Dr Paul Watters

From Hill 60 to Home: The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company

History EN ↓ 5 episodes

From Hill 60 to Home: The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company “The hidden war beneath the Western Front - and the families who carried its shadow.” Beneath the mud and trenches of the First World War, Australian tunnellers fought a war few have ever heard about - digging in silence, laying mines, and enduring gas attacks in the suffocating dark. This podcast series follows the story of the journey from the tunnels of Hill 60 to the kitchen tables of Depression-era Australia. It is a story not only of soldiers, but of wives, children, and communities who bore the long shadow of war across generat...

Author

Dr Paul Watters

Episodes

Episode 0 - Beneath the Western Front: The Tunnellers’ War Begins 29.12.2025 18:46

At dawn on 7 June 1917, the earth beneath Messines Ridge exploded, tearing the landscape apart and signalling one of the most dramatic victories of the First World War. This episode begins with that moment and descends into the hidden world that made it possible: the underground war fought by tunnellers beneath the Western Front. This prologue introduces the origins of mining warfare, explaining h...

Episode 1 - From Maitland to the Front: The Making of a Tunneller 29.12.2025 15:53

This episode traces the transformation of Alphonsus Joseph “Albert” Edwards from a young working man in Maitland into a frontline tunneller on the Western Front. Told through first-person investigative narration, it begins with a personal moment of discovery - a name carved into a school honour board - and follows that thread into the archives, service records, and lived experience of war. Set aga...

Episode 2 - Into the Earth: The War Beneath the War 29.12.2025 20:41

This episode takes the listener fully underground, revealing the hidden battlefield beneath the Western Front and the reality of the tunnelling war that shaped both the conflict and Alphonsus (Albert) Joseph Edwards’ life. Set in France and Belgium in 1917–1918, it explores the unseen world of the Australian Tunnelling Companies - men recruited to dig, listen, counter-mine, and fight in total dark...

Episode 3 - The Gas Attack - A Minute-by-Minute Account 29.12.2025 20:54

This episode reconstructs, in forensic detail, one of the most devastating moments in Alphonsus (Albert) Joseph Edwards’ war: the mustard gas attack of March 1918 that permanently damaged his health and crippled the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company. Drawing closely on war diaries, appendices, and medical records, it traces the attack as it unfolded - minute by minute - from the first shells to th...

Episode 4 - The Long Shadow: Family, Memory, and the Next Generation 29.12.2025 15:47

This episode follows the war home, tracing how the consequences of underground service shaped not only Alphonsus (Albert) Joseph Edwards’ life, but the lives of his wife, children, and the generation that followed. Framed through a family photograph from the early 1930s, it shifts the focus from battlefield to household, from explosions and gas to illness, endurance, and memory. The episode begins...