Miners Pick circa 1944.
Courtesy Newcastle Regional Museum

Collection
Newcastle Regional Museum, Newcastle, New South Wales

Object Name
Miners pick

Object Description
A miner’s pick consisting of three parts: the universal head, pick tool and handle. The tool and head are both made from cast-iron while the handle is wooden. The universal head fits onto the end of the handle like a metal sleeve allowing the pick tool to fit over it. The pick tool is symmetrical in shape with the working part of the pick shaped like a metal spike. Dimensions: L:465mm W:355mm

This miner’s pick was owned by Charlie Barker. Charlie Baker was a miner and was the son of a Welsh coalminer. With his mother and five brothers and sisters he migrated to New South Wales in 1923 settling in Boolaroo. In 1923 he started work at the S Stockton Borehole coal mine in the Hunter Valley as a trapper, later became a clipper, wheeler and first class shift man. Charlie used the pick during his work as a miner at the S Stockton Borehole mine.

In 1940 Charlie was appointed as trainee in Mines Rescue Corps. In 1942 Charlie gained the Deputy’s Certificate in Mines Rescue. In 1944 Charlie became a permanent Mines Rescue Corps member. In 1969 Charlie was elected president of Hunter District Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association, after being Vice-President for two years. Charlie retired as instructor at Newcastle District Mines Rescue Station after 29 years continuous service. During this time, he gained a specialised knowledge of modern mines rescue, fire-fighting and gas detection appliances and procedures

Mining was one of the first industries that developed in the colony. From 1800 coal was mined in the Hunter Valley and later in the Illawarra. From the 1850s gold attracted thousands of migrants seeking to make their fortune.

Specific British communities were targeted for assisted immigration because of their accumulated skills and knowledge in a particular industrial or agricultural process throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first miners in NSW employed skills and techniques developed in European mines and with them came knowledge and culture.

Coal was first discovered in Australia in 1791 by a convict, William Bryant, at the mouth of the Hunter River in New South Wales and the first coal mining settlement was established there in 1801.

S Stockton Borehole Mine NSW circa1949.
Courtesy Lake Macquarie Library

In the early years of the colony, coal was used primarily for domestic heating and cooking. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the early railways and steamships had become the primary market for Australian coal. By 1888, annual coal production in NSW and Queensland had reached 2.5 million tonnes.

Pit Ponies and Miners in the Illawarra circa 1900, Courtesy National Library of Australia

At the beginning of the twentieth century, coal was used mainly to produce gas to light and heat our cities and towns. The demand for thermal coal increased during World War II and after, with rising electricity demand, and during the 1950s and 1960s for coking coal for export to Japan for the rapidly growing Japanese steel industry.

The processes for mining coal were developed to extract of coal from flat seams. The traditional way of cutting coal from a seam was by undercutting the coal face, at the base of the seam, with a pick, then the coal was picked and crow-barred down. This process was developed by miners in Britain and Wales.

Later nineteenth century practice was to hand-drill shot holes in the face above the cut, inserting explosives and blowing down the seam. The coal was then hand-shovelled into skips, with the miner’s tally token attached, this being a leather tag identifying the miner and enabling a tally of his output to be maintained at the pit head. In very early mines it was common for sorting and sizing of the coal to occur at the coal face, with no subsequent treatment above ground - this was the case in Queensland until after 1900. As production increased, above ground screening, picking belts and, later, washing became normal. It was usual to expect each miner to cut, load and transport about two tons of coal in a shift.

Coal seams were either accessed by way of a vertical shaft or by an inclined tunnel that facilitated the more ready removal of coal by rail systems. At the base of the shaft or inclined tunnel the seam was worked outwards in one of two ways.

Bord and Pillar mining was the traditional British method used in Australian collieries. This method consisted of mining in broad compartment (bords) up to 9 m wide, leaving pillars between the bords to support the roof. The pillars were of equal or lesser thickness than the bords, and were often trimmed down to a minimum thickness after the basic pattern was established. Cross drives linked the bords and removed coal from the pillars at regular intervals, leaving grid patterns of passage ways around pillars that supported the roof. Pillars were usually subsequently removed, at least in part, maximising coal retrieval and allowing the roof to settle slowly. The area where mining had been completed, and pillars removed, was called ‘goaf’or ‘gob’.

Longwall mining, the extraction of coal along a continuous face, with the roof supported behind the face by packwalls of rock, was used only infrequently in Australia. It was sometimes used where the coal seam narrowed to under 1 m thickness. Longwall extraction was being practiced, for example, at the Howard Colliery in Queensland as early as 1905, at Wonthaggi in Victoria from 1909, at two Newcastle collieries and at Mount Kembla in NSW by 1912, and in Tasmania the short or step long wall method was in use by 1914 at the Cornwall Colliery. This early use of longwall technique was not of the fully mechanised extensive longwall type used for total extraction, which came into use in some Australian collieries in the 1950s and 60s, and was not introduced into Queensland until 1986. By 1991 mechanical longwall methods accounted for 52% of underground operations in NSW, and 66% in Queensland.

