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Clip description
This clip re-creates the early days of mining in Australia, when contract workers laboured for long hours underground in dangerous conditions. In sunny scenes above ground filmed in colour, a group of contractors walk to the mine with their equipment. The pits below ground are filmed in black-and-white. As if to illustrate the safety hazards, fire breaks out and the roof caves in. Two workers haul an injured miner up to the surface.
Curator’s notes
The filmmakers vividly capture in monochrome the claustrophobia of the confined spaces down the coal pits. The pit horse represents older mining methods, but also has a dramatic purpose. Its distressed whinnying on the soundtrack and the close-up of it charging through the tunnels emphasises the dangerous conditions below ground.
The narration, read commandingly by Leonard Teale, is initially from the point-of-view of a miner, with the use of 'our’ and 'we’ helping to draw in the viewer. Later, it shifts to the impersonal documentary voice-over that was more common at the time. The phrases 'branch off to the left, branch off to the right’ and 'take it out fast and cheap’ are repeated like a poetic refrain and reprised in clip two.
