When Macquarie Colliery opened at Teralba, a suburb of Lake Macquarie NSW in 1978, solidarity was a way of life for miners, and a tradition. 'Cleanskins' learned about solidarity through the narratives of old miners, and traditional expressions of this solidarity such as district stop work meetings, family Christmas parties, and union organised institutions such as a miner's village for retired miners. The new generation of miners adopted these traditional expressions of solidarity, although their lives and the structure of their community was very different from miners of the past. Thus these modern miners were able to meld modernity and tradition, as the traditional unifying factor of solidarity was unchanging. Sadly for these miners, their community was alienated from other mining communities as a significant political event in 1988 saw the destruction of the solidarity the Macquarie miners had depended on. This destruction saw this community move away from the wider mining fraternity, and internalise, its members only expressing their beliefs and feeling through narrative. The end result was that with the loss of tradition, this community was marginalised and largely forgotten.

Coal mining traditions, in the form of inherited knowledge and beliefs, are well-documented facets of many coal-mining histories. Some coal mining histories have been produced with the sole aim of ensuring these traditions are not lost with the changing face of the industry.^[1] The emphasis placed on the coal mining industry by historians is not surprising, as it was as crucial and old an industry in Australia's development as agriculture.^[2] Coal remains a major export industry to this day.^[3] Coal mining is also popular in traditional labour and social histories, as coal miners had one of the strongest trade unions in the country for almost one hundred years, and this representative body makes an institution-based study of society appealing. However, there is a lack of literature focusing on coal mining in the mechanised period and even less looking at coal mining during the 1980s. A study of a coal mine found at Teralba in the 1980s shows that some of the unifying traditions amongst miners were in a state of change over the decade and this change led to the marginalisation of a community established in this time. Solidarity, the staunch adherence to an identified group, expressed through faithful support of fellow workers and adherence to union doctrine, was one such tradition that was destroyed in the 1980s within the Teralba community, which in turn prevented the community from growing and prevented future coal mining communities coming into existence based around the tradition of solidarity.

     When Macquarie Colliery opened at Teralba, in the city of Lake Macquarie in 1978, it existed in a place that already had strong historical and contemporary connections with coal mining. The city of Lake Macquarie can be found on the east coast of New South Wales south of Newcastle. A city of the Hunter Region, it boasts many picturesque natural features, the most significant of these being the city's namesake Lake Macquarie, a salt water lake covering approximately 110km².^[4] From 1828 the picturesque nature of the scenery in the area was seen as attractive to those wishing to retire rather than those wishing to make their fortune in agriculture.^[5] Likewise the lack of military order found at the convict settlement of Newcastle^[6] resulted in a more piecemeal approach to the city's development, with the suburbs sprawling over a massive area with suburbs becoming populated in relation to industries appropriate in the immediate environment or simply the view. The term 'city' is used now as an administrative description, as the area falls under the governance of the Lake Macquarie City Council, but has no identifiable city centre. The unifying feature of the area is the geographical feature of Lake Macquarie, and this is reflected in the history books written about the region, which tend to focus on suburbs rather than the entire 'city'.^[7]            

     The north west of Lake Macquarie, made up of the suburbs of Edgeworth, Barnsley, Holmesville, West Wallsend, Killingsworth, Teralba and Booragul, has an identity of its own. The area is made up of small suburbs mostly established in the 1880s,^[8] surrounded and disconnected by scrub bush. Rather than being centred on the lake, the north west of the region is situated around 'Salty Creek', a major creek running from the lake. This creek is now heavy with silt and pollution after many years of servicing heavy industry and a sewerage plant. The creek does not present the beautiful views of the lake as most of the creek is lined with mangroves. Thus, this area attracted industry workers rather than retirees.

