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Clip description
This clip begins with a sign which says 'Tarn Shan Tin Mine’. The camera pans across the mountainside, showing a man pulling a bucket from a well, local workers standing on large wooden barrels and the expatriate men who run the mine.
Curator’s notes
Horace Buckley was sent to Thailand (then called Siam) in the late 1920s to open the Tarn Shan Tin Mine, seen in this clip. Aspects of expatriate work life in South-East Asia are not often captured in home movies, let alone from the 1920s. Buckley’s involvement in the mine gave him an interest in filming what might otherwise be thought unimpressive, particularly by those of us unfamiliar with tin mining. What it reminds us, however, is that Australians have worked and lived in the region for decades.
Tin is an important natural resource in Thailand and Malaysia. Another example of tin mining in the region can be seen in the home movies of Dubbo-born Arthur Reginald White, who lived in Malaysia (then Malaya) for 30 years after the end of the First World War and filmed the workings of a tin processing plant in the 1930s (see Tin Mining in Malaya, c1930).
