It stands in Kitchener Park, a monolith to the memories of days gone by.
So says Col Maybury, who has been reflecting on the role of coal in his life.
Over to you, Col.
I was a youth then, just 16. I had worked the last year as a ticket boy on the Newcastle wharves. Now I was going down the Aberdare shaft mine, near Cessnock. A miner just like my father and grandfather before me.
The poppet head towered above me. The spinning wheels threw morning sunshine, as men and tools suspended in the iron cage descended 250 metres into the dark mine below. There were two counter balancing iron cages. Each carried four skips with one tonne of coal. The mine depended wholly upon the poppet head and the coalfields of Cessnock and Kurri relied upon the mines.
The mines are no more, but the collective name lives on - a proud remnant of the past. In time it must go. But standing beside that huge machine in Kitchener Park, the sights, sounds and smells of the productive mine came rushing back.
They played jokes with novices in the cage, riding into the black depths below.
A new man riding was signalled by bell to the engine driver, who would then allow a much faster ride down the shaft. To the novice miner, it felt like his stomach was coming out of his mouth as the cage accelerated to terminal speed.
When it slowed, the stomach tried to exit at the other end. The old hands feigned nonchalance, leaning against the iron walls while wetting themselves inwardly.
I was employed to work as a trapper, almost under the clay pigeon shooting range at East Cessnock. We travelled 4.5 kilometres along the transport road on an electric man transporter, through the jungle of wooden props supporting the three-metre high roof.
The sounds, smells and sights so alien to above-ground earthlings came fast, as the props and white-walled ribs of coal flashed by. The white was stone dust blown on the walls to suppress coal dust explosions.
My job was to sit all day on a block of coal, holding a tattered rope attached to a large wooden door. I had to pull it open on the sight of a wheeler and his horse, with two skips going deeper in the mine. The door was a necessary part of clean-air flow through the mine. Air entered the shaft at the poppet head and exited via the exhaust fan, after a full circuit of the mine.
Here I was, safety helmet and lamp on my head, a battery on my belt, sitting on a lump of coal in dark bowels of the warm earth, scared witless at first, listening for a horse coming out of the dark. I was an insignificant but integral part of the huge machine that won the black coal and earned Australia so much in those days when coal was king.
The skips, hauled by wonderful and willing well-trained horses, were released to the care of the clipper to be attached to an endless wired rope, snaking some 4.5 kilometres to the pit bottom.
It was a huge industrial system to handle 2400 tonnes of precious black coal each day. And it all revolved around the poppet head.
Underwater Art
Speaking of things beneath the surface, we were chatting to Shawn Stowe about Aboriginal art on a rock shelf 20 metres or so off the shore of Stockton Beach.
Shawn, of the Worimi people, said it wasn't far from where the Sygna shipwreck existed. It was carved before the sea rose.
"My uncle showed me three fish carvings on the rock shelf when we were spearfishing. They're probably 15,000 to 20,000 years old."
Shawn saw the art in the late 1980s. Wonder if it's still there?
