Trevor Mills with his two impeccably behaved Border collies Mill and Slim. Photo: John Thistleton.
Trevor Mills recounts slate struck with a hammer sounded like striking steel, yet splitting it correctly could separate pieces like two pages in a book.
In his early teens living near the old Chatsbury slate quarry north of Goulburn, Trevor soon discovered how valuable it was and how darned heavy it was to lift onto and off his father’s old 1948 Ford tabletop truck.
This was in the 1960s, more than 30 years after the quarry had stopped operating. Prospectors had scoured the district for good slate in the late 1800s and found promising sources under the Tarlo River about 17 miles from Goulburn.
After two attempts, they diverted the river with a 10-foot-high wall made of slate, of course. Welsh miners extracted vast quantities between 1915 and the early 1930s. The quarry closed for good after an explosion opened a seam of water which filled the lower section of the quarry.
Occasionally investors came along afterwards, scratching their heads and contemplating reopening the works. Divers were sent down once, according to Trevor, to locate the heavy machinery left behind, but could not find it, probably because of all the sediment that washed into the quarry over the years.
In 1956 Trevor’s older brother Donald, who had been away in Queensland, bought the property around the quarry for somewhere to live. Three years later, Trevor’s father, Victor, bought it and, along with his wife Daphne and most of their eight children, moved into the home there.
In the meantime, a man was regularly calling at the property, pulling out good slate from the outbuildings and workers huts and taking it back to Canberra.
Victor Mills training his Border collies. The wall in the background made of packed slate was raised to divert the Tarlo River around the Chatsbury slate quarry. Behind the wall is the heavily scarred hill above the quarry. Photo: Daphne Mills.
Victor challenged him and a dispute led to a court case, culminating in Trevor’s father securing mining rights.
So they took a fresh look at the quarry with a view to mining it once more.
“We were going to try and pump it out and get some better slate out and we had three big, six-inch (diameter) pumps going 24/7 on pontoons,” Trevor said. It was his job to make sure those pumps never stopped, and he set his alarm to wake each night to refuel them.
But after three months the pumps were unable to empty the quarry of water. Victor wasn’t about to throw in the towel. He turned his hand to reclaiming slate from stockpiles around the quarry.
Trevor and his brother Hilton helped him, and uncovered tools around the discarded slate used to split it. “It was more trial and error,” Trevor said. “We were lucky, we found some little bricky’s gads (splitters) buried in the dirt, that’s what we used to use.
“We got the slate out of the stockpiles, the slate they (miners) thought wasn’t any good,” he said. “You would dig up pieces, sit them up between your knee and split them off. You get a good piece of slate, it was beautiful to handle,” he said.
They supplied grey, green and purple slate for the new Travelodge Motel building on the corner of Auburn and Verner streets, Goulburn. Stone masons on the project specified the coloured slate that they required before laying them in specific patterns.
The Mills later supplied their Chatsbury slate for an even bigger project, lining the edges of Canberra’s ornamental showpiece Lake Burley Griffin.
“Dad formed a partnership with Norm Wind from Canberra; he was a Dutchman; he had a factory there,” Trevor said. “They called their company Wind Mills Slate Company.”
Aged about 11 or 12, Trevor Mills with his accordion. He became a proficient musician and played at bush dances at the Middle Arm Hall. Photo: Daphne Mills.
They heaved hundreds of tons of slate onto the truck. Arriving in Canberra, they raised the tipper slightly so the rock would slide to the back, enabling them to unload each piece without risking smashing it. The quarry continued supplying the lake project after Trevor and Hilton left to work elsewhere.
Victor sold the quarry in the early 1980s. Trevor went on to meet his wife Shirley, raise four children, while working in similar roles as his father for the Mulwaree Shire, neighbours’ farms and finishing with Goulburn City Council, running 400 head of cattle and shifting irrigation pipes in all weather. The work was hard, and perhaps not as interesting as that old slate quarry with multiple layers of history.
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