The Black Diamonds of Sydney Harbour

Abstract

This article explores the case study of a coal mine that was first tunneled under Sydney Harbour in 1897 but closed in 1931. Specifically, it examines how the history of the mine intersects with aesthetics, race, colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Centered on the story of an English mining company that first sought a mine site in a pastoral area of the city, but under public pressure was forced to select instead a grimy working class suburb on the opposite harbor shore, the article argues that environmental aesthetics and tastes in beauty collaborated with extractivism. The argument emerges that economics, art, and aesthetics are inextricably linked in this history and further, that while the mine excited the industrial imagination through the aesthetic of the sublime, and associations with darkness and vastness, it conflicted with colonial settler tastes for the pastoral imagination defined by the aesthetics of the beautiful and its associations with light. The article discusses the context of a settler economy in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, and how conceptualizations of the sublime and beautiful, as well as dark and light, were aligned with the racialization of the properties of coal and space above and below ground.