Coal And Colonials: Founding The Australian Coal Mining Industry
Australian History Biography & Memoir Environmental History Labour History Industrial Relations Energy & Mining History Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
Coal and Colonials: Founding the Australian Coal Mining Industry is the only book-length account written by an insider who actually swung a pick in the early pits. Jim Comerford—miner, union firebrand and later president of the United Mineworkers Federation—tells how Welsh and Scottish migrants, transported convicts and Aboriginal trackers together hacked the first workable seams out of the Hunter and Illawarra escarpments in the 1820-1890 period. In 176 tightly-written pages he blends payroll ledgers, harbour-master logs and oral reminiscences to show that coal, not wool or gold, financed the colonial banks, paid for the railways and turned Sydney from a garrison town into a commercial capital. The result is a Young-Adult-friendly textbook that doubles as a ripping yarn: underground explosions, company scrip stores, midnight strike meetings and the first “black bans” that foreshadowed modern Australian labour law.
What makes this particular copy collectible is its pristine hard-back state: tight signatures, no previous-owner markings, original dust-jacket still bright with the Federation’s embossed colliery wheel. Only light foxing on the leading edge of chapter one betrays two decades on the shelf, leaving the rest of the pages crisp and supple for highlighter or archival storage. Because the 1997 United Mineworkers print-run was small and largely distributed to union locals, most copies were thumbed to pieces in pit-camp libraries; unmarked examples seldom surface in the secondary market.
For students of Australian, labour or energy history, owning this edition means skipping the pay-walled archives. Every statistic—tonnage, wages, fatal accident rates—has been re-checked against Newcastle Port customs books, while Comerford’s first-hand stories (low-seam stooping, the 1888 Bulli explosion) are unavailable anywhere else. Environmental researchers also value the book for its pre-greenhouse snapshot of coal’s social licence: rivers dyed black, pit-top smokestacks and the political deals that locked the colonies into a carbon economy long before Federation. At a compact 176 pages it is the perfect ready-reference to anchor a shelf that includes titles on Aboriginal dispossession, Chinese market gardens or the rise of the Australian Labor Party.
Buyers seeking a giftable piece of Australiana will appreciate the book’s heritage aesthetics: thick cream paper, sewn sections, and the iconic dust-jacket pit-head sketch that looks equally at home in a corporate boardroom or a teenager’s history project. With coal once again front-page news, Coal and Colonials offers the back-story that explains how “black diamonds” shaped modern Australia—and why the continent still rides the fossil fuel tiger today.
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