The Coalminers of Queensland Volume 1:
Creating the traditions

Pete Tomas has been a journalist from the time he left Perth Modern School in the early 1930’s and he has been a member of the Australian Journalists Association continuously since 1933.

From 1946 on, he worked for leftwing and trade union newspapers in Brisbane and Sydney. He was editor of the Miners Federation’s weekly journal common Cause from 1973 until he retired from that position in 1979. He has over ht past 30 years written many booklets on industrial-political subjects. Several of these have been for various trade unions, including the Queensland branch of the Building Workers Industrial Union, the NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation (in the Green Bans years of the Mundey-Pringle-Owens NSW leadership) and the Miners Federation.

Following his retirement as Common Cause editor, he wrote Mining in the 1970’s, a 550-page book taking the history of the Miners Federation on from where Edgar Ross ’A History of the Miners Federation of Australia left off. Miners in the 1970’s was published by the miners Federation in 1983.

By Pete Tomas

The Coalminers of Queensland Volume 2:
The Pete Thomas Essays 

Greg Mallory has brought together eight essays that Peter Thomas had written over a two-year period prior to his death in 1988. These essays were contained in the archive that Pete left to the Queensland Colliery Employees Union, later to be known as the CFMEU Mining and Energy Division (Queensland District Branch).

The essays describe the working and living conditions of coalminers and their families in Central Queensland from the early 1960’s to the mid-1980s. After various large companies (many of them multinationals) realised that there was a great deal of money to be made from the mining of coal in these areas, they set about to develop mines and recruit labour. On the whole, their industrial relations attitude to the workforce was one of confrontation resulting in industrial action ny the miners union in conjunction with other unions.

The essays are divided into three sections – ‘Mining Communities’, ‘Campaigns and Strikes’, and ‘Utah and the Union’- and portray a militant union that was prepared to fight for basic improvements to its members’ working and living conditions. The essays also show how the union entered into social and political arenas, such as demonstrations against the attacks on civil liberties in Queensland under the Bjelke-Petersen Government.

The union was also involved in a range of community activities, ranging from donations to charitable causes to supporting the building of community and sporting facilities. The essays also highlight the role women played in the development of the union particularly through the women’s auxiliaries around the time of major strikes. They also describe the activities of some of the more prominent officials who rose to state and federal positions within the union, as well as branch officials and rank-and –file activists.

By Pete Thomas and Greg Mallory