Summary

An extract from the Introduction:

Mount Mulligan, west of Cairns, is an impressive natural landmark whose underlying coal deposits supported a small mining town from 1914 until 1958. On 19 September 1921 a massive coal dust explosion in the Mount Mulligan mine killed all seventy-five, or perhaps seventy-six, men and boys who were working underground.

The Mount Mulligan disaster was the greatest industrial accident that Queensland has ever seen and because of the isolation and small size of the community in which it occurred - perhaps also because of the romantic splendour of its setting - the story of the disaster has become a part of North Queensland folklore.

Despite the strength of this oral tradition, no substantial account of the Mount Mulligan disaster had been written before 1977. Occasional commemorative newspaper articles had described the disaster, usually drawing on the more sensational features of the 1921 press reports. Regional histories gave Mount Mulligan and the disaster passing mention, treating it as a chance event unconnected with the more coherent passage of human activities, and outside any visible causal pattern.

This study treats the disaster as an integral part of North Queensland mining history, and thus necessarily describes at some length not only the rise of Mount Mulligan, and its progress and decline in the decades following the disaster, but also some events further afield in the Australian coal industry. The explosion was not a random incomprehensible intrusion into the explicable domain of human affairs, but the logical result of geographic, economic, social, political and technological forces. A random element undoubtedly influenced the immediate initiation of the disaster at that particular time and place, but chance to that extent plays a part in most human activities.