Sixty Miler

I am a coal miner on a Sixty-Miler: the term used for coal transporting ships going from Hunter River to Sydney. They are named as such simply because that is the distance from point A to point B for all ships in commission for this specific job. Like my father before me, and his father before him, I bury my body in and inhale the soot from one of Earth's most valuable commodities to make a living. It is the year 1932 and my son is my world, my purpose. I am caught in the throes in a perpetual battle with myself. This trade is the only skill I have, and it is what puts food in my son's belly. We die young in this line of work; they call it the black lung. The ultimate irony and a Shakespearean tragedy wrapped together, in that my son’s very lifeblood is what will, in the end, take me away from my him, Jamie, my little boy.

Some mornings, I like to sit on the benches overlooking the harbor outside of Hunter River here in New South Wales. I see the Sixty-Miler ships carrying the mornings load out on the horizon. I imagine my grandad and my pop's ghosts underneath those boats, moving them along to their destination, in a never-ending funeral procession, the ghosts of miners past carrying their own coffins above them through the water, with their sons standing atop. They say we stand on the shoulders of giants. I think in reality we just purchase the lumber, little by little, for our own coffins, until one day they are complete and those “giants” are our ancestors’ ghosts looking on, weeping at their failures. They are doomed to pass on the dangers and mortality of our trade to future generations.

My own father died when I was 12, and now I fear that my son will suffer the same fate. My father used to always tell me that he worked to give me a better life but would also lament about my school and work ethic and say things like: "In my day, we did our schoolwork, then the housework, and if we were lucky, every now and then we could lollygag outside. Even then all we had to play with was rocks and sticks!". Why do we do that? We say we want a better life for our kids in one breath, and then complain that they have it better than we did in the next.

I know one thing as I sit here watching those ships make their slow advance across the river; my son will not carry on the family business. He will live to be 100 years old, with children, grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren. In a big home, the smell of meat and potatoes permeating the air, Jamie will wake in the morning with his heart beaming. His children bake him a cake for his birthday and reminisce on all the wonderful times they had together in their long, long lives. He will teach his children to be kind, empathetic, successful people. I see them eating dinner round an oak dining table that I built for him before I died. I see my sweet boy’s smile on a body I do not recognize because I did not survive long enough to ever meet that version of him, but now he is not smiling, he is sobbing with his head in his hands, soot and coal are pouring out of the corners of the dining room ceiling and burying my family in that bleak darkness that I breathe daily. No one seems to notice as they eat their dinner but Jamie. Now he is leering at me with pleading eyes as his children are submerged in the bounty of my work, energy to fuel the world at the expense of the inhabitants of that very world. I see him mouthing the words, screaming, "Dad!", but all I can do is watch as my family suffocates under a bed of black. Then I wake up, having fallen asleep on my bench, realizing it was a dream. A constant dread fills my stomach, thinking or knowing even, that it was no dream at all, but a premonition. The future for my son, that ghost ship on the horizon.