     There has been a coalmine at the same site in Teralba since 1886.^[9] Initially known as the Great Northern Coal Company and financed by its employees, the colliery was re-named Northern Colliery in 1890.^[10] Soon after this the name was changed to Pacific Co-operative Colliery in 1893 then finally its most popular name, Pacific Colliery, in 1914.^[11] The mine retained this name until it was shut in the 1960s by BHP, the new owner.^[12] During this early period, the mine had worked the Great Northern Seam of Coal, which was quite close to the surface and also did exploratory work in the Fassifern Seam of coal.^[13] When BHP reopened the mine in 1978, it was decided that the mine would extract coal from the Young Wallsend Seam.^[14] The mine fell under the lease title of Westside, as was its neighbouring mine Stockton Borehole.^[15] However, Stockton Borehole mined the second lowest seam in the area, known as the Borehole seam.^[16] BHP also had ownership of Stockton Borehole and this assisted in the movement and washing of coal in the new mining venture.^[17] The company built modern buildings on 'pit top' including a bathhouse for the miners. A shaft was sunk at the old Pacific Colliery, which was re-named Macquarie Colliery by the new owners.^[18] The neighbouring mine, Stockton Borehole (commonly referred to as Borehole) had a drift entrance to the mine, thus making it easier to move large pieces of machinery down into the new mine site. For this reason, in the late 1970s, the small number of new Macquarie employees began developing 'pit bottom' via Borehole mine. Once the work was completed and the shaft sunk at Teralba, the Borehole access was no longer required and the two pits were divided off from each other via a pair of metal explosion proof doors.^[19] BHP received approval from the Department of Industrial Relations to mine the two pits as separate entities.^[20] Thus, the employees who started at Macquarie Colliery were mostly new to the job, or from Burwood Colliery, which was also owned by BHP and was being 'wound down' during this period.^[21]

     The establishment of a mine is not automatically synonymous with the formation of a community. Yet a community (named the Pacific 'blokes' or community after 1988) was formed based around the mine at Teralba, although it was not defined by the geographical existence of the mine. In effect the mine brought together a number of like-minded individuals who proceeded to acquire traditions from older miners and this unified the group into a community. As Taksa states, community is 'a web, a social formation that changes over time depending on individual choices as much as on a variety of pressures'.^[22] The miners assembled as a result of the creation of the mine chose to adopt traditional expressions and beliefs relating to solidarity. This occurred as a result of their dependency on older miners (who already believed in solidarity) to teach and protect them in such a dangerous physical environment. This dependency led new miners to quickly learn about and believe in the tradition of solidarity, which they saw as a necessity in the mining environment and this merged the miners into a community. Thus the Pacific community at Teralba was not based around the mine but was based around narratives.

     As the Pacific community at Teralba was based around narratives, no written sources existed to account for its existence and it was necessary to depend upon oral history to find and examine the community. The changing nature of memory is often presented as the weakness of oral history.^[23] This stems from the perception that memory is constructed in relation to social groups^[24] and that time results in changing social groups and thus memory becomes fallible as it moves further away in time. Alternatively, further experiences taint the memory of the past to formulate meaning in relation to the present. This research is not attempting to ignore the effect of memory on the participants' narratives. It is celebrating this natural function of recall, as memory allows the information that each participant perceives as most significant to be recalled. This gives the information provided more significance, as it identifies similarities in belief between the community members, as the narratives remembered give insight into the perspectives the miners did and still do hold about their community. If the informants believe the information to be true, this provides the researcher with the most important information about the way an individual interpreted an event.^[25] The interviews referred to here were collected in an attempt to identify and define the community that existed at Teralba during the 1980s. However, the oral testimony presented by the participants identified inherited traditions as one of the key binding points of their community and this inspired the current paper.

