THE COAL MINE AT BALMAIN
By George Repin
When he arrived in Sydney in October 1925 Ivan Repin could not work as a mining engineer because his professional qualifications were not recognised in Australia. It would be a further 5 years before he opened his first café in 1930 starting a successful chain of coffee shops which in the nineteen thirties were popular and a feature of the Central Business District of the city.
In the meantime, however, he had to find work. Through Daniloff, a miner who had worked for him in the coal mines of the Don Basin in Russia, Repin was employed in the colliery at Balmain. Few people in Sydney know of this mine which started operations in 1897 and was the deepest ever worked in Australia. It ran under the harbour from a site to the north of the Birchgrove Primary School.
Location and extent of the Balmain Coal Mine
Ivan Repin lasted in the job for three months – his services “being dispensed with owing to the partial closing down of the Mine”. This probably was not a bad thing for him in the long run as working conditions in the mine were poor and it suffered several disastrous accidents.
The Balmain mine was never a commercial success. Apart from the cost of the site, bought in 1895 for $15,000, considerable expense was incurred in sinking two shafts each 18 feet in diameter and fully lined, using over four million bricks. Other heavy expenses were the cost of surface machinery and buildings and the reclamation of a 580 foot wharf which provided 26 feet of water at low tide.
Balmain Colliery Pithead c. 1907
After five years of “sinking”, coal was eventually struck at 2880 feet but was split into several seams, the largest being only 2 feet 4 inches. Further out under the harbour the seam improved to an average of 4 feet 6 inches but the company never managed to produce enough coal to get a cash flow sufficient to offset the huge capital costs. It ran out of cash and work stopped in 1915. The mine was reopened in 1924 but after continuing industrial and financial troubles the operating company was liquidated in 1931 and coal mining at Balmain ceased.
Throughout its operations working conditions in the mine were poor. It was hot, dusty and gassy. Because of the depth of the mine and poor ventilation the temperature, at over 90 degrees F., was too high for dust to be settled by water sprays as the humidity would have been unbearable.
Miner underground working a 30 inch coal seam in very wet conditions
In a letter to the “Labour Daily” in 1924 a miner described conditions working in the mine, including a graphic description of walking from the shaft bottom to the coal face. “We start in single file – a stream of men about 70 in number. The dust begins to rise from under our feet and we are in a cloud due to horse refuse and stone dust” …..”After the best part of an hour’s walk under beautiful Sydney Harbour we reach, in a half-dazed state, the coal face”. The whole letter is reproduced in the publication cited at the end of this article.
The property was sold in 1955. Each shaft was filled with fly ash from the White Bay Power Station and concrete seals were placed on the shaft heads by 1957.
The description of the Balmain mine in this article is based substantially on the following publication:
PRIMEFACT 556 dated February 2007 issued by the NSW Department of Primary Industry
