Leslie Milo FORSYTH was the youngest son of Elizabeth Emily Milner CROMPTON/COX and her second husband, Thomas Taylor FORSYTH.

Much of Leslie Milo FORSYTH's physical characteristics have been gleaned from his army ‘Attestation Paper of Persons Enlisted for Service Abroad’ completed and signed on 13 November 1915 in Ross, Tasmania. These state that he was born at Mt Jeffcott, Donald, Victoria on 20 October 1888. He named his mother, Elizabeth FORSYTH of Bayswater, Victoria, as his Next of Kin. When Leslie signed he was single, 27 years and 1 month old, a blacksmith by trade having been apprenticed to H.V. McKay Sunshine Harvester Co. for four years and that he had no previous military service. Leslie was 5ft 7in (1.7m) tall, and weighed 12 stone (76.2kg). He had a dark complexion, blue eyes and black hair. Right: Leslie Milo Forsyth in 1912 from the wedding photo of Mabel Frances BLACKMAN when he was best man to the groom Oliver Otto PEARSON. Caroline Louisa COX, his half sister, had married William JT PEARSON, the groom's brother. The Electoral Roll from 1912 to 1914 shows that Elizabeth Milner CROMPTON/COX/FORSYTH may have lived in Port Melbourne with Leslie. There are two typographical error - Leslie Milo and Elizabeth Milner, which may indicate another couple. Thomas Taylor FORSYTH is not mentioned.

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Leslie and Elizabeth were recorded at this address until 1914. In 1915, Leslie Mils (sic) is the sole recorded inhabitant. However, his mother Elizabeth Milner lived in an unspecified Bayswater property from 1914 to 1925. 35 Raglan Street was, at various times the home of his half sister, Caroline Louisa COX, Effie CADWELL and WJT PEARSON. It is possible that Elizabeth Milner also lived with Caroline Louisa and WJT PEARSON at the Woodman Road nursery. Left: 35 Raglan Street, Port Melbourne, 01 December 2015 Author

Blacksmithing in Queenstown, Tasmania

Before the First World War, Leslie lived and worked in the copper rich but isolated west Tasmanian town of Queenstown. He may have had to take a steamer from Launceston to Strahan's Macquarie Harbour before boarding the Abt railway to Queenstown to take up his trade as blacksmith. Geoffrey Blainey, in his book The Peaks of Lyell, records that the proverbial blacksmith's shop sprang up besides a score of new tunnels, if only to sharpen and temper the boring chisels. However, Penghana, a mile up the railway from Queenstown was the site of the original Mt Lyell blacksmith workshops, until it was burnt to the ground in the bush fire of 12 December 1896. The passages below will give a flavour of Leslie's experiences. Right: A map locating Queenstown, Tasmania

It is likely Leslie was employed by the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company ¹ (MLMRC). On 22 May 1903, James Crotty's North Lyell Company (registered September 1897) and the Mount Lyell Mining Company merged to form MLMRC. The North Lyell Company had a good mine with good quality ore, but it was being poorly developed and managed and its smelters were a failure. The Mount Lyell Mining Company had only a mediocre low-grade mine from the original Iron Blow excavation, but its eleven pyritic smelters were perhaps the best in the world. Blainey (ibid), comments that miners would remain there just long enough to earn their fare back to the mainland. However, following the 1912 fire industrial harmony and affluence prevailed in the copper fields. The photos below show illustrate scenes that Leslie may/would have seen during his work.

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Although the Electoral Roll shows Leslie living in Allan's Lane, volunteers in Queenstown's Galley Museum (see below) were, after extensive research, unable to find Allan's Lane or any mention of Leslie. They think that as the miners cottages were placed randomly on the hills that Allan lived at the bottom of the Lane. The Electoral Roll suggests that Leslie returned to the same address after the war and before his marriage in 1920. This is doubtful. The photograph below shows Bachelor Street is to represent Allen's Lane, though at a post-World War 1 date.

