110 years after Australian miners went underground at Hill 60, the secrets of the tunnels remain

Historian Mat McLachlan

110 years ago this month, Australian miners from all over Australia - from Ballarat, Bendigo, Broken Hill, Newcastle, North Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and beyond - took over the claustrophobic tunnels beneath Hill 60 in Belgium, and began one of the Great War’s most secret fights. 

The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company arrived near Ypres in November 1916 to relieve Canadian tunnellers. They named their galleries after home: Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Newcastle, Hobart. In places, only a few metres of blue clay separated them from German tunnellers digging in the opposite direction.

For seven months they worked in silence, listening through stethoscopes pressed to the clay. At the end of the tunnels sat two enormous mines. They were among the 19 that detonated at 3.10am on 7 June 1917, destroying the German line on Messines Ridge in what was then the largest man-made explosion in history.

But the Australians’ most haunting moment came six weeks earlier. On 25 April 1917, two years to the day after the Gallipoli landing, an explosion tore through the tunnels beneath Hill 60. Three officers were killed instantly in their dugout, and seven men resting in the tunnels were trapped. None of the ten survived.

They included Captain Wilfred Avery of Mackay, Lieutenant Arthur Tandy, a Ballarat-trained mine surveyor who later worked at Cloncurry, and Sapper Charles Glew, a North Queensland miner who enlisted at Charters Towers.

More than a century later, the cause remains unknown. Some accounts blame a German shell. Captain Oliver Woodward, who arrived with the relief party that night, believed a faulty detonator was responsible.

Eight of the ten lie at Railway Dugouts Burial Ground near Zillebeke, within sight of the hill. Avery and Tandy are buried at Poperinghe New Military Cemetery. Others who died under Hill 60 were never recovered, nor were many British, Canadian, French and German soldiers who fought for the hill from 1914. Hundreds still lie beneath it.

Military historian Mat McLachlan, who marked Remembrance Day this week at the Menin Gate in Ypres, has been sharing the tunnellers’ story from the site as he finishes a five-month journey across Australian battlefields, from Vietnam to the Western Front. 

Also on the journey: more Vignacourt negatives found

During his Western Front tour, McLachlan visited Vignacourt, where Brisbane couple Donna and Michael Fiechtner have taken over the Thuillier Farmhouse, a WWI photographic studio once marked for demolition. As restoration begins, more glass plate negatives have been found hidden in the attic walls. The Fiechtners have launched a crowdfunding campaign for the restoration.

Visiting Hill 60

Hill 60 is open to visitors, who can walk boardwalks along the original trench lines, see a German pillbox and the Caterpillar crater, and visit the Australian Tunnellers’ memorial. It is a few kilometres from Ypres and the Menin Gate, where the Last Post sounds every evening at 8pm. All Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours of the Western Front visit Ypres, the Menin Gate and Hill 60.