverpool Plains, the once teeming hunting ground of the Wonoruah and Kamilaroi peoples, and later when the land was stolen from them, rich farm lands, turned into ugly black holes that stretch for miles and miles. I hope for the day when there are no coal mines and that day cannot come fast enough.

But there are other things that come from growing up in a coal town. There is a history and there is a culture and there is an abiding sense of class. And it was a different sense of class and a different sense of togetherness. In today’s open cut mines, people work in relative isolation to what they did in the labour-intensive underground pits of my childhood. They were also paid relatively poorly and they had much poorer safety systems and processes and the good pays and conditions of today were won by generations of miners like my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and I certainly don’t begrudge what modern miners have, but I think that there was also a price.

I cannot see the cultural products, the writers and artists, emerging from the modern coalfields in the way that they did in the past. I grew up devouring some of these stories from other coalfields because I could identify with the people, whether it be Zola’s Germinal or Richard Llewellyn’s How Green was my Valley. This is not to say that this was not always the case, and I have in my collection a novel by a writer by the name of Jock Graham called Black Diamonds and is a story set in the mines around Kurri Kurri. He was also the author of a volume of poetry called Blood on the Coals; he was a lifelong Communist and a friend of my Grandfather. I remember coming home from Sydney for a visit to my parents and my father had videotaped an old movie made in 1940 that I had never heard of, it was called The Stars Looked Down and was based on a book by A.J. Cronin and the main character was the son of a coalminer who heads off to the city to study but, through some misadventures, returns to teach the children of the coalminers. There is a tragic element in which the teacher tries to convince the miners that one of their union leaders has struck a bad deal that leads to a disaster.

I am not sure what my father was trying to say to me by giving me this movie and I suspect that he saw something of the miners son, the schoolteacher in me and I know he was proud of my education and pleased that I did not go down the pit but I will never know if he had hoped that I might have come back to my old mining community but, by then, of course it has gone.

Some of my high school friends followed their fathers into the mines and they have all grown to become wonderful men, men of humanity and gentleness but also fierce in their politics and in their loyalty to the comrades so, perhaps not all is lost in modern mining although I note that these men all worked in underground mines.

As I write this, it is the anniversary of the Aberfan disaster in Wales in 1966 and it is hard to believe that next year will be the sixtieth anniversary. I was only five when this disaster occurred, but it has always been there in my imagination – I don’t know if I saw it on the television news at the time or whether I learned about it much later but it has stayed with me all of my life. When I was growing up, death occurred in the pits and it was neither frequent nor was it completely unknown and there were the stories we heard of the big disasters, the explosions underground, the fires and not far from my house in the small town cemetery there was a large marble memorial that stood over the mass grave of a group of miners killed in 1905. What made Aberfan different was the fact that the victims were mainly children, killed when their primary school was buried in mud and slurry. There are no words to describe the horror that unfolded that day.

When there are no words, there is music. When I look back at historical photographs and read accounts of my town in the early days there seems to be have been a range of community bands of different descriptions. Brass bands, it would appear, were popular on the Coalfields and they probably started by immigrant coal miners from the north of England. My town was certainly considered a Geordie town because of the number of miners who had settled there from Northumberland in England and, to a lesser extent, non-Geordie places such as Durham and Yorkshire. The Welsh coalminers settled in an adjoining town to the one that I grew up in and the Scottish immigrants to the larger town to the east and I suspect, but have no proof, that those from Lanarkshire and those from Fife probably lived in different parts of the town. My paternal grandmother’s first husband was a miner from Fife and they had lived in Burntisland across the Firth from her Edinburgh birthplace.

One of my favourite bands is a Geordie folk band called the Unthanks. To label them a folk band is probably bit misleading these days. They certainly started in the folk tradition as Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, but their music has expanded across genres although folk is the strongest influence. In 2012, the Unthank recorded an album and toured with the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, a famous Yorkshire colliery band. There are two songs on that album that relate directly to coal mining – Trimdon Grange Explosion that tells the story of an explosion in a coal mine in 1882 where over sixty men and boys from one small town were killed. On the same album, the brass band plays a piece called Gresford, which is also known as the miner’s hymn and they played it as a tribute to three coalminers who were killed in a pit in Wales whilst the band was on tour in 2012.

I grew up in a coal town that is no longer a coal town. I am not sure if the town still has a sense of identity, and perhaps it does because its residents were always fiercely parochial. Not having lived there for so long, I am not sure what that identity is these days and I sometimes wonder if those of us who deserted the town carry with us a sense of identity that no longer exists and, in thinking about that and my own work, I wonder if it is all a search for my own identity and perhaps, at the end of the day, it is the search, it is the journey that is important.