     New miners, often referred to as 'cleanskins',^[26] learned about solidarity through the narratives of the old miners who established pit bottom and other traditional expressions of solidarity. This solidarity was presented as necessary and worthwhile to new miners in a number of different ways. The most obvious of these presentations was through formal political action often taken in the form of strikes, protests and stop work meetings which provided men with a feeling of control over their own working conditions and rights. Robert Burton tells of the effect such mass meetings could have on men, especially if it was their first stop work meeting, and how it was an out-pouring of power. Robert remembers how:

Every pit in the North stopped for twenty-four hours. And you'd go up there and there might be three thousand or four thousand men would be at the Kurri Kurri sports ground. And they'd say right we're here to discuss the log of claims. But going back to going to the aggregate meetings, and never having been to one, and the first one the hair went up on the back of your neck, and I thought how good's this. And you know they're screaming this is what we're going to do, and we're going to demand [sic] this, and we're not going to do this.^[27]

These meetings were the ultimate display of political power for miners and they were happy to physically present their strength to make a point. Burton goes on to discuss the way the men at a protest threatened to storm an open-cut mine they were contesting until finally they pressured the authorities into bending to their demands. Burton laughs as he remembers the innocence of the miners: 'had they [the mine owners and police protecting the mine entry] stopped and defended it [the open cut mine], it would have ended up like, like all havoc would have broken loose. But they let them [the protesting miners] in and once we got in we didn't know what to do'.^[28] These mass political actions and successes allowed new miners to understand the importance and great power formal expressions of solidarity could bring.

     The miners saw their solidarity and the power it provided them with, as a way of protecting their employment interests but also their families and their futures. Solidarity between miners was established through community building exercises such as family Christmas parties,^[29] spontaneous socialising of work 'units' at race days and family holidays^[30] and formal institutions such as the miners retirement village at Teralba. Men working in the mines were immersed in a traditional culture of solidarity, emphasised to them through narratives of old miners. The importance of solidarity was not expressed explicitly, but rather old miners structured most of their stories through a battle narrative, which implicitly identified the importance of solidarity in the face of such opposition. These narratives constructed miners in opposition to a number of enemies. The first enemy a miner had to 'fight' was their employers^[31] and their bosses.^[32] While the men took great pride in their work ethic, they saw in their bosses, particularly deputies and under managers, as a largely non-threatening enemy that could be taken advantage of. Burton uses a battle metaphor to explain the relationship. He states that working in the mine 'was like being in a prisoner of war camp, where it was our duty to escape and it was their duty to catch you'.^[33] He went on to say that if a man got caught it was his responsibility to accept it, and it was the bosses responsibility to accept it if the men got away without being caught. Their employers, however, could not be taken so lightly. Paul Jones states that employers were often faceless names, who only appeared to take money from the men, so they were hated.^[34] As a result, the men rarely dealt with the managers' themselves, and left dealings with such high levels to their union representatives.

     The second enemy a miner had to battle was the most threatening, their environment.^[35] The mine was a living enemy, and a real enemy, which always had the capacity to injure, or kill. In fact, the area of the mine that most men who worked at Teralba saw as most dangerous was the walls, which were called 'the rib,' a human body part given to a personified enemy. Many interviewees spoke casually about death, aware that it was a reality, but still willing to take the risk. Many identified events that were 'near misses', that reminded the men of the daily war they were fighting, and their own fragility in comparison with their enemy.^[36] Paul Jones relates his perspective of death and serious injury and the way miners were able to deal with it in a conscious way. He states that 'fear was something that was not a good thing to have down the pit cause you could, you know, I always thought that if you were pretty fearful you were probably going to make mistakes for yourself or for others around you, you know, you were too worried about it'.^[37] This shows that each man felt he had a responsibility to those he worked with to protect them and be protected by them in return.

     The final enemy the miners felt they were at war with was their own bodies.^[38] Most of the men I interviewed had serious long-term injuries sustained in the mines.^[39] These injuries prevented the men from reaching the pinnacle social status of a miner, that being a physically fit man with a high work ethic. Thus, many men continued mining with their injuries. While none of the men discussed this issue directly, it was clear that working as a unit and working with other miners was the daily reality of working at Macquarie/Pacific/Teralba. To be injured meant that other men would have to do more work to make up for an injured miner. Thus, no miner wanted to be injured as it would not only effect the way they viewed themselves as people, but would also effect their capacity to work in a unit, which secured the highest pay.^[40]

     Cleanskins adopted these narrative topics and forms and most of the miners who provided oral testimony of their time at Macquarie were able to tell of a time when a workmate saved them by helping them when they were hurt,^[41] by showing solidarity in the face of a boss' attack^[42] or of physically saving them from injury in the mining environment.^[43] Prior to 1988, these miners believed that these were the only enemies they had to battle and all miners were their allies in this battle.

