test 01
I’m a miner. I dig holes for a living. ‘Dig’ is a generous word, really. I blow things up so we can go deeper. Drill, charge, blast then bog it out. Then repeat. It’s loud, dirty, and dangerous. But it’s honest work, and there’s a rhythm to it, one that makes sense. Until the day it didn’t
The mine is called Kalgara Deep, carved beneath the sun-blasted hills of Western Australia, three hours from the nearest servo, and six from anything you could call a town. It’s not on any tourist map. Just a dot behind a red dirt road lined with scrub and ghost gums, baking under the kind of heat that feels like a punishment.
Above ground, there’s nothing but flat country, shimmering mirages, and the low growl of LandCruisers kicking up clouds. Below, it’s another world entirely. Black, hot, pressurized. Like working inside the lungs of a sleeping beast.
The decline spirals down like a corkscrew, levels branching off like arteries. On the walls, streaks of ironstone and quartz run like veins, whispering of wealth. But all I see is rock. Rock that hates us.
We live in its shadow, day in, day out. The walls we drill into are older than time, but they shift and breathe when they think we’re not looking. Miners don’t talk much about it, but we all feel it. The weight of the mountain above. The way it presses down on your shoulders. The way the ground moans when no one’s talking.
The crew, well, they’re part of the mine too. Worn, thick-skinned, most of them. Sun-cracked knuckles, tattoos faded by lime dust and sun. We come from everywhere—Kalgoorlie, Perth, Darwin, Broken Hill. Some from Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Fiji. All of us pulled in by the promise of cash and a kind of brutal peace. Down here, nothing matters except the job. It’s simple. Honest.
It’s The Deep.
It started like any other swing. Seven-on, seven-off, twelve hours at a time. I’d had my coffee on the bus in, made the usual groggy jokes with the crew, and geared up for the pre-start. Another day, another meter into the rock.
No Shortcuts.
No Shit.
This wasn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been charging faces for over a decade. You get a feel for the place after that long. The way the ground breathes, the way it creaks and pops when it’s restless. That morning felt normal. Almost too normal. The kind of quiet you don’t notice until later, when you’re trying to remember what warning signs you missed.
The headings were deep, past 1000 meters. Hot, humid, still. My offsider, Davey, had cracked a joke about the air being thick enough to drink. We were loading up the cut at the end of the 5065 decline, getting ready for the next blast. The drillers had done a clean job. I was priming the holes while Davey stood back, leaning against the wall and fanning himself with his helmet like an idiot.
“You reckon if we keep going down, we’ll pop out in China?” Davey asked, grinning through the dust.
