The famous Sigrid Flodin photo of the scene at the pit top following the Bulli Mine disaster of 1887. Photo: University of Wollongong archives collection D158/3/5.
On 23 March, 1887 John Cope was working in the tunnel mouth of the Bulli Mine and was blown out of the mine.
He was a lucky man because he really shouldn’t have been near the mine entrance at all but rather on strike with the other miners who had been refused employment by the company if they joined a union.
So it was one of the few occasions when it was actually a genuine blessing for miners to be locked out of their workplace.
But the presence and dangers of gas in the Bulli Mine was something of which both the mining company and most of those at work that day should have been aware.
The horrific eruption followed a nine-month strike and as the second last survivor – Henry John Coltman who died in October 1952 – explained, there were actually relatively few “local men in the mine at the time”.
“They were mostly what was called ‘free’ labour, although the miners called them ‘scabs’. They lived at the mine under police protection.”
Mostly only those fortunate to be in a part of the mine sufficiently distant from the explosion did not become one of the slaughtered 81 men and boys.
These “scabs” or “blacklegs” as they were then called had been shipped to Bulli Jetty in a boat named the Merksworth. But when it was learnt more scabs were scheduled to arrive, the striking miners and their wives went into action.
A watch was kept and whenever a ship was sighted the watchman would signal back to the strikers, who would assemble at the colliery rail line from the jetty where it crossed the main road. About 150 men and women waited there.
When the train carrying the scabs reached the crossing, the strikers would stop the train, get aboard and throw the men’s trunks out – and then throw the men out, too.
On one celebrated day the miners’ wives physically blocked the line with their bodies and dared the locomotive driver to drive over them.
Even though a police sergeant read the riot act to the crowd, the engine driver proved unwilling and the train reversed. A few of the scabs who immediately decided discretion was the better part of valour took the train straight back to the jetty. Surprisingly, a few of the scabs stayed and reputedly joined the strikers.
The mine owners had hoped to avoid the inconvenience of a miners’ union but, ironically, in doing so, the more militant of those among the Bulli miners’ leadership were saved and many of the less militant who went to work were killed.
The devastation wrought by what was then the biggest land disaster in Australian history had an immediate impact. There were widows everywhere in Bulli. Fathers and sons died together and some families no longer had any living male members.
Even if it was only the male head of a family who perished in the wake of the coal gas, the horror of the disaster could sometimes get infinitely worse.
Just a year after the explosion, the first of the Bulli Mine disaster widows, Mrs Traise, died. As the Illawarra Mercury bleakly reported: “She leaves 10 orphan children”.
After two years of widowhood only two of the widows had remarried. This was a big decision for these women because it usually meant they thereby waived all rights to financial compensation.
And even those among the widows who eventually did receive cash did so from a fund that was marred by rumours of corruption and misappropriation.
Private fundraising for the widows was also attempted throughout Australia. Extraordinarily, on the very day of the Bulli Disaster anniversary in 1997, I turned up a piece of ephemera in a Sydney junk shop for a fundraiser in Port Adelaide (pictured above).
The last immediate link with the widows of the Bulli Mine disaster of 1887 was severed in 1942 with the death of Mary Ann Jackson, of Phillip Street Thirroul, at the age of 85.
The most recent scandal associated with the disaster, however, was due to the lyrics of a song titled Old Bulli, penned by the Australian folk singer Gary Shearston which, incredibly, caused his record company to delete it from subsequent pressings of his 1966 LP.
Fortunately you can today listen to it on YouTube.
And, in my view, it’s a classic.