     The Macquarie miners celebrated the successes of those miners who had achieved significant industrial change before them. The cleanskins were grateful for the opportunity to work with miners who could teach them about solidarity, and were keen to maintain the achievements these old miners had made. Robert Burton most eloquently explains this when he stated:

I think that's why I was so lucky when I started, because you went into a unit of blokes and I worked with old Johnny Hughes and he'd started in the pits in 1948, so this is 1981. So this massive experience there. You know he'd been through all the hard times, and the bulk of them had come from Burwood to Macquarie, because they were both BHP pits, and when Burwood was winding down it was started up and you had these real old hard heads. You know union wise and fighting for the conditions which they'd all fought for, which is all gone today. Its all, that's the thing that I really see as sad, how from when we started how staunch everyone was, and now its just gone, totally gone. In the space of twenty five years I think they've gone backwards. They've gone back sixty years or seventy years. You know they've gone back to the days, I'm sure that they'll be whats ya, in another five or ten years they'll be calling under managers mister again. That will be tragic [laughs].^[44]

This form of learned memory was very important for the cleanskins, as they did not have their own experiences to refer to when establishing the tradition of solidarity. Miner solidarity was a feature of political movements of the past, which the cleanskins had not been part of. Thus, their adherence to this form of collective identification was a tradition, rather than a personal necessity.

     The solidarity taught to the new miners as a form of tradition would not have spontaneously existed without this education as the social structures did not exist in 1979 which had led to the outpourings of solidarity in Australian coal mining communities since the depression. Metcalfe identifies the importance of geography and place in establishing a coal mining community up until the 1960s in his study which focuses on 'the lives of the people who lived in Kurri', a coalmining town in the Cessnock region^[45] Yet, by 1979, the Macquarie coal mining community could not be connected through geography, as the eleven participants who provided oral testimony regarding Macquarie Colliery, were not based in Teralba. Improvements in transportation, conditions and pay^[46] by 1979 meant that miners were not forced to live close to their place of employment. The oral history participants cited lived in the north west of Lake Macquarie, through to the east of Lake Macquarie, Newcastle and Cessnock. The close social contact between miners Metcalfe identifies in his study, did not exist in Teralba in the 1980s and so presented no geographical basis for solidarity. The traditional mining village where the lives of everyone in the village depended on the mine, no longer existed. The geographical variance found in the miners who worked at Macquarie Colliery resulted in the miners depending on narrative and the various expressions of solidarity already identified to maintain their community.

     In 1988, the Macquarie miners learnt concepts of solidarity were destroyed with the merger of the Macquarie and Stockton Borehole mines. The 'event' referred to as either the 'takeover'^[47] or the 'amalgamation'^[48] by the interviewees began in 1988. BHP determined to close down the operations of one of their coalmines, and to merge Macquarie Colliery with its neighbour Stockton Borehole Colliery. Explosion proof doors joined the two collieries, and although an inter-seam drift needed to be completed, which took many months, the physical merging of the two mines was not a difficult task.^[49] It is not clear how the union came to be the deciding factor for who kept their jobs and who lost their jobs. Regardless of the politics behind the situation, it became clear that in 1988, half the men mining in the two mines known as the Westside Colliery Holding^[50] were going to loose their jobs.

