What lies beneath: remembering Huntley Colliery

It’s a quiet morning in Avondale as we arrive at the Huntley Colliery site entrance, an abandoned car sitting there, wild grass whispering in the wind. The air carries a faint smell of native trees; there’s not a trace of the dark dust that once coated the area, but beneath the soil, the echoes of the mine’s past are still entwined with the place.  

It was 1946 when three brothers, William, Phil and Frank Waugh, opened the colliery. The original vision was local and determined. Handworked in the beginning, the mine was named ‘Huntley’ as a homage to Huntly in New Zealand, a family link for the brothers.

Former miner Roger Mason, now in his eighties, remembers the mine well.

“It was a good place to work. When I went there, I think there were some 300 men up there at the mine.” 

By 1951, the mine was acquired by the Joint Coal Board, and by 1955, the Electricity Commission of NSW took over to supply the newly built Tallawarra Power Station on Lake Illawarra. Production took off. In 1966, Huntley Colliery became the first Australian mine to produce over one million tons of coal in a year. 

The trucks rumbled, steel beasts carrying black gold that would keep lights on in homes. Mason remembers that there was a sense of certainty.

“This fella said, ‘don’t worry, coal never goes bad, so the coal is always gonna be there’,” he says.

But alongside its achievements came whispers of something darker. 

While official documentation on dumping at Huntley Colliery remains scarce, the coal industry’s record in the region is far from perfect. In 1973, the ABC program Four Corners examined the waste dumping in the Illawarra escarpment as a broader environmental concern. The suggestion is that mining operations were under-scrutinised when it came to operations like waste management.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, miners and locals began talking in hushed tones of waste being buried on-site, and sicknesses that followed. According to the mine’s history summary, in December of 1985 the Illawarra Mercury reported an unusually high rate of a form of cancer, lymphoma, among the Huntley workforce. Seven men were out of work, two had already died in the 1960s. 

Initial investigations were launched. In 1986, a workplace environment survey was funded by the federal government, and overseen by Dr Steve Corbett of the South Coast Workers’ Medical Centre, and Dr Barry O’Neill of Wollongong Hospital. 

With the mine closure announced on the 14th of June 1989, and the workforce retrenched on the 17th of July that year, the coal mine’s working life ended. The following year, the environment survey concluded that no identifiable circumstance peculiar to Huntley Colliery was likely to increase the risk cancer. 

However, in 1997, a peer-reviewed study found that the cohort of New South Wales coal miners from Huntley had a Standardised Incidence Ratio (SIR) for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma of 3.27 and Hodgkin’s disease of 7.27. 

“At one stage, the mine was going quite well. Within six months, they closed the mine, and after there was many rumours going around,” Mr Mason says.

Back in Avondale, we attempt to walk the fenceline to see more of the old mine. The escarpment towers behind, trees slowly reclaiming the land. We can’t legally access the site itself because the gates are locked, but we stand at the edge, where the colliery and nature clash. 

In the silence we imagine a different time, long before we were born: steel-capped boots crunching, trucks loaded with black gold rumbling off to the power station, conveyor belts humming; we can see workers emerging from the pit, dust covering their faces, bantering in the change room. But then we also imagine the breeze carrying coal dust, the mine dump piled high, the unknown material buried.

What is rumoured to have happened at Huntley Colliery is more than an old local mining tale. It speaks of a complex relationship between the industry and the community, the hope of progress, and the shadows that can follow. When we discuss waste dumping, we also discuss accountability, the cancer clusters, the cost of labour, and the hidden costs of production. 

The archival records are telling. The NSW State Archives holds the ‘Huntley Colliery Inquiry Papers’ which is filled with transcripts, exhibits, correspondence and medical reports under NRS-10015. The final report remains officially classified. 

Even the publicly released peer-reviewed study acknowledges that there is an elevated lymphoma rate in the cohort but aren’t able to exclusively tie them to specific causes in the mine environment. Which leaves the community with statistical anomalies and stories. 

For the community, Huntley Colliery was more than a mine, it was where Santa would arrive in the back of a ute, where generations of families could work, and where many believe an important truth was buried.