114 / 128
NEWSPAPERS
With the digitisation of newspapers and the advent of comprehensive
search engines like TROVE, even more valuable sources of information
have become readily available to researchers.
The Newcastle Herald has kindly allowed us to utilise the information
contained in articles included or referenced in this account. Martin
Dineen’s “
Private’s Heroism Captured in Movie
” reproduced previously
on page 63 tells the story of Carol Burgess’s pride in her grandfather John
Allan Tansey’s involvement with the First Tunnelling Company in the
war. The Tunnelling Companies exploits were displayed in the movie
“Beneath Hill 60”.
Coal miners from the Hunter Region including Redhead and Dudley
miners provided an important part of the tunnelling companies’ expertise
and labour during the First World War. The Battle of Messines had begun
with the crucial and very effective detonation of the explosives placed in
nineteen mines under the Germans front line trenches.
The initial havoc caused by, and obliteration of the German’s front line
troops, meant an early successful entry into the War by Australian
tunnelling/mining companies and was in its way, an early attempt to break
down the advantage of troops in defensive positions with artillery and
machine guns against opposing troops trying to advance across open
ground.
This innovative approach to breaking down the power of the trenches
demonstrates a desire to find ways to win quickly the war but
only the advent of fresh American troops, the use of the tank, the
economic strangulation of Germany, new tactics such as General
Monash’s limited advances under precision artillery fire and the greater
numbers of Commonwealth forces, meant that the German forces were
compelled to seek an armistice in 1918; after more years of carnage.
The second feature of the War shown by the reporter’s story previously in
19. Killed and Lost
covers a sinister and soul destroying feature of the
War; the fact that not only did relatives not return to Australia but their
bodies were never found and could be never identified as belonging to a
particular grave. Families in many cases were unable to have a final
answer to what happened to a son and where he was buried. It is hard to
112