     Traditionally, the union decided job cuts by seniority.^[51] Many of the interviewees emphasised the importance of seniority in the mines.^[52] It gave men security and was a driving force to keep working, as they knew their solidarity and their union would protect their jobs. Yet this case was different. Two mines meant two union lodges, and two union lodges meant two lots of seniority. The result was that the union had to decide which lodge was going to be made redundant. Thus, for the first time in the Pacific community's history they were not fighting with a traditional enemy for their jobs, they were fighting other miners. This destroyed the learned solidarity the miners at Macquarie (renamed Pacific Colliery by 1988) had used as the basis of their community. The community was further destroyed when it was announced the Stockton Borehole Lodge were to keep their jobs, and almost all of the Pacific miners were going to loose their jobs at the mine. Only approximately thirty Macquarie/Pacific miners were forced to retain their jobs, most under duress as they were threatened with not receiving their redundancy packages if they did not continue on in a casual capacity.^[53] The effect was a dispersal of the community, as the members rarely maintained close contact. Yet all those interviewed proved that the community still existed on the narrative level, as the miners' belief in solidarity was not diminished, rather it was internalised, as the miners felt they could trust no institution or miner other than those they worked with at Macquarie.

     The reality of the war discourse prior to 1988 was that the miners at Pacific Colliery were not required to forgive their enemy. They were expected to respect their enemy (in the case of the mine itself) and to continue working in the face of difficulties and injustices (as in the case of employers) yet they were never expected to forgive the enemy for their actions. Nor did the miners accept the actions of their enemy in many cases, even when the decisions were final. Paul Jones' presents a narrative about fighting his under manager even after he had been removed from his unit, which is a testament to this attitude.

     Thus, when it came to forgiveness and acceptance of the events that occurred in 1988, many of the men had trouble. They were not used to fighting their own 'family'^[54] and so each man had to make a decision regarding their reaction to the situation. Brown remembers that one miner who lost their job at Pacific Colliery had a brother who worked at Stockton Borehole Colliery, and these two men did not speak for an extended period of time after the merger.^[55] The reaction was made easier for those who no longer worked at the mine. They were able to come to terms with the issue in their own time. If they chose to forgive the miners who had taken their jobs, they were able to do it knowing they were bestowing a form of benevolence upon other miners, as they themselves held the moral high ground of a victim in the situation. Faull states that time and hindsight have tempered any animosity he felt towards the men who worked at Stockton Borehole.^[56] For those who continued at the mine it was a different experience, with traditional inherited expressions of solidarity being undermined, many of the miners in the Pacific community felt degraded and alienated from the mining community they had believed in. Being forced to continue working at the mine, as they were told by BHP that refusal of the casual work being offered would forfeit their redundancy packages further degraded them.^[57] Thus, they felt their rage on a daily basis as men from Stockton Borehole began moving into their pit. Paul Jones details the insult small, daily occurrences would have resulted in. Jones speaks of the importance of showers and lockers as physical markers of seniority and pride in a miner's job and hypothesises these things would have been taken over by the incoming miners.^[58]

     Likewise, as the miners in the Pacific community also lost their seniority to the incoming Stockton Borehole miners, they were forced onto 'back shifts' that they had worked years to 'escape' from. The Macquarie miners were forced to change their entire lives and return to working night work to enable them to keep their jobs and continue the battle for their families. Thus, the battle with the new enemy continued on a daily basis, even if it was not a verbal dispute between the men in a literal form.

     The Stockton Borehole miners who provided testimony generally show very little animosity towards the Pacific miners. Both Stan Juchniewicz and David Jones state towards the end of the interview, after having time to think about the circumstances of 1988, that they felt a level of guilt for taking jobs away from other miners, however believe that the miners at Pacific Colliery were fighting for their jobs just as hard as the men at Stockton Borehole Colliery and this justified their actions.^[59] Both strive to convince the interviewer, that the Stockton Borehole miners honestly believed that the Macquarie/Pacific/Teralba pit was there own, and that they never doubted they would simply move into Macquarie when Stockton Borehole finished.^[60] However there seems to be a great deal of bias attached to this argument. The narratives suggest that this was the point of argument that the Stockton Borehole Lodge president made to allow the Stockton Borehole miners to keep their jobs.^[61] As this argument had been successful, the politically aware miners, such as Juchniewicz and Jones had adopted this point of view as truth and a moral justification for their actions in the face of the accusations of unethical and immoral behaviour thrown at them by the Pacific miners. Horder, however, who was not able to remember the events which took place between the two mines, summed up his perspective by saying 'one day we worked at one pit and the next day we worked at another'.^[62] In his memory, the two mines were separate and he started mining at another mine the day he started at Teralba Colliery. His perspective is supported by the primary evidence which suggests that in legal terms, the two mines were legally separate and this would suggest that the Stockton Borehole miners had no reason to believe Pacific Colliery belonged to them.

