I would like to thank Dawn Epton for her kind words of the commemoration event for the 81 miners killed in the Old Bulli Mine on March 23, 1887, Australia’s second-worst industrial disaster – only overshadowed by Mt Kembla’s disaster, 15 years later in 1902.
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With the Appin Mine 1979 disaster, our region has had the three worst industrial disasters in Australia.
Old copies of the Illawarra Mercury show how the whole of Australia rallied around our local community, first in 1887, and then again after the 1902 disaster.
In speaking of learning from such tragedies at last weekend’s commemoration, I was echoing the values of my Uncle Alex Hicks, then president of Illawarra Colliery Employees Association and mayor of North Illawarra Council, when he spoke at the dedication of the Mt Kembla Mine Disaster Memorial in 1905.
We’ve lost more than 260 local miners during the last 150 years. We do not want to lose any more. That is the lesson from the 1887 Bulli disaster commemoration.
