By David Roach, Clifton School of Arts vice president
A real estate agent constructing a narrative about the Northern Illawarra for a couple of prospective buyers may begin with our rich Indigenous history. They may point to the sweeping wilderness at our backs, the spectacular ocean views. Oh look, is that a whale? After that they’re likely to skip straight on to the abundance of great coffee and sourdough.
The obvious gap in that story is where Dawn Crowther focusses her passion. Chronicles From Clifton tells the hidden stories beneath our feet. As gentrification buffs up our suburbs, evidence of our recent past is harder to spot. There’s not much romance to be exploited in the relics of industry; a vine-covered sign warning of abandoned mine shafts, the rotting remnants of a jetty, the rusting ruins of a colliery glimpsed from the train.
Tourists on the Sea Cliff Bridge may be unaware that entombed below is another world. Coal Cliff Colliery, once the country’s largest underground mine, is still there. Tunnels snake down the coast, spreading north and west under the escarpment, reaching to Darkes Forest and beyond. These corridors are sealed and silent now but not so long ago they were filled with dust and noise and life.
Down there, generations of wheelers, shot-firers, riggers and fitters sweated and toiled in the dark, worried about their families, dragged their mates from beneath cave-ins with bare, bloodied hands, were maimed, played goofy jokes on each other, sang sad songs, gave themselves nicknames like Outchy, Bat Eye and Oil Can, shared rollies at smoko and told stories of their fathers and grandfathers who laboured for years in brutal British pits before risking all to sail to Australia and start again, to build a life for their kids.
There were many deaths in Coalcliff, hundreds across the Illawarra coal fields and countless victims of black lung. Dawn Crowther is the daughter of a miner. Her uncle, George Draper, was killed in Coalcliff Colliery in 1967. But she chooses not to dwell on the fatalities. It’s out of respect, she says, for the miners who contributed their stories. The anecdotes they told her invariably accentuated the fellowship and camaraderie that was needed to survive in the industry then and still today.
Thanks to local historians like Dawn, evidence of that camaraderie is not hard to find. The most obvious example is the modest, magnificent Clifton School of Arts, built in 1911 by those same miners.
Maybe it’s possible to hold two seemingly opposing views simultaneously. You may believe fossil fuels have had major impacts on our climate and coal mining should be phased out. At the same time you can argue, as Dawn Crowther does in Chronicles from Clifton, that miners deserve to have their histories told, their dignity preserved and the sacrifices that they made acknowledged.