The Guardian 20 July, 2005
Book Review by Phil Doyle
Black Diamonds and Dust
Greg Bogaerts' useful book, Black Diamonds and Dust, takes us into the workplace
of the 1880s, and into a working-class culture that is still remarkably familiar.
Not that Australia's first coal mining novel is full of modern sensitivities, far from it, but the
characters exhibit the same reluctant and frustrated engagement still found across a lot of
Australian working class communities.
The anti-hero of the piece, Edmund Shearer, and his fractured, muddling but surviving family would
be at home in the Western Suburbs of Newcastle today.
It is a graphic and sometimes violent work that exhibits a style of writing that familiarity with TV and
film has tended to banish. There is plenty more showing than telling in this yarn.
There are surprises here but they are not contrived, but rather very human. It lauds a knowledge
that comes from bitter experience, from failure. It is also remarkably illustrative of the double bind
many people still find themselves in today.
Shearer is a coal miner in Newcastle's estuarine collieries, the ones that used to jut out under the
harbour, metres below the water level. It opens with the inevitable cave-in from burrowing too close
to the sea and continues on through the life of a community, finding its feet in more ways than
one.
As a fable it bears a remarkable parallel at times to Icarus' flight too close to the sun, teasing out
the relationships between fathers, sons, daughters and mothers. But don't let that put you off, it is
also a ripper read; a gut-wrenching page-turner with its fair share of humour amidst the grinding life
of Adamstown before it was a weatherboard suburb.
The fact that this book is published at all is a cause for celebration. It has been put out by that
unashamedly working class publisher, Melbourne's Vulgar Press. It is hard to see this sort of story
being valued or so exquisitely crafted on Penguin's list since the advertising copywriter Bryce
Courtney mortgaged their values.
Boegarts himself is a scion of the 'castle. A sometime taxi driver who has worked at BHP and this
is his first novel. Not that you'd know, it reads like a modern classic. Let's hope it's not his last and
that Vulgar can keep the bank manager away for long enough to see him in print again.
Buy Black Diamonds and Dust, read it, and learn something about who we are and why we
are.
Workers Online