Blainey (ibid), describes miner accommodation at the turn of the century. Although Leslie was there twelve years later, some of the accommodation may still have been seen in the townships. The insanitary conditions remained until 1995.

'At first most men lived in small hillside huts, erected by their mates in Sunday working bees. Even in 1901, when houses were rapidly replacing huts, 1,100 of the 2,900 habitations in the district were single-roomed huts, and another 700 houses had only two rooms. In the same year, males predominated by almost two to one, and by an even higher ratio in Gormanston, where gales and rain and creeping mist made miserable the days of the housewife. As the women increased, the shanty suburbs gave way to small houses with red or tarred roofs. The main street of Queenstown, already packed with solid shops and two-storied hotels, wore an impressive façade when the three-stored brick hotels - the "Empire" and the " Imperial" - sprang up by the railway station to greet wealthy investors.

In the first years they were insanitary towns, scourged by typhoid and dependent on frequent rains to wash away the refuse. As there were few acres of arable land on the west coast, fresh vegetables and fresh milk were luxuries. In 1898 two cows grazed in the district, and tinned milk was the vogue. Despite the high rainfall water was often scarce. At Gormanston running water was often impregnated with copper, and miners complained that sulphur fumes contaminated tank water.

The area of what was to become the first Mount Lyell settlement was soon pegged out, and a shanty town, Penghana, grew up in the Queen River valley. It was burnt out in 1896 and the settlement, renamed Queenstown, moved further down the Queen River, though still dominated by the then Mount Lyell Mining Company. Queenstown boomed. By 1901 it was Tasmania's third-largest town, with 5051 people, fourteen hotels, banks, schools and shops. It soon gained electric street lighting, provided by the Company's Lake Margaret power scheme. In the 1954 edition of his book Blainey (ibid), describes Queenstown as

The heart of the town retains the [the frontier town] atmosphere of the 1890's, though new public buildings have been built in recent years. When Orr Street, the narrow main street, is quiet or deserted, it resembles the old mining towns of the wild west of the United States, with the quaint locomotives and the old Pullman observation cars in the five-track railway yard, hundreds of wooden veranda posts stretching in unbroken line on each side of the road, shabby old-fashioned shops of wood and iron, and a background of razorback hills and stark mountains walling in the town. This antique air persists on Saturday evenings in summertime when the silver band plays from a hotel balcony or the highland band parades the streets, while people line the road and pavement.

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The population rose and fell in succeeding years, as mining's fortunes varied and large machinery gradually displaced manual workers. Queenstown continued to be a major town with population statistics being 5293 in 1903, 3827 in 1911 and 3216 in 1921. Tree-felling, sulphur and fire denuded the surrounding hills of trees, giving Queenstown its 'moonscape', but the mines brought prosperity and, as well, more militant workers than elsewhere in Tasmania, strong unions, and a close-knit community. [...] but Queenstown remained remote, without direct transport connections with the rest of Tasmania. It wasn't until 19 November 1932 that the through Hobart to Queenstown road opened. Five years later a road connected Launceston to Queenstown. (Blainey (ibid))

Sulphur was the curse of Mt. Lyell. When the big company smelted its pyrite in ten or eleven large furnaces Queenstown found its climate changing. In still weather sulphur from the smelters thickened fogs into invisible pea-soupers, choked Queens-town, and blanketed the valley. For days on end men working in the flux quarries on the hills above the town basked in the winter sun, and looked down on the creamy waste of cotton wool in the valley. Men who set out with hurricane lamps for the smelters in the morning were sometimes found miles away at evening. Sulphur was in every breath of air; even tobacco lost its taste. One holiday procession became hopelessly confused when marchers split in different directions at a fogbound corner.

