Poster for Sting’s The Last Ship. Photo: Matthew Murphy.
The Osborne-Wallsend mine, later known as Kemira Colliery, got its name in 1857 from its owner Henry Osborne and also the high-quality Mt Keira coal vaunted as equal to the best from Wallsend in the UK which had been mined since earliest recorded history.
Wallsend in the UK, however, was an apt name for that township as it marked the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall and thus the border between England and Scotland.
And, like the Illawarra escarpment mine portal at Mt Keira, some of the old Roman wall still survives in Wallsend today.
The musical The Last Ship by Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner – Sting’s birth-name before he became famous in 1977 as the front-man, principal songwriter and bassist for the The Police – was inspired by his childhood experiences in Wallsend in the 1950s.
The main theme of the musical concentrates on the local shipyard, then the economic engine of the Wallsend community and the impact of its closure in 1993.
Sting’s production thus recounts the hopes, dreams and tragedies of the inhabitants and the demise of the shipbuilding industry in Wallsend until the socially devastating closure of the town’s shipyard which had long loomed over both the town and Sting’s childhood as seen in this short video.
The parallels with today’s demise of coal-mining in Illawarra and the crisis in the Port Kembla steel industry when the workforce declined by almost 10,000 are obvious.
Sting has stated: “I did everything in my power to escape Wallsend … I became successful, but I owe a debt to that community. This play is me trying to honour that community, trying to pay back what they gave me – a sense of self but also the engine that allowed me to escape. That’s the strange paradox. I love where I come from, I’m glad I escaped, at the same time I need to tell that story as a sort of ‘soul debt’.”
The reason the Wallsend moniker was originally attached to the Mt Keira mine was because it was another Wallsend-born man – William Robson – who had opened a new mine for the exceedingly wealthy Henry Osborne after James Shoobert’s earlier Albert Mine was abandoned.
And so, on the momentous day 16 April 1857, three and a half tons of coal from Mt Keira’s Osborne-Wallsend colliery was delivered to Wollongong Harbour by bullock dray and loaded on the steamer SS Illawarra for trial purposes. And the trial of using this coal to fire the steamer proved a complete success.
William Robson (1817-1888) thus became the man who first delivered coal from the colliery at Mt Keira to market. Robson and his wife Ann and daughter, Margaret, had emigrated to NSW in 1841 aboard the ship The Emerald Isle.
Despite there today being a town named Wallsend near Newcastle NSW, its coal mining operations only began in 1860. So the use of the Wallsend moniker in Illawarra predates that of the more northern NSW town.
Getting Mt Keira’s Osborne-Wallsend coal to Belmore Basin. From an 1887 image by William Clarson.
Sting however had begun toying with idea of a musical about his home town as early as 2011. The original Broadway production of his The Last Ship opened in New York on 26 October 2014, following previews a month earlier.
Critics suggested Newcastle or another venue in the UK would have provided a better debut for a musical about the decline of Britain’s ship-building industry, especially one sung in Tyneside accents and Catholic religious undertones.
So when Sting’s musical The Last Ship moved to the UK changes were made including the removal of the significant figure of a Catholic priest, as well as other religious references, even though the idea for the musical had come to Sting from a 2009 article about a group of unemployed Polish men building a ship under the guidance of a Catholic priest.
Now the current world tour of Sting’s The Last Ship The Musical – including Amsterdam, Paris and New York – and a new book by Barney Norris and Lorne Campbell based on the original book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, will hold its Australian premiere at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre on 9 April.
It would have been great if the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre had got a chance to be a try-out venue for the Brisbane production as the promoters, if they had known, might well have been able to play upon Illawarra’s Wallsend connections with the birthplace of Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner more famously known as Sting.
But, nonetheless, today’s Robsons Road at Keiraville on the western border of the Botanic Garden commemorates Sting’s Wallsend-born compatriot – William Robson – who first brought Illawarra’s black diamonds to market.
