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Miners The
miners of the Western Australian goldfields were the driving force behind
the colony's Federation Movement. Many of the prospectors and alluvial miners
of Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, Kanowna and a host of other centres in the goldfields,
came to Western Australia during the 1890s from eastern Australia. A large
number of Victorian-born miners participated in the formation of the Australian
Natives' Association - an organisation which had helped push for Federation
in eastern Australia.Many of the residents of the goldfields brought with them radical ideas about republicanism, socialism and unionism. Hostility to the government of John Forrest ran very deep among the miners of the fields. The Forrest Government's 'ten foot' law which forbade alluvial miners from digging any deeper than ten feet, granted big gold mining companies the rights to all minerals below that level, sparking widespread protests and unrest among the miners in the late 1890s.  Miners
complained that the Forrest Government had used the wealth generated by
the gold boom to benefit the residents of Perth, Fremantle and established
farming districts. They resented the absence of government services such
as fresh water and felt excluded from decision-making by an electoral distribution
weighed heavily in favour of pastoral and farming districts.For the miners, Federation represented a way of achieving fairer representation in Western Australia as much as affirming their links with friends and family in the eastern colonies. By 1899 this strength of feeling combined with frustration with the Forrest Government gave rise to a move to separate from Western Australia. It is no coincidence that it was at a conference of the Trades and Labor Council at Coolgardie that the Western Australian branch of the Political Labor Party was formed with the aim of contesting the first federal election in 1901. |
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