The Last Mt Kembla Pit Pony
For over a decade I've been wondering about Tom. One day in 2006 Graham Bartholomew, "Bart" to everyone, showed me old Tom's horse shoes at the Mt Kembla Public School Museum. We talked at length about him, Bart described how he found him alone in a paddock on Calderwood Road in the 1970s, he'd been left behind when the rest of the horses were sold. No one knew anything about the history of this horse. Bart told of how Ken Mason, the hostler for the mine, took him up to Windy Gully and trained him pulling sleepers, then tested him underground, when all went well he bought him and put him to work at Nebo Colliery. Ken named the new pit horse Tom, after Tom Wetherall, the Mt Kembla Hotel publican at the time. Bart tells of how, incredibly, a couple months in they realised the black pony was actually still a stallion, but with impeccable good manners and temperament... Try as I might though, without a photo, Tom was always a mystery. Since then I've been asking and searching for a photo of Tom. It seemed such a shame that there were no photos at all of our very last pit pony.
A couple of days ago, while looking for a photo of Nebo Colliery on Illawarra Images, a photo I'd never seen before caught my eye. As I clicked on the description and read, I laughed out loud and couldn't wait to show Bart the picture of his old mate. You see Bart was the last farrier to shoe Tom. He removed his last pair of shoes on the 15th of May 1988, Tom had lost one so there were only three shoes in the set. Bart donated the shoes along with the docket for $30 to the school museum in 1994. No one thought to take pictures back then Bart lamented "there was no need". In the interim years, the Illawarra Mercury has donated their photograph archives to Illawarra Images and the staff at Wollongong Council library have been busy cataloging them. Among them, this precious photo of Tom ready for work with his chaff bag and his wheeler, Terry McCarthy, at Nebo Colliery on the 2nd of August 1986 care of Fairfax Media. Hopefully the newspaper article this picture was probably taken for will turn up soon too.
Tom lived out his remaining days at Windy Gully, Kembla Heights, looked after by Pieter Teunissen (and his family) who had taken over the job of looking after the pit ponies after Ken Mason passed away in 1977. Pieter's daughter-in-law Jennie tells that Tom had a mustache and a very gentle nature. He passed away "during the cold, wet miserable winter of 1988... [and] is buried where he went down, in the paddock on the north side of the house" (J. Teunissen 2017).
So here's to remembering Tom, the unassuming stallion, who was the very last in a long line of horses to work in an underground coal mine at Mt Kembla and possibly New South Wales. Two Queensland horses, Warrior and Mr Ed, were the last underground working pit horses in Australia who retired in 1990.
This short clip provides a glimpse into the working lives of Mt Kembla pit ponies.
"A horse in the pit you know, he's a faithful thing... you've got no idea." Rene Purcell 1976 interview with Stuart Piggin from the University of Wollongong Archives.
