From Heritage New Zealand, Summer 2009

by Matt Philp

New Zealand’s worst industrial accident occurred more than a century ago and is still spine-chillingly awful in the recounting. New tracks and information panels at the site make sure the tragedy will not be forgotten

Tragedies take absolute possession of a site.

Everything else that happens there becomes secondary – prologue or aftermath – to a single world-shattering moment. So it is with the Brunner Mine site on the West Coast. It is really two sites, linked by an historic suspension bridge from which, during summer months, children from nearby Greymouth still throw themselves into the turgid Grey River.

On a bright, clear morning in March 1896, 65 men and boys walked into the mine at Brunner and more than a kilometre into the hill, past workings long exhausted during 30 years of continuous production. No one returned alive. A massive explosion of methane killed them all where they worked; some may have survived the blast only to be poisoned by the afterdamp gas. Whatever the sequence, by the following morning when the first of the bodies was brought out, the Brunner had been confirmed in its abiding legacy as the site of New Zealand’s worst industrial accident.

Yet there is so much more to know about Brunner. As well as great tragedy, it was a place of great industry, being at one time New Zealand’s biggest producer of coal and sustainer of the country’s largest settlement of miners and their families as well as home to ancilliary brick and coke-making industries.

That layered history, however, has always been difficult to penetrate. The sheer diversity of the site confused many visitors. Meandering tracks, a river and railway line through the middle and poor signage all added to the bemusement and sent many of the curious back to their cars none the wiser. No longer. Aware that the historic significance of the site was being missed, the NZHPT, which manages the Tyneside site on the right river-bank, and the Department of Conservation (DOC), owner of the much larger area on the left, collaborated on a trackbuilding and interpretation project so that the Brunner could finally tell its story clearly and intelligibly. This place of memory now makes sense in a way it never did before.

I hear insiders’ accounts of the changes when I meet DOC’s Jock Edmondson and Brunner site committee member Brian Wood at the brand-new Tyneside car park. It’s been raining without a break for three days – it’s still raining hard – and the river is running high and brown between where we are standing and the collection of ruins and relics on the other side.

Jock says that DOC intends to install panels at the Tyneside shelter to explain to visitors what they are seeing and where everything stood in relation to the mine. “It’s all about getting that picture into people’s minds. And that has been the difficult part of this project – to make this place coherent.”

Some well-thought-out landscape and track work has helped. Where previously a handful of sketchy trails ran off in all directions, there is now a sympathetically sloped and upgraded track that makes a loop of the site. Explanatory panels that dated back to the 1980s, some of which were looking very tired, have been replaced with new interpretations.

Brian, whose decades-long involvement with the site includes the writing of the history Disaster at Brunner, says the new take is very much a social history. He would like to see more emphasis placed on the industrial aspect, including plans of the mine workings to help visitors to understand just how unfeasible it was to effect a rescue of the lost 65. 

That said, navigating the Brunner site does open one’s eyes to the often ingenious, always laborious means by which the resources of a raw country were exploited. Nothing was wasted, as seen in the long rows of beehive ovens where coke was produced for the Australian smelting industry and the kilns that turned out Brunner’s famous fire bricks.

We’re perhaps overly inclined to think of heritage in terms of stately homes and public buildings. But our industrial heritage, “while a little bit mucky, is important,” says NZHPT National Heritage Policy Manager Nicola Jackson. “Now that we can just pop down to Mitre 10, we’re in danger of forgetting these processes, but brick-making and where you got your glass from were important considerations 100 years ago. And it’s the No 8 wire thing. We were very advanced in finding local solutions, so that ties into our national identity.”

For Brian, the significance of Brunner lies in what it says about the role of labour in shaping early New Zealand. “Some would tell you that this is a farming country and that it is rural history and the role of the producers that counts. Being a West Coaster, I’m more inclined to think its backbone was the workers.”

The workers who flocked to the mines at Brunnerton, as the various neighbouring settlements collectively came to be known, were mostly from the “ugly citadels” of England’s Midlands and the northern industrial counties. They were tough, no-nonsense men, by denomination often Methodist or Salvation Army. In fact, the memorial at Brunner is inscribed with a line from the Army hymn: “There is a land that is fairer than day, and by faith we can see it afar”.

They were not, however, shy of scrapping for a fairer land in this life, too. The men who entered the mine on that diamond-bright morning in 1896 may well have been involved in the industrial conflict that characterised the period leading up to the disaster, although not as leaders.

Recessionary times and falling demand for coal, along with the effects of amalgamations of the various business interests along the Grey, were by that time conspiring against the industry. Miners’ earnings had taken a hit; there’d been strikes and mine closures.

Perhaps tellingly, there had also been a rise in the number of accidents. In Disaster at Brunner, Brian suggests that years of industrial conflict had resulted in miners having less say in determining their working conditions which were becoming increasingly unsafe – in many respects similar to those seen in the third world today. Whether or not a decline in safety standards caused what happened at Brunner, it is certainly true, as he puts it, that “the disaster occurred at a time of considerable poverty and distress in the community”.

It was to get worse. At nearby Stillwater cemetery, where 33 of the dead lie in a mass grave, the list of names contains those of mere boys and some ancients, including 72-year-old John Morris. But most of the victims were in their prime and left behind widows with many children. A handful of those families would later join George Geoghegan, who lost two sons to the blast, in relentlessly, and eventually successfully, suing the company for negligence.

I meet Brian one last time at the Buck’s Head tavern in Taylorville, a few kilometres downstream, where the walls are papered with historic photos of the Brunner mine. Taylorville was the home of most of the victims and the pub was at the heart of its community life. If the cultural memory of the disaster lies anywhere, says Brian, it is here.

He points out a drum from the Brunner brass band, likely the same one that kept time for the funeral procession to Stillwater, where 6000 mourners gathered. Eighty years later Bill Mosley, who was 12 years old at the time of the burial, maintained that the sound of the drum as the colliery band played Handel’s Dead March was still resounding in his ears.