Fields Find Mine blast 1899.
On the morning of August 31st 1899 a 20 kg box of explosives and some detonators were taken down to level 2 of the Fields Find gold mine. Later that day, Daniel Hogan, William Payne, Fred Smith and Edward King went past this box on their way to work on the shaft.
At the face they drilled into the rock and set their explosives, then lit the fuse and retreated some 50 meters back up the shaft to what was considered a safe place.
Men working at the surface heard their charges go off, and then heard another much more severe blast. Tragedy has struck the mine.Such was the scale of damage down the shaft that it took rescuers hours to reach the level at which the men had been working. There they found that the stored explosives had wreaked havoc, perhaps triggered by the blast at the rock face – or by a cigarette being lit in the wrong place.
Over the next 24 hours they also found the scattered remains of four bodies. These were gathered together into two coffins and buried on September 2nd 'in consequence of the smell and the flies'.An area, the size usually allotted to four graves was fenced off at the Fields Find cemetery and a single marble tombstone was laid in the centre.
Surrounded by acacias on a flat of soft soil about a mile and a half from the mine, the people of another small isolated gold mining town mourned their dead. At least two of the victims, Hogan and Smith had brothers working here too.All four were young men aged between 22 and 38.
Their deaths mirror those dozens – perhaps hundreds more who died in the unforgiving early years of the goldfields.
Ashes to ashes – dust to dust.
Source; Fields Find cemetery, Memorial Board