On clear days passengers on ships sailing into Macquarie Harbour could see the sulphur pall of the Mt. Lyell smelters, hovering over the rugged mountains, fifteen to twenty miles away. The few travellers who walked overland from Hobart saw the corroded iron telegraph poles, ten miles before they reached Linda. At the Mt. Jukes mines, seven miles from the smelters, miners tasted the sulphur when the wind was northerly. The prevailing souwesterlies blew the fumes to Gormanston, but Queenstown fared worst in fogs or northerly winds.

The second curse was rain. In 1906 1.422m of rain fell in 79 wet days in a three month period. Today 2.408m of rain fall in the 336 cloudy days of the year.

The Mount Lyell fire

Leslie was in Queenstown at the time of the Mount Lyell Fire. It is possible that he saw the funeral train.

The fire began between 11:15 and 11:30 am Saturday 12 October 1912 in a pump house on the 700-foot level of the Mount Lyell mine, as 170 miners were working on six underground levels of the North Lyell shaft. Initially there was no panic, as it was believed that once the King Billy pine which lined the pump house was destroyed, the fire would burn itself out and not spread to the wet, heavy timbers which supported the roof of the drives. Only 73 men made their way to safety on the first day. The next shift even entered the mine, confident that the fire would soon be extinguished.

Considerable problems occurred evacuating those who were still alive. There was no emergency warning system. Instead, men had to run along the levels and drives warning the men of the serious danger that faced them. Many became trapped as they were working in remote stopes and didn't know of the fire until it was far too late.

But deadly carbon monoxide fumes meant rescue work was delayed until appropriate clothing and apparatus came by a record-breaking mercy dash by rail and steamer from Victoria's mines.

Fifty-one men were finally rescued from the 1000-foot level on Wednesday morning and 42 lives were lost. The bodies were buried in unmarked graves in the Queenstown General cemetery.

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Despite rumours of incendiarism, a Royal Commission could not detect the cause of the fire: an open verdict remained.

Leslie Coulter (qv) was involved in the rescue.

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Leslie declared a 5% gas disability as a result of being wounded by a gas shell on 10 April 1918. He may well have been affected by the large quantities of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions spewed out by the smelters, These gases mixed with the 2.4m (95 inches) of annual rainfall to form acid rain that denuded the landscape ². Even today vast tracts of land are like a vegetation less, orange moonscape. This would have been the landscape Leslie saw, though the Queen River was a biologically dead from the smelters, chemical tailings and human sewage.

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Left: Historic Mt Lyell winding gear by the side of the Lyell Highway Photographic source: 1912 North Mt Lyell Mining Disaster Cards (Accessed 03 April 2016) Tasmanian History - Mount Lyell (Accessed 03 April 2016) Galley Museum, Queenstown 14 November 2015 Author

Above: Mining environs of Queenstown, c.1900 to 1910 Source: Blainey (ibid) Click on the map to open a 256kB A4 landscape map in a new window

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Above: 1:250000 map of the modern Queenstown area showing many of the original and historic copper features Click on the map to open a 256kB A4 landscape map Source: The LISTmaps (Accessed: 10 April 2016)

Above: The map shows

• The location of Queenstown the Mt Lyell town and Gormanston, the North Lyell town
• Philosopher's Ridge, where the first prospecting took place
• Iron Blow, shown by the circular lake
• The extent of the modern workings
• Tram ways and belts to the operations building
• Queen River flowing to the south-west corner
• Mount Lyell and Mount Owen

Sources:
Australian Electoral Roll, Ancestry.co.uk
Blainey, Geoffrey, 'The Peaks of Lyell', Melbourne University Press, 1959 p.88
Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life for population stats (Accessed: 06 April 2016)
The Companion to Tasmanian History - Queenstown (Accessed: 06 April 2016)
The Companion to Tasmanian History - Mount Lyell fire (Accessed 10 June 2017)

