“On the 23rd of March I went back over to Hermitage and that was the end of the line. It was all over. It was the last chimney in town.”
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“It had a big impact on Lithgow, 180 blokes were gone. There were impacts all round, that included the railway, the shops, all sorts of things. There had been contractors working there for 20 years.”
This is how Gus Fergusson recalls the day, March 23, 1987, Lithgow’s first coal mine, and last valley mine, closed down.
“I was very sad because I only lived down the road and I used to ride a mini bike there,” Mr Fergusson said.
As a boy Mr Fergusson knew he wanted to be a miner like his two neighbours. When his mining career began at the Lithgow Valley Mine in 1965, the township’s coal industry was already destabilising.
“The State Mine flooded in 1964 and I had a start ready for then. But then they closed the mine and the books, until the miners were absorbed elsewhere. But in 1965 I got in.”
At the Lithgow Valley Mine Mr Fergusson worked as a shunter and on the ‘dog’s watch’, replacing picks and laying timber for the next day’s work.
By the time the Lithgow Valley Mine closed in 1979, Mr Fergusson was already working at the last of the valley’s collieries, down in the mine and washing coal.
“We’d pump the waste water under the Greyhound Track to keep the grass green. But the water was black.”
In 1983 Mr Fergusson worked for 24 hours straight on a Sunday evening trying to smother a spontaneous fire. A 200,000 tonne pile of coal stock had set alight and it took three days to put out.
“We pumped water from the creek and made a dam, then we pushed the coal through it. It wasn’t dangerous to homes, but it gave the town a bit of a smell.”
Eventually the Hermitage and the connected Fernbrook Mines were declared too difficult to maintain.
“The roof was a bad low roof and we couldn’t keep the belts clean, everything was wet and it ran like a river,” Mr Fergusson recalls.
A decade after the Hermitage closure Mr Fergusson had to retire from mining, which he had continued at the Angus Place Colliery, due to an episode of cancer. He became a bus driver.
“Oh yes, I miss the mines very much,” Mr Fergusson said.
“It was just the comradeship; there was something different to do every day.”