Ventilation fan house at Seaham Colliery, Hunter Valley. Engine house to left, then circular fan housing to left of the person on the roof, and air shaft and headframe to right. Inclined tramway in foreground. Courtesy NSW Mines Department Annual Report 1900.

Transport systems were central to coal mining operations, because of the high-bulk nature of the commodity. Remote coal deposits were often not exploited until the railway reached them, or special railways were built to transport the coal to market. Some collieries used long aerial cableways to transport coal from the mine to jetties or railway sidings for loading.

Within the mine the transporting of the coal from the face to the pit head, before mechanisation of the system, involved several steps. Once removed from the seam the coal was shovelled into skips by the miner, and the skips moved by ‘wheelers’ either pushing them, or pulling them with a horse, to a ‘flat’ where several drives from the work faces converged. Here the skips were arranged into short trains and pulled by a horse in the control of another wheeler to the main haul road where an endless rope haulage system operated. At the main haulage the skips were attached to the rope or chain ‘creeper’ by ‘clippers’, and hauled to the shaft bottom for rising by cage, or hauled directly up through the inclined tunnel portal. Double track endless rope haulage ways could run 4-5 km from the shaft bottom to the furthest reach of the haulage road.

After mechanisation transportation was by traditional endless rope or chain, conveyor belts, or by small diesel or electric locomotives hauling skip trains. When mechanical loaders were introduced slowly from the 1930s they delivered the coal directly from the face into skips, and starting from 1950 the later cutter-loaders did the entire cutting and loading process in one step.

At the base of the shaft skips would be moved onto a cage for hoisting to the brace. At the end of a haulage way up an inclined tunnel the skips were disconnected from the rope and run on into the pit head area by gravity. In both cases the skips were led over a weighbridge for weighing, and in contract system mines the token attached to the skip was removed to keep a tally of who cut the coal. From the weighbridge the skip ran onto a ‘tippler’ which tipped the load into a chute and onto screens and a picking belt where rock was removed and oversize coal was broken up with hammers. The picked coal then was sized by screens and loaded into rail trucks for shipment. As sorting and cleaning techniques improved, the picking belts were replaced by coal washers and/or jigs for sizing.

Open cut coal operations became common by WWII, and characterised the brown coal working in Victoria, the later Hunter Valley mines, and the large export mines in Queensland. The modern open cut is worked by large bucket draglines, ‘dredgers’ and other massive earth moving equipment.

Coal mining was overwhelmingly a hand operation for most of its history in Australia. The first mechanical cutter in NSW and Australia was a Gartsherrie cutter introduced for oil-shale cutting in 1881, and the first coal cutter was a Stanley Header installed at Greta Colliery in 1889, used to undercut the seam. Take-up of the new machines was slow, however, but acceptance of the benefits grew early in the new century and by 1907 there were 104 coal cutters in NSW coal mines. In Queensland the first mechanical cutters were introduced in 1905, and by 1911 there were 24 coal cutting machines in the State. While mechanical aids for cutting and haulage increased after the standardisation of electrical power use in mines in NSW was legislated for in 1908, mechanical loaders were not introduced until 1935, and by 1946 still only 36% of coal in NSW, Australia’s largest producer, was mechanically cut, and only 27% mechanically loaded. By that time, however, the use of power borers to drive shot holes was almost complete. An example of the slowness of mechanisation of coal mines is the continued use of horses for some haulage, at Wonthaggi up to its closure in 1968, at North Bulli No. 2 colliery in NSW until 1972, and at Stockrington Colliery west of Newcastle until its closure in 1982, even though diesel and electric locomotives had gradually been replacing horse haulage since before WWII. The first continuous miner, which cut and loaded in one operation, was introduced in 1950.

Before 1900 most mines were ventilated by furnaces placed at the base of an air shaft to induce convection, sometimes augmented by exhaust steam fed into the shaft. Some early and usually quite short adits were ventilated simply by digging a second, parallel, adit and joining the two by drives, inducing air flow. However, mechanical ventilation was introduced as mines became deeper and gassier. Furnace ventilation continued in the Lithgow area until at least 1912, and furnaces were finally prohibited in NSW from all but shallow mines in 1926. ‘Brattice’ cloth, a heavy sacking, was used to restrict passages and direct air flow through the workings.

The Courriers Colliery disaster in France in 1906, which was due to the explosion of coal dust, exerted a profound influence on safe working around the world, including Australia. From that date much attention was paid to ventilation, illumination, power supplies and the treatment of flammable gas and coal dust. Departments of Mines promoted the introduction of compressed air and electrical equipment such as cutting machines. Australia had, and was again to experience, its own mine explosions, such as that at Bulli in 1897 (81 men killed), at Dudley near Newcastle in 1898 (15 men killed), at Mount Kembla in 1902 (94 men killed), at Mount Mulligan in Queensland in 1921 (76 men killed), and at Bellbird in the Hunter in 1923 (21 men killed). An early safety measure, by no means universal for many years, was the locked flame safety lamp, which was first used as the sole lighting source in the Metropolitan Colliery in NSW in 1897. The Dudley disaster lead to the practice of the continuous ventilation of coal mines, whether they were being worked at the time or not, to avoid the accumulation of gas. The Bellbird disasters lead to the 1926 NSW Mines Rescue Act that required the setting up of rescue stations and the training of rescue personnel. The process of roof bolting (inserting long bolts to stabilise the roof of a mined area) was introduced after experiments starting in 1949, and greatly increased mine safety.