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Mount Lyell, Queenstown, Tasmania In the decade of the 1870s, a discovery by one man tramping alone in the West Coast wilderness in the summer of 1871 profoundly changed the history of the West Coast and of Tasmania. The man was James 'Philosopher' Smith and his discovery was the fabulously rich Mount Bischoff tin deposits, soon developed to the richest tin mine in the world. In the years that followed, other prospectors who penetrated this wild and uninhabited country found almost every known mineral of value to man — gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead, zinc, wolfram, osmiridium and others — and the West Coast mineral province became Tasmania's richest natural resource. Queenstown, situated in the rugged west coast hills, was born when Cornelius Lynch found gold in the area in 1881. Many diggers arrived, though the trip from the harbour at Strahan up the King River was extremely difficult, and the land journey worse through almost impenetrable bush. Michael and William McDonoughs and Steve Karlson battled their way up the dark, heavily- forested King River Gorge, much of it already pegged by this time, and deeper into the high mountains of the West Coast Range, reaching the foothills of Mount Lyell in November 1883. There, camped in the area on Philosophers Ridge between mountains of the West Coast Range, in the Linda Valley they found fine gold shed from a thick ironstone mass, known as the 'Iron Blow'. They examined the strange formation. It jutted twenty or thirty feet above the surface and was split by deep cracks and crevices as if a great explosion had fractured the rock and flung slabs far down the hill...(they)... had seen no similar outcrop in their brief mining experience. Pegging a claim and tracing the gold bearing material to the eastern flank of a ridge connecting Mount Lyell to Mount Owen, they worked the alluvial gold by sluicing the slopes. Others followed, though development was expensive and difficult, due to isolation and poor access through thick scrub. They believed Iron Blow was the capping of a rich gold reef — the mother lode of the alluvial gold being found in the rivers and creeks of the West Coast Range. Bill McDonough eagerly tramped the 100 miles back to Waratah and the nearest mines office to register the claim. The McDonough brothers and Steve Karlson thus became the discoverers, not of a rich gold mine as they believed, but of the huge Mount Lyell copper field. The Iron Blow had been discovered and pegged in 1883 but it was not until the decade of the 1890s that the great Mount Lyell copper mine it covered was brought into production. By then the McDonoughs and Karlson, disillusioned with their unprofitable 'gold mine' had sold their shares for a few pounds, rolled their swags and gone their separate ways, still in search of the elusive yellow metal. They never found it. James Crotty, another of the early Macquarie Harbour prospectors, acquired Mick McDonough's one-third share by paying Mick's £20 (about £2 200 at 2014 RPI inflation index) debt at FO Henry's Strahan store. In less than 15 years that one- third share was worth some £1 500 000 (more than £16 483 214.55 at 2014 RPI inflation index). In 1886 FO Henry, J Crotty and W Dixon formed the Mount Lyell Gold Mining Company and an 8- head stamp mill started crushing ore at the Iron Blow. But, recoveries were poor. In 1892 two Adelaide financiers, Kelly and Orr, realising that a fortune in copper was being washed down the sluice boxes, bought the mine and the Mount Lyell Gold Mining Company was formed in 1889. By now, 28 companies were working the field. In 1891 a big, burly Broken Hill investor and one of the wealthiest men in Australia, Bowes Kelly, became by far the major shareholder in the Mount Lyell Gold Mining Company. He was encouraged by FO Henry to ride overland to the Iron Blow, still being prospected by James Crotty. After sending an experienced metallurgist, Herman Schlapp, to further assess the deposit, Kelly promoted the first Mount Lyell Mining Company in Melbourne in January 1892, with the issue of 100 000, £1 shares. Kelly got 20 000 shares and his two main partners, investor William Orr and metallurgist Schlapp, got 15 000 and 10 000 respectively. Within a few months of the opening of the Mount Lyell mine in 1897, the £1 (£110 at 2014 RPI inflation index) shares were worth £16/10/- (£16.50) (£1 813.15 at 2014 RPI inflation index). After several ups and downs the Mount Lyell Mining Company was liquidated and the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company was established on 29 March 1893, mainly producing copper. As the surface gravel, soil and button grass were sluiced away, in 1893 a pyrite ore body was exposed. Within the main mass were richer patches, one of spectacular grade which provided the impetus for the rapid development of underground mining. The following year the Mount Lyell Bonanza produced over 850 tons of high grade copper and silver ore. Profit enabled more development, including an Abt railway from Strahan in 1896. In 1895 Robert Carl Sticht arrived as chief metallurgist and perfected pyritic smelting.

