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History of Mt Mulligan

Mount Mulligan, 170 klms west of Cairns, via Mareeba/Dimbulah is an impressive landmark whose underlying coal deposits supported a small mining town from 1914 until 1958.  On the 19th September 1921, a massive coal dust explosion in the Mount Mulligan mine killed all seventy-five or perhaps seventy-six men working underground. The disaster was the greatest Queensland has ever seen. The town was situated at the foot of the mountain, a flat-topped, red-brown cliff which rarely failed to attract comment from visitors.

 

Mount Mulligan was a distinctive town because it was concerned entirely with coal mining, which wasn’t conducted anywhere else in the North. It was considered to be the absolute dead end and therefore, never attracted incidental travellers or commerce. The mine was never profitable and spent much of its life in the shadow of financial ruin. Mount Mulligan is chiefly remembered for the day seventy five miners died & the horror of that day, which left a deep impression on the entire community all those who assisted in the disaster. It has been noted that before this disaster, no deaths had occurred at Mount Mulligan and there was no cemetery. The ground was quickly consecrated and the burials held. Even today to visit that graveyard and read the headstones, is enough to make the devil weep.

 

It is also interesting to note that the day before, the game of cricket was called off, but in the cool of the evening, an impromptu party was held in the local hall and the town sung and danced until midnight. The single men had returned to the hotels still in high spirits and some had pillow fights. It was to be their send off. If only they knew.

 

THE DISASTER

Monday, 19th September 1921, was the beginning of a new cavil at Mount Mulligan.  The cavil is an old coalmining practice, intended to equalize every miner’s opportunity to improve his earnings. As Mount Mulligan miners were paid by piece-work, that is by weight of coal produced per man, the working conditions in different areas of the mine could greatly affect the miner’s income. In areas where the coal was shotty – full of stone pieces, which had to be picked or washed out – or lay in broken strata, less coal could be produced in a working day than in areas where a clean seam of coal lay horizontally. The distance of the working coal-face from the ropeway was another consideration, since the time spent in wheeling a full coal-skip to the ropeway was obviously time not available for extracting coal.

 

Four times each year the miners cavilled, or balloted, for their positions in the mine.  Dividing themselves into working pairs, a hewer and a wheeler, the men placed their names in a hat.  In the presence of the manager and two union scrutineers, the pairs of names were drawn in an order corresponding to numbered positions in the mine working.  Not all miners were cavilled. Coal-cutting machine operators were a specially qualified group,  who could only rotate among a limited number of machine working positions, and some other underground workers such as electricians, carpenters and clippers – who attached the skips to the endless rope – did work not directly involved with coal extraction and were paid a day rate. 

 

The beginning of a new cavil is a time of confusion.  Men have to become accustomed to a new working place and often a new workmate. There is usually an abandoned mess to clean up in the new area, since the previous occupants’ last day’s work has rarely been conscientiously completed. An unfamiliar environment is confusing in any circumstances, but in the black labyrinth of a coalmine a change of scene induces a fumbling period of disorientation even among veteran miners.  Confusion is exacerbated, too, by the absence of men from the cavil or from the first working day.  Mount Mulligan had a reputation as a difficult mine because of its relatively thin, shotty coal seams and its isolation, and the end of a cavil was a likely time for restless miners to seek more congenial conditions in the South, with or without informing the management.  An influenza epidemic was affecting Mount Mulligan in 1921, and a number of miners were at home or hospitalized in Mareeba, thus contributing further to the uncertainty of the new cavil.

 

52 names were cavilled at Mount Mulligan on Friday, 16th September, and 74 miners reported to the mine on the following Monday morning.  Mostly carrying their own tools, they picked up carbide lamps at the mine entrance, collected the explosives they needed from the store a short distance inside the tunnel, and dispersed into the workings to find their new places.

 

There were four main working areas in the mine.  The Middle of Number Two seam was most fully developed, with roadways extending north and south from the central axis of the mine, the main dip, where the endless ropeway ran.  North of the dip was Beattie’s Machine Wall, where a Sullivan longwall machine was operating.  Thirteen men were to work in this section.  South of the dip were two longwall faces, Fitzpatrick’s Machine Wall, where the other longwall machine and sixteen men were working, and the Bottom or South Section, which was developed for longwall working, but was being cut by hand in September 1921.  Sixteen men were working on the straight longwall pick-face there, and another eight on the stepped pick-face immediately east of it.

 

The Top or Number One seam workings were of smaller extent and developed on an irregular bord-and-pillar plan. Thirteen men worked there with a shortwall coal-cutting machine. Another eight men were employed in or around the main dip, in the middle seam.

