I was picked out for ‘below’ and was marched off with the rest of the gang to the mine shaft, or the ‘Coal hole’ as we called it

William Thompson, The Career of William Thompson, Convict

It is perhaps one of the more enduringly barbaric images of the convict system: men toiling underground in the near dark, crawling through crumbling tunnels to come at rich seams of coal. Like Port Arthur or Moreton Bay, places like the Tasman Peninsula Coal Mines attract more than their fair share of myth-making, the stories accreting around nuggets of historical truth. Often, our job feels like mining, as we hack away at myth to try to see the kernel from which it grew. Some would say this takes the fun out of history, but those people are wrong – history is interesting enough.

The British Empire was driven by coal, demand growing exponentially as the 19th Century progressed. A source of fuel, light and heat, it fulfilled domestic and industrial purpose. Naturally, as the Australian colonial project got underway, sources of coal were eagerly sought wherever the British made landfall. Exploitation began in 1801 at Newcastle, New South Wales, the tonnage exported to both Sydney and the newer settlements of Van Diemen’s Land. In this colony the government had been busily seeking its own resources, with at least eight identified by the 1820s. In 1822 the first coal was worked at Macquarie Harbour, the labour provided by convicts attached to the Sarah Island penal station. A short-lived affair that petered out by 1824, it gave way to a number of private attempts across the colony.

By the 1830s demand for coal in Van Diemen’s Land far outstripped the slow, expensive supply from Newcastle. It was therefore fortuitous when, in February 1833, a promising seam of coal was identified on the western arm of the Tasman Peninsula. A small group of prisoners experienced in mining were detached from the nearby Port Arthur penal station. Over the following two years they cautiously tested the coal, sinking an exploratory shaft and then an adit (horizontal tunnel) from the coast. The two main seams were opened and tested, with it being excitedly reported that the coal was good and showed no signs of thinning out.

So began a period of coal extraction that would last until the end of the century. The first fourteen years saw the mine worked by the government, using the skills and raw labour power of its convict workforce. The place quickly developed a paradoxical reputation. On the one hand it deployed and exploited the labour of prisoners who had developed their skills on the coalfields of the British Isles. Without their knowledge the mine was doomed to failure. On the other, for weavers or farmhands with no experience of working underground, being sent into the depths to haul overladen boxes of coal was nothing if not nightmarish. As with all such places, hundreds of experiences wove together to create its nuanced history.

Below you can learn more about the operation of the Tasman Peninsula Coal Mines during its period of convict operation (1833-1848).