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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...