 

The use of carbide lamps with their exposed flame was potentially hazardous in a coalmine, but was accepted in Mount Mulligan by both management and miners as involving a very remote risk whose alternatives were undesirable.  Carbide lamps gave a bright white light, far more comfortable for vision than the dim orange glow of the gauze-enclosed safety lamp, little changed from Sir Humphry Davy’s prototype of 1815; and the Queensland miner’s preference for convenience over safety has been amply documented.  The Queensland Colliery Employees’ Union opposed the use of Davy-type safety lamps for mining, as after long periods of working by their poor light, men developed a condition known as Miners’ Nystagmus, an involuntary rapid flickering movement of the eyes, which severely impaired vision.  From Chillagoe Limited’s point of view the use of safety lamps was distinctly undesirable, because a court decision was expected on a 25% loading to be paid to employees working with them.

In any case, flammable gas had never been encountered in the Mount Mulligan mine, a circumstance rare in coalmines, and one which partly explains the disregard of Mount Mulligan miners for a number of safety precautions which were observed as a matter of course by miners elsewhere.  As the mine had been closed since the previous Friday, the Underground Deputy, Frank Grant, with another miner had passed along the working faces and wheeling roads an hour earlier with a safety lamp to check for traces of gas.  As usual, none was encountered.  Shortly after 8am all 74 miners had entered the mine to commence work, and were joined by Tom Evans, the Underground Manager, who began the administrative work attendant on the new cavil in his cabin, about a hundred metres inside the entrance.

  

At lease one person in the town of Mount Mulligan saw the explosion occur.  At 9.25 am the children of the Mount Mulligan school were on parade before the commencement of lessons, listening to the headmaster, Neil Smith, as he conducted the morning devotional and patriotic ritual.  His assistant, Nellie Hourston, was gazing into the distance, her attention wandering.  Suddenly she was startled by an eruption of black dust half a mile away at the foot of the mountain, in plain view from the school verandah.  Pieces of timber and sheets of roofing iron were visible, tumbling end over end high in the air.  She interrupted Smith to draw his attention to the sight, and as she did so they heard the sound of a violent explosion.  Smith ran immediately to the mine, leaving her to care for the newly-orphaned children of Mount Mulligan.

The explosion at Mount Mulligan was clearly heard in Kingborough, twenty kilometres from the coalmine. 

The response to it was the instinctive one, with the women and surviving men of the town forgetting everything else and converging on the point where the ropeway entered the mountain face.  The first runners met a dazed and coal-blackened man stumbling down the ropeway from the mine.  George Morrison was employed by Chillagoe Limited as a blacksmith and tool sharpener.  He occupied a small wooden hut a few paces from the mine entrance where he maintained picks and other tools for the men working below.  Near the blacksmith’s hut stood the junction box, which regulated electrical current to the coal-cutting machines, and Morrison had frequently complained of the flashes and bangs from the fuses blowing in the mysterious equipment beside him.  Preoccupied with his own ordeal, he mumbled to the rescuers who bore him away “I told them that bloody thing would blow up one day.”  Nearly unscathed but badly shocked, Morrison had almost no recollection of the explosion when questioned by the Royal Commissioners a fortnight later.

 

Watson, the General Manager, was inspecting the work of the bricklayers on the cokeworks foundations when the explosion occurred, and reached the mine entrance before the crowd gathered around it.  The violence of the explosion was manifest in the surroundings.  Heavy black smoke rolled from the mine’s two openings.  The steel winding drums, two tonnes in weight, which had worked the old haulage system, had been blasted from their timber framework above the mine entrance, and lay twenty metres down the ropeway.  A mound of stone, earth and broken timber blocked the mouth of the adit, and it appeared that a massive collapse had occurred in the mine.  The fan had been ejected from its shattered concrete housing and lay twisted among the trees, 40 metres in front of the ventilating tunnel.  The whole area before the mine entrance had been coated with fine coal-dust and seared by flame – grass was burning 60 metres from the entrance.  Watson was sufficiently experienced to infer from this scene what conditions had prevailed in the mine.  Standing on a shale dump near the entrance, he told the gathering crowd: “You’d better all go home.  I hold out no hope for any man.”

 

Among the first to arrive at the Mount Mulligan mine entrance in the minutes after the explosion were the engineer, Jim Harris and his brother Jack, a carpenter, together with the brothers Plunkett, both surface workers.  With them was a group of men unknown to the local people, who had recently arrived in Mount Mulligan to seek work.  Watson would allow only a small group of experienced men to investigate the smoking mine, so, posting others to guard the entrance, he, Harris and one of the new men climbed over the debris at the mouth and entered the tunnel.  Inside the adit, much of the timber had been dislodged by the blast and piles of stone from the roof obstructed the ropeway.  The atmosphere was heavy with afterdamp and smoke obstructed vision.  A clipper, Neville Ruming, lay dead beside a skip a short distance inside the mine. 

