Such Was Life: And Such Was Death

Such was life? For many in the early years of the remote Western Australian Goldfields it was And Such Was Death. It was a time when the largest typhoid epidemic in Australian history ravaged the Western Australian Goldfields. When one in ten women died in childbirth. When beer was cheaper and safer to drink then water with the result that alcoholism was commonplace. When, as a result of isolation and deprivation, men committed suicide by dynamite or cyanide. And, in later years, racial and social tensions resulted in days of rioting and death. And from the first days of underground mining through to modern times, accidents in the mines was a regular part of Goldfields life. The almost 1,500 men and women who died in mining accidents are remembered in the Memorial at the Museum of the Goldfields and in the moving poem “A Man Was Killed in the Mine Today” by Tom “Crosscut“ Wilson which closes the film.