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In addition to his 3000 share in the Iron Blow, James Crotty discovered rich ores were on the eastern side of the shoulder and pegged three separate 10-acre leases of his own. One of them became the North Lyell mine, far bigger and richer in copper than the Mount Lyell Company's Iron Blow deposit. Crotty formed his own North Mount Lyell Copper Company (North Lyell Company) with capital raised mainly in London and Glasgow and set about creating his own empire to duplicate and rival the Mount Lyell Mining Company — mine, smelters, railway, port, ship and towns. Crotty could probably have made just as much money, by a merger but chose instead to spend millions duplicating the Mount Lyell Company complex. The North Lyell Company rivalled Mount Lyell. It completed the railway, port and smelters and spared no expense. At least £! 250 000 (£137 360 121.2555 at 2014 RPI inflation index) was poured into the North Lyell enterprise: a vast sum for those times and twice the capital expenditure of the Mount Lyell Company. North Mount Lyell had richer ore than the Mount Lyell Company, but its new furnaces failed. At the turn of the century, the Lyell copper field had two major mines, two smelters, two railways, two ports. By 1901, the new townships of Queenstown, Gormanston, Crotty, Pillinger, Lynchford and Linda with a population of more than 10 000, were flourishing. Sticht had eleven blast furnaces working in the smelting plant. The Mount Lyell company operations centred mainly on the shoulder between Mount Owen and Mount Lyell, and to the western side of the mountain. On the eastern side of the shoulder were the old North Mount Lyell workings, where the 1912 North Mount Lyell Disaster occurred. The telling difference between the rival companies, however, was that the Mount Lyell Company was being superbly managed by an American metallurgist, Sticht, whose success in the pyritic smelting of the Mount Lyell copper ore had earned him international acclaim in the mining industry. The North Mount Lyell Copper Company was being badly mismanaged by a succession of appointees of a London-based company whose directors had never even seen the mine. The North Lyell Company had a good mine but it was being poorly developed and its smelters were a failure. The Mount Lyell Mining Company had only a mediocre low- grade mine but its smelters were perhaps the best in the world. Both companies could have saved enormously by blending their ores and smelting in the same furnaces. A worried Mount Lyell Mining Company made initial merger approaches at the close of the century. The approach was bluntly, and foolishly rejected. By 1902 both companies were facing bankruptcy and merger negotiations were resumed, finally signing an agreement on 22 May 1903 to form the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company. With the original Mount Lyell board retaining the real power, it meant the end of Crotty and Pillinger. In 1914 the Company built its own hydro-electric power scheme. In 1922 the Iron Blow, now a vast open cut, was phased out, leaving underground workings to supply the ore. Its copper contained many impurities, and from 1928 further refining by electrolysis produced copper 99.8 percent pure. From 1934 to 1972, the West Lyell mine produced 47 million tons of copper ore. In 1963 the Abt railway to the Macquarie Harbour port of Strahan closed, as maintenance costs were high, while road transport was easier. Economic problems saw the closure of the refinery in 1964, and the smelters in 1969 when the Mount Lyell smelters closed and the company began exporting its ore as concentrates to Japan. In 1976 depressed copper prices forced the retrenchment of almost half the workforce. The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, now a subsidiary of Renison Goldfields Ltd, suffered continuing problems and in 1993 work stopped at the mine. Twelve months later it was taken over by Gold Mines of Australia, but low copper prices made the operation unviable, and it was sold to an Indian company, Twin Star Holdings. They used the ore for smelting operations in India, and in 2004 employed about 270 people. The Mount Lyell mining operations produced more than a million tonnes of copper, 750 tonnes of