Electrical power had been slowly introduced into NSW mines from 1893, but really became the norm only after a Royal Commission in 1907-08 provided standard regulations for electrical power in mines. Electricity was used to drive pumps, lights, fans, stationary hauling engines as well as coal cutting and boring equipment. Electricity was first used in coal mines in Queensland in 1905 and was quite common by 1913, and electricity was the power source at Wonthaggi in Victoria by 1912. A number of coal mines were established with the ‘captive’ market of a power station built adjacent to them, powering both the mining operations and feeding into the State’s power grid.

Working conditions for coal miners slowly improved as the safe working regulations were introduced, and as mechanical mining became more common. However, it was a slow change, with pit head features such as bath houses only becoming common by the late 1940s. The ‘contract system’ was the norm at most collieries until at least the end of WWII, with teams of miners being called out to cut coal or develop the mine on volume contracts when work was available. Working clothing was supplied by the miner, cloth hats being the normal headgear– miners protective helmets did not become compulsory in NSW until 1941. The gradual mechanisation of mining had the most profound impact on mine working conditions; though its introduction was from time-to-time resisted by the mining unions as threatening to reduce the amount of work available for miners. Cutting machines relieved miners of the backbreaking and dangerous process of undercutting the seam, and mechanical loaders reduced the manual handling of the coal.

Organised mine rescue teams slowly became active from the turn of the century. The first rescue brigade was established at Ipswich in Queensland in 1910, with a Rescue Station built in 1915. In NSW the Department of Mines and the mine owners agreed to share the cost of a mine rescue station and apparatus in the Hunter in 1912, but the system was ad hoc until the setting up of Rescue Stations was required by legislation in 1926. At Wonthaggi in Victoria a Rescue Station was established in 1928 following a mine explosion in 1924.

The pick has historical significance as evidence of the role migrants have played in the development of coal mining in NSW. The Welsh have a long history in the mining of coal. During the 19th & 20th centuries Welsh miners were targeted for assisted migration to work the mines of the Hunter & Illawarra Regions. The Welsh excelled in development mining techniques because of their cultural heritage. This activity was often carried out with rudimentary technology and tools and often relied to experiences and skill of the miners. This experience and expertise was much sought after in NSW mines

The pick has aesthetic significance. The miners pick is significant because of it typifies the technology developed for close quarter coal mining. Its small but robust manufacture communicates the aspect of working in a confined space, of hard and physically demanding work. It is also significant for its embodiment as a symbol used for mining unions and mining communities to communicate their tribe or community allegiances and cultural heritage of industrialised Wales. The cross pick insignia can often be found as football club emblems and Mining Union motifs

The pick has intangible significance. The Welsh migrated to places such as Australia and established industrial communities in the Hunter Valley and in particular Wallsend. These communities were organised industrially and were founding groups in the Australian Labour Movement and the Australian Labor Party. These communities also were highly homogenous carrying on the Celtic heritage traditions of mutual support of their communities in sporting clubs, coops and mutual Societies.

The pick is well provenanced to Charlie Barker’s workplace.

The pick represents the experience of the 19th century miner. Mining tools had to be developed to suit close quarter mining in a time before impact drills and mining machines. The 19th century coal mine was a labyrinth of small shafts tunnels and scaffolding. Small pick such as these were developed to pick the coal away from the seam in a confined space. These technologies & techniques were often developed by the miners themselves.

The condition of the pick is good. It is significant that such an object remain in good condition, intact and in the region it has an historical association with.

The pick is a powerful interpretive tool in communicating the experience of migrant workers and their families who were sought because of their traditional mining skills to develop coal mining of NSW. The pick interprets the history of mining in the Hunter Valley and NSW, the role of migrant workers in the history of the Australian labour movement and twentieth century mass migration.

Coupe, S. & Andrews, M.
Their Ghosts may be heard: Australia to 1900,
Longman Cheshire, Sydney, 1992.

Regional Histories of NSW,
Heritage Office & Dept of Urban Affairs & Planning, Sydney, 1996.

Significance: A guide to assessing the significance of cultural heritage objects and collections,
Heritage Collections Council. 2001.

Reeves, A.
Another Day, Another Dollar: Working Lives in Australian History,
Murdoch, Melbourne, 1988.

Websites

www.australiancoal.com.au/history.htm

www.ahc.gov.au/publications/generalpubs/
mining/profile1.html