In the early 1950s, ambitious young historian Geoffrey Blainey, in the employ of the Mount Lyell Mining Company, wrote a Master’s thesis and then a book, The Peaks of Lyell, tracing the history of the Mount Lyell Mining Company.

The book was first published in 1954. Over the decades thousands of copies have been printed across six editions. Gracing the bookshelves of many Tasmanian homes, its version of events are often recounted as fact.

In his chapter on the 1912 North Lyell Mine disaster Blainey blamed miner and union leader, Robert Francis Stone, as the ‘incendiarist’ who lit the fire in the mine (although he never actually named him)¹. This was despite the Royal Commission that investigated the disaster explicitly ruling out incendiarism - or arson in today’s terms. The fire, the smoke, the carbon monoxide caused the death of 42 miners. Many more died from the legacy of the trauma and smoke inhalation in the years following. The generational pain and trauma caused by this event still haunts Queenstown and many lives beyond. Queenstown does not forget.

The people of the town, along with those in Linda and Gormanston, and indeed the whole of Australia, waited for over four days to know if the men trapped beneath the fire at the 1000-foot level would be safely rescued. They were - through acts of bravery, ingenuity, co-operation, determination and gruelling physical exertion.

Blainey based his case against Stone on circumstantial evidence, some of which has since been disproven, and much of it credibly challenged. Many historians and writers have pored over records of the events leading up to and after the fire. I know from experience that once you become caught in the detail of this history you can never leave it behind. It is labyrinthine.

Over time claims and counter-claims have been hurled into the labyrinth. Blainey, now famous and known by many of his conservative positions, has been cast as anti-worker and anti-union. Notably, his position was shredded in 2012 on the centenary of the disaster in Peter Schulze’s book, An Engineer Speaks of Lyell. Schultz said he wanted to set the record straight and that evidence was suppressed at the time for various reasons. He went into great detail, finding evidence of several electrical fires in the underground pump station at the 700ft level of the mine prior to the October 1912 disaster.

Blainey’s motivation was possibly quite pure. Like any detective he wanted to solve the case and offer a neat explanation – tie things up with buttons and bows - in an attempt to put the historic trauma to bed. But life and history is much, much messier than that.

I first entered this tangle of history when I visited the treasured Galley Museum in Queenstown - a collection accumulated by and through the dedication of retired miner Eric Thompson.

It was sometime in the 1990s. I was home from studying in Sydney and yearning for Tasmania (as those of us who move away often do) when I saw images of the funeral train, and the extraordinary photographic record at Eric’s museum and then later in the State Archives.

I became obsessed with finding Robert Francis Stone.

Returning to Sydney I received fat envelopes of newspaper articles carefully dug out and photocopied at the State Library from my dear, curious father. A newly retired academic, he had not yet reconciled himself to a life of veteran’s golf and winter pilgrimages to the Sunshine Coast.

Returning home to Tasmania in 2005, resolved to become a writer and build on my previous work in film and theatre, I set about working on an opera libretto about the North Lyell tragedy. Tasmania had a ground-breaking opera company in those days, IHOS Opera. It was recognised on the national stage and had presented at the Sydney Festival.

I wrote, I researched, I hung around at the back of the Queenstown Council chambers on meeting nights hearing gossip of days past. I spent night after night in a discounted room at the Mount Lyell Motor Inn. The mine was still operating. On shift change night the miners knocked off, assembled in the bar and then spilled outside for a smoke. The magnificent landlady, worried for my welfare, would call out to me in her dressing gown from the upstairs balcony to check I was okay. I was.

But the opera company failed to secure ongoing government funding and its artistic drivers largely moved overseas where it continues to operate from Amsterdam. I moved on into a different life.

Twenty years later, I came back.

I’m still caught in the tangle of history but the opportunity to return to Queenie and write has given me a pathway I never could have hoped for. It feels like a pathway home.

I can’t explain the mystery around a tragedy that has caught so many of us in its thrall. That’s not my job. Drawing me back time after time are all the voices unheard, or heard only briefly. I believe I may have found my space seeking out the voices not amplified by history. Those who were there flickering for a moment, in a newspaper article or giving evidence at an inquest, or writing a will underground as the poisoned air overcame them.

So, what of Blainey’s supposed incendiarist Robert Francis Stone? In 2006, round the back of the Queenstown Council Chambers, I was told the general view was that he signed up for WWI and died. Convenient but wrong.

Tracking him down through historic records I am beginning to sense him, but doubt I will ever quite pin him down.

Robert died in Melbourne in 1948, just a couple of years before Geoffrey Blainey started writing his book. I located his death certificate which showed he still considered himself to be a professional miner when he died.

I know a few things now. Three of Robert Francis Stone’s children and his wife were still alive when The Peaks of Lyell was published. Whatever history they held about their father and husband appear to have gone to the grave. But you never know.

What I do know is that despite claims the mining company hired a private detective to try to trace Robert Francis Stone and his family, Blainey never spoke to them. Maybe the family hunkered down and held their tongues or maybe the private detective was particularly unskilled.

Robert was no freewheeling radical. He was born in 1881 in Beaconsfield, the son of a former senior mine manager and later, hotel keeper of the Exchange Hotel. He started work in the local mine when he was still a child and, like so many miners of his day, he went to the mainland, working in Broken Hill. He was a widower whose first wife, Frances Machul, died shortly after the birth and death of their third child in 1906.

