In Collinsville, a boy could tell the time of day by the sounds around town, the rhythm of men heading to work, the quiet before the heat set in, and the small signs that life was built around the mine. For Gurney Clamp, that world was not something he visited, it was the way he grew up.
“I was born in Collinsville, and from the start, mining was just part of everyday life,” Gurney shared.
His earliest memories are of a family home where nothing was wasted and everything was made to last. The roof was kerosene tin, the walls were brattice bag with whitewash, and the floor was ant bed packed hard underfoot. At night, light came from a two-burner carbide lamp until a better one could be bought. Even the cups on the table carried the marks of the times, condensed milk tins repurposed into drinking cups, their handles shaped out of the lids.
“We didn’t have much, but you didn’t think about it like that. You used what you had, and you just got on with it.”
It was not a childhood built on convenience, but it was built on resourcefulness, neighbours, and the kind of practical problem solving that mining towns have always understood.
School, too, had its own routines. Collinsville State School was not where Gurney found his favourite hours of the day, but like most kids, he found the joy around the edges. Lunchtimes were for Red Rover across the football field, marbles in the dirt with a ring drawn in the ground, and tunnel ball during the weekly exercise period, played with what felt like a heavy ball at that age. In those early years, students wrote on slates, and the rules of the classroom were enforced in ways that belong to another era.
“The best part of school was lunchtime. That’s where all the fun was.”
With no tuckshop in those days, the highlight for many kids was the local pie man. Jerry Schmidt would arrive with his oven on the back of his ute and set up under a gum tree, flipping through his order book and calling out names as he handed over meat pies, pasties, apple pies and sausage rolls, always with sauce on hand.
“I can still picture him there with his little book. You’d order in the morning and he’d have it ready at lunchtime.”
But for all the childhood games and schoolyard stories, it was mining that sat at the centre of Gurney’s world.
His father worked at Scottville as a mine deputy, a job that carried responsibility long before anyone else started their shift. The deputy’s work began with inspection, and in those days, getting to work meant riding a push bike from Collinsville to the mine and back again, day after day.
“Dad had to ride his push bike to Scottville for work, three miles there and three miles back. That was just what you did.”
When Gurney reached about five years old, his father decided it was time he understood what that job really involved. So on Saturdays, Gurney would go underground with him.
It is a memory that has stayed sharp across the decades, stepping into the cage, dropping down the shaft, and watching his father move through the mine with the deputy’s safety lamp and a canary. As a child, it felt like adventure, a glimpse into a hidden world beneath the town. Later, with age, came the realisation of what the canary and the lamp were for, and the quiet logic of safety in an era when risk was managed with the tools available at the time.
“Dad would take his safety lamp and the canary, and I’d go with him. At the time I loved it. I thought it was the best thing in the world.”
Looking back now, Gurney admits he sees it differently.
“It was only later in life I started to wonder where I fitted in the safety chain. If there was gas, the lamp would flare up and the canary would fall off its perch, and then it was just Dad and me down there.”
Those underground trips were not just about the mine, they were about understanding what mining meant to families. The work shaped the household, the week, the community, and it shaped the stories people told.
Some of those stories were built from mischief and the kinds of pranks that travelled fast through a small town. Everyone knew his father did not like the dark, even though he worked in it every day, and others took that as an invitation.
“Dad didn’t like riding home in the dark, and everyone knew it. They’d play tricks on him.”
One winter night, as he rode home past the cemetery, a couple of men in sheets with a light held underneath jumped out to frighten him, sending him running the rest of the way home. There were other versions of the same trick, including one involving a miner riding a horse home in the dark. The horse reared, the rider hit the ground, and the story goes that he burst into the pub announcing a ghost had nearly got him, only to be asked where the horse was.
“He’s coming.”
In towns like Collinsville, stories like that weren’t just jokes, they were part of how people coped with hard work and long days. They were entertainment, warning and laughter all rolled into one.
Gurney’s childhood curiosity also pulled him close to the working world in ways that would make modern parents wince. One day, he and his cousin Darrell wandered around the State Coal Mine gantry, climbing up high to see what they could see. Up there they found a coal skip sitting on tracks and, as kids do, they pushed it for fun.
“We thought we’d give it a shove, just to see it move. Then we lost control of it.”
It got away from them and rolled down the rails, heading into the mine shaft. They ran, convinced no one would ever know.
“We ran like hell. We thought we’d got away with it, but Dad found out.”
The next day, the truth caught up with him at home, delivered in the language of the time, a leather strap and a lesson learnt the hard way.
Outside of work and school, the mining community also knew how to make a day of it. The miners’ picnic was held once a year, and it was a big deal which everyone looked forward to. A steam train would pull out with carriage after carriage filled with miners and their families bound for Bowen. From there, buses would take them to Queens Beach, where families spent the day in games, food, and the kind of shared celebration that only makes sense when you’ve lived a life built on shift work and routine.
It was a reminder that mining towns weren’t only defined by the pit. They were built on families, friendships and the shared understanding that everyone was working towards something bigger than themselves.
Today, Gurney is looking back over a life shaped by coal towns and the people who lived in them. The places have changed, the work has changed, and the world has moved forward, but the memories remain, not as a neat timeline, but as moments. The sound of a steam train, the taste of a pie eaten in the shade, the creak of the cage heading underground, and the feel of a childhood spent in a community where mining was never far away.
And perhaps that is why he has started gathering these stories now, not as a history lesson, but as a way of keeping something real for the next generation.
“I don’t want these stories to be lost. I want my family to know what life was like back then.”
For the next generation, the mining towns of the past can easily become a few names on a map, or an old photograph in a drawer. But in Gurney’s memories, they are alive, full of texture and humour, hard work and simple joy, and they tell the story of what it meant to grow up as the son of a coalminer.