     The acceptance and justification of the political point of view which won them their jobs, does not show that the Stockton Borehole miners were immoral or unethical. Rather it shows how similar they were in culture to that of the Pacific miners in relation to moral superiority and being able to justify their actions in relation to the group. It is not clear if the miners at Stockton Borehole had the same emphasis on morality and ethics as the Pacific community, however, it is clear that when they moved into Pacific Colliery (which was the same time the name of the mine was changed to Teralba Colliery) and began working with the men remaining at the mine, that the Stockton Borehole miners felt it imperative to have an ethical position from which to rebut the often aggressive and constant comments from the old Pacific miners.^[63]

     The Pacific community miners had no problem in establishing their moral and ethical position. They had been treated as unjustly as any miner could be without loosing their job. They had lost their seniority, their workmates, their redundancy packages, and their pit to an invading source. They had been let down by their own union and had no trust in the new miners that were entering the pit. Their community had been dispersed as they no longer were able to keep contact with any great ease, and they felt they had every right to continue the fight against the 'Borehole C's'^[64] as Brown expressed.

     While both the former Pacific and Stockton Borehole miners all stated they had to simply get on with the job and even eventually made friends on an individual basis, as they were all still miners and had a lot in common, the war between the Stockton Borehole men and Pacific men never stopped. Both sides had men who 'would not let it go',^[65] who would make reference to the fight as often as possible. Individual men made stances against the event in different ways, such as Brown's refusal to call the mine Teralba, but generally there seemed to be a significant level of taunting to and fro between the two sides. It seems that the urge for friendship may have been influenced by the fact that the Stockton Borehole men were aware that their moral justification of their actions was not as convincing in the face of the Pacific miner's grievances. The Stockton Borehole miners present the view that they were miners also and just wanted to 'mine coal'^[66] and to keep their jobs. The reality for the remainder of the mine's operating history was that the miners seemed to have established an uneasy truce.^[67] However, Paul Jones summarises the situation when he states that 'as far as Teralba goes . . . there was two cultures. Borehole and Pacific'.^[68]

     The internalisation of the community still working at the mine and the marginalisation of those who were made redundant had far reaching effects for the wider mining community. The Macquarie miners were not able to educate new cleanskins in the importance and necessity of the tradition of solidarity. The miners still working would not trust other miners enough to engage in expressions of solidarity as they once had. Thus the Pacific community was marginalised as being seen as unimportant, or simply trouble-makers^[69] and this resulted in a loss of the tradition of solidarity.

     This research is important as it records a significant event for not only the miners at Macquarie/Pacific, but also for the functioning of the union, and the beginning of the new era for the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) who eventually represented them. The changes experienced in the 1980s with redundancies, downsizing and eventually union amalgamation, are hardly amenable to a heroic-style labour history, although today the CFMEU is able to put a positive spin on such issues.^[70] The events, which took place in 1988 during the Stockton Borehole merger, placed the union in a position of immense power over the lives of its members. However, rather than representing its members, it was deciding which of them to abandon. This event can be seen as a product of the time and obviously had a profound effect on the members of the community who worked at Macquarie/Pacific Colliery. It is important to note that this event, as a result of the union's unusual position within the dispute, has largely been forgotten or ignored. Yet it remains a clear metaphor for the industrial relations that were to come for the members of not only the community being studied but also coal miners in general. This research shows that traditions, such as the expression of solidarity through action and the formation of unions which seems so under threat by the nations hostile federal government, were in fact being disintegrated in the 1980s. Only through recognising the failures of the institutions which represented individuals and by understanding the traditions of those individuals which helped them bind themselves into communities, can we ever hope to achieve Thompson's aim of labour history being the 'history from below' where 'lost causes' and 'losers' are 'valid in terms of their own experience'.^[71]