He returned to Tasmania with two small children in tow, Agnes and William, aged two and four, and continued to work as a miner. He was elected as secretary to the Beaconsfield Workers Political League in 1911 – this league shortly became the Labor Party.

Probably leaving his babies in the care of his mother Jane, now in his early thirties, Robert went mining on the West Coast, to Mount Lyell. His younger brother, St Clair Stone, who had been working as a mill hand at the mine in Magnet, near Waratah, followed him.

In September 1912 St Clair was crushed in a terrible accident at the Mount Lyell mine. The huge rockfall killed two of his workmates instantly. The roof of an area all thought to be safe, where the miners often ate their crib, caved in.

St Clair was conscious when they found him and asked for the rocks to be lifted off him. In evidence to his brother’s inquest Robert spoke of how long he sat vigil as St Clair slowly died from terrible crush injuries. He was just 23 years old.

Published with permission of Eric Thomas Galley Museum, Queenstown.

The photo of him you see here was probably taken post-mortem.

The epitaph Robert and his mother had scribed on St Clair’s grave in the Queenstown Cemetery read ‘A human life sacrificed on the altar of dividends’.

These words incensed some in the community and in 1913 Alderman Allen from the Queenstown Council had them painted over - obliterated. Fiery debate over several council meetings ensued.

Weeks later Jane Ellen Fowler, Robert and St Clair’s mother returned to Queenstown and reinstated the epitaph with a wreath, carefully curated under glass and issued a legal notice to ward off any further interference with her son’s grave. The council was stumped.

I visited St Claire’s grave again in October 2025. I hadn’t been there in twenty years. I found it using a map of the cemetery marking the site, sent to me by the efficient staff of the West Coast Council. I knew from my first visit, the wreath, the glass protection and the epitaph are long gone. The grave is unmarked. As are the individual graves of the 42 miners that died just weeks after St Clair in the North Lyell disaster.

The following day was a surprisingly clear and warm Sunday, with the distant yells, cheers and cackling commentary from the Rec, Queenstown’s infamous gravel oval, where artists and locals were facing off in a football match like no other. This match marks the end of the Unconformity Festival. At halftime I wandered down to the Galley Museum where I had the honour of sitting with Denis, Robert Francis Stone’s grandson. It was our first meeting. I saw Denis’s face twist in old anger as he recounted some of the burden and rage his family carry to this day. I heard stories about his grandfather’s life and struggle. He gave me a photo.

A face now, for the name. Robert Francis Stone.

I think of Geoffrey Blainey in 1954, his youth, his ambition, his eagerness to find a path out of the labyrinth by the simplest and most direct route. I think on his carelessness. And I think about the Stone family, a family that has lived under the weight of the story Blainey told for over seventy years.

This poem had its beginnings in 2006 as an aria to open the unfinished opera. While based on evidence presented at St Clair’s inquest, it is largely a work of imagination.

–

¹ Schulze, Peter. (2011). The North Mount Lyell Disaster: a miscarriage of justice. 16th Engineering Heritage Australia Conference: Conserving Our Heritage - Make a Difference! Engineers Australia, Barton, Australian Capital Territory, pp. 203-216. ISBN 9780858258877

A human life sacrificed on the altar of dividends

I will remember you
Little brother
Running through the high grass
It was golden
It was
Tracking with you down the muddy path
to the river
Throwing smooth stones
Hooking silver fish
Waltzing and flickering shafts of light
And breeze spooking through the casuarina
I want to remember summer days
Currawongs calling us from the pines
Not the dark stone pit
Shudder of explosive above
Steel on stone
Heat,
water dripping
Smells of men
Sour sweat, urine
grunt,
grind
and clang
I saw you put on the mantle
How it sometimes hung heavy on you
Made your shoulders stoop just a little
Too young, still shiny
A practical miner
Perhaps not
But a miner nonetheless
I could not enrage you
make you understand that
they did not care enough
I tried to prise mother’s hands a little looser on your vest
Watching her cling to you
But you went underground
And sent her your wages
And they carried you out
Broken
wounded
crushed
Ribs bleeding
Neck gouged
Jaw smashed
But you had said
‘For God’s sake Teddy lift this stone off me’
And they did
With you all night
Watching your shattered chest
Knowing the bleeding is on the inside
‘I'm all right now, but my legs are caught’
And at 4am
you
still
knew
me
Let’s go running in the high grass
My brother
Let’s ride the bicycles to the store
Then beyond
Freewheel down the Beaconsfield hills at sunset
Wait until the last moment to turn for home
Until darkness has nearly set upon us
Lift this stone off me
Lighten this load
It is too much
What we carry is
too
much
to bear
Roaring or weeping
That is me now
Weeping and roaring still
For God’s sake lift this stone off me
I'm all right now,
but my legs are caught
And I want to change the world

Susan Wallace

Susan is a Tasmanian born playwright and screenwriter having made a number of successful short films and worked for SBS television for many years. She is also an advocate for affordable housing, asbestos disease sufferers and workers’ rights. The Moonland Project represents an opportunity to return to her writing and work to further her deep fascination with Tasmania’s West Coast. Also a celebrant, she is interested to explore ceremonial acts and the pause they give us in our daily lives. Susan hopes to explore some of the powerful imagery of the 1912 Mount Lyell Mine disaster and its echoes through our history.