 

At the entrance to the Manager’s cabin, the party found two more men, alive, but barely conscious.  Evans was lying in the doorway, badly burnt, with a piece of timber driven into his chest, its end protruding above his collar.  The books and papers in his office were flung into a scorched pile in a corner.  Near Evans lay a miner, Martin O’Grady, obviously severely injured and extensively burned.  Stretcher parties were called into the mine to remove the two men, and Evans, lucid at times as he was carried out, tried to recite from his memory of the cavil sheet the positions of the men in the workings.  O’Grady died within a few hours.

 

The first party continued a few hundred metres further and found a fourth man, Robert Thompson.  He was dead.  All were now feeling the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning, and as a stretcher party returned for Thompson’s body a heavy fall of stone was heard not far ahead of them, and a wave of afterdamp rolled up the dip.  Watson ordered the entire group from the mine, convinced by now that no-one else could be found alive and that further exploration must await adequate ventilation of the mine.

In the hours following the disaster, the telegraph lines became overloaded with competing messages to police, mines, medical and company officials, relaying garbled accounts of the explosion and requesting assistance.  The railway telegraph system, connecting the Mount Mulligan Stationmaster, Franklin, with the Cairns Traffic Manager, Hooper, provided one of the more reliable means of communication.  One of the first messages received outside Mount Mulligan was from Franklin:

"Explosion throughout the whole of the mine, presumably caused by gas.  The mine is wrecked, and there is much debris to clear before any entry can be effected.  About 100 men in the mine are entombed, and there is little hope of their recovery alive.  One body has been recovered.  Two persons are injured seriously, and are unconscious.  Relief workers are proceeding from Dimbulah, also railway lengthsmen.  The explosion was heard 14 miles away."

 

Volunteers poured into Mount Mulligan as word of the disaster spread by direct observation, telegraph and rumour.  First to arrive were a group of miners from the Tyrconnel goldmine at Kingsborough, who came by pump-car from Thornborough.  A train from Mareeba brought doctors, nurses, ambulance men and volunteer rescue workers, and returned in the late afternoon with the mortally injured Evans and the body of Ruming.  The most useful piece of equipment with the Mareeba party was a ten-inch electric ventilating fan from the Biboohra meatworks, which Harris rigged at the mine entrance during the night.

 

At about 10.30pm a train from Cairns brought more doctors, a police party and a group of twenty volunteers, many of whom were Cairns waterside workers.  A Cairns undertaker, H.M. Svendsen, had been requested by telegraph to provide 60 coffins for Mount Mulligan, but only six were available.  A further 25 coffins followed on a later train, as did five more fans and six oxygen cylinders.  Forty miners from the Chillagoe district arrive with Laun at 2am on Tuesday, bringing more electric fans and gasmasks.  In all, about 300 volunteers reached Mount Mulligan.  Only skilled miners were permitted to enter the mine, and the remainder were employed in grave digging and other surface work.

 

By 5am on Tuesday, the mine atmosphere was considered safe for the entry of rescue workers.  Harris and Laun formed two parties, and dividing the underground workings into districts, commenced a systematic search of the mine.  This was a task involving days of walking and digging, for in seven years’ production the Mount Mulligan mine had expanded into miles of tunnels on two levels, and progress was impeded in many places by falls of rock and timber.  Bewildered by their surroundings, and numbed by the horror of their task, they could do little more than stay together as a group, ready to provide labour when a body was found or some temporary repair had to be made.  On Tuesday, the main dip was cleared of dead, and the air current was directed into Beatties’s Wall.

 

By Tuesday night, 22 bodies had been removed from the mine.  The 74th man was taken out on Friday morning, and the entire mine workings were searched repeatedly.  There were no more to be found.  When each body was found, they were disinfected with phenol, carried from the mine on stretchers, placed in coffins and wheeled on skips down the ropeway to the goods shed beside the railway.  There each body was numbered and identified if possible.  When the workmen were unable to identify a man, the wives of missing miners were brought from the mine entrance to view the body.  Twelve of the dead were buried as ‘unidentified’.

 

The origin of the Mount Mulligan explosion has never been established beyond doubt, but the principal theories all postulate some neglect of elementary safety precautions.  The means of propagation of the explosion was undoubtedly the presence of coal-dust in the mine.  In other words, someone in the mine made a careless mistake, which might perhaps have injured one or two miners.  The circumstances prevailing in the mine at the time, instantaneously transformed this error into a huge explosion involving the very dust particles on the floor, walls and roof, which killed every man who happened to have cavilled a place that morning in the miles of tunnels which made up the mine.