["Paradise or Purgatory? Another Whim Creek Willy Willy", The Sunday Times (Perth, WA), Sunday 31 March 1912, page 7]
PARADISE OR PURGATORY?
ANOTHER WHIM CREEK WILLY WILLY.
The Scarifying of Saunders.
Is Whim Creek a paradise for the worker, or is it a purgatory? That is a question very difficult to answer. If you want to get an authoritative answer from those who should be in a position to know, it all depends on whom you question as to which side of the case will be placed before you. Those connected with the management of the Whim Well Copper Mine will tell you that those in charge lose their sleep o' nights thinking out schemes for the well-being of those under them; but the latter, with base ingratitude, will tell you that such tales are all bunkum, and that a couple of years spent at Whim Creek is quite equal to a similar term spent in purgatory.
Last week "The Sunday Times" published an interview with Mr. Claude Saunders, who for two and a half years had been engineer on the Whim Creek mine, and some of the statements there made brought a deputation of three to us almost as soon as the office was opened on Tuesday morning (on Monday we suffer a recovery and carefully abstain from work). The spokesman of the trio had a grievance against the writer that on the last occasion he was in we did not publish all he said, and though we pointed out to him that had we done so it would probably have cost us something in the neighborhood of £5000, which of course HE was not prepared to pay, he hardly saw it from our point of view. "You allow them to call us larrikins," he said, as a clincher, and we allowed the argument to be clinched.
However, the grievance of the deputation on this occasion was last week's interview, which they required to contradict in detail. The first statement of Mr. Saunders they took exception to was where he stated that agitators misrepresented the true facts of the case with regard to bringing men up to the mine under contract. The spokesman said that they did not object to men going up, but they objected to the system. The men were landed without any agreement except that which bound them to pay the company their fares back, and the result was that they were completely at the company's mercy. And it was more than strange that these men were always brought when the company expected trouble with the union.
"Mr. Saunders says that Mr. Sleeman assists the men to make homes for themselves," continued our interviewer. "He has, but the man has got to build on the mine's freehold land, and if the man is compelled to leave the district his improvements are valued by one of the company's officials and paid for accordingly. There was a case recently where Mr. Saunders valued some property, and he set a value on it which was not equal to what the man had previously paid the company for the timber alone, without allowing for his labor or anything else.
"As far as Mr. Sleeman is concerned," he continued, "we give him every credit for there is no doubt he has made the mine what it is. The men have no personal grudge against Sleeman, though it cannot be said that they like him. One must certainly take exception to Mr. Saunders' statement that some of the men up there are not genuine workers, for they would not be there, so far from comfort and civilisation, unless they were.
"The next statement of Mr. Saunders in which he deals with the Chinese market garden incident and refers to unionists as the 'larrikin element,' I must strongly contradict, as it is completely opposed to the facts. Mr. Saunders says:
Several white men tried to produce vegetables up there, but could do nothing with them. Later on a Chinaman sank a well, got water, fenced in a garden patch, and started to grow vegetables. He had got a nice crop just coming on when one night the larrikin element raided the garden and tore up the tomatoes, cabbages, lettuce and everything else, throwing the lot over the fence. It was neither manly nor wise, for not only the men, but the women and children were deprived of the chance of obtaining fresh vegetables. Of course the Chinaman has left and no-one has grown any since.
"The true facts of this case were altogether different," continued our informant. "The men had all along been opposed to the yellow man getting a footing in the field. Some time ago there were two Chinese bakers at Whim Creek, but we got rid of them by getting a baker up from Geraldton, and guaranteeing him our support. He is there yet. Before the Chinaman started the garden a man named O'Reilly was running one, and he is there yet, Mr. Hales, the manager of the store, held a block of land under a miner's right, which he let to a Chinaman to run a vegetable garden. Subsequently, a letter from the Lands Department was read at a meeting of the union, stating that the conditions had not been complied with, and adding that anyone who liked, providing he was possessed of a miner's right, could peg it out again. Next morning one of the union officials – not 'one night the larrikin element' – pegged out the ground, and said that there was alluvial there. That is the true story of the incident.
"One more contradiction and I have finished. Mr. Saunders states that at Christmas time the company took the men and their families on the trams to Balla Balla, carried fresh water for them, took them out on the company's schooners, and gave them a good time. What is more, they paid them their wages as well. This is not correct. It was only the staff who were taken out for a picnic. I can assure you that not a single working man on the mine apart from the regular staff on weekly wages, went out on the company schooner at Christmas time. Furthermore, there was not a man who didn't work for them who was paid his wages at that time--we three were there and know. You will thus see that Mr. Saunders hardly gave a correct statement of the case in his interview last Sunday."
No wonder the elements in the vicinity of the Whim Well Copper Mine are occasionally disturbed with disastrous results, when one section of the residents at Whim Creek will persist in stating that black's white and another section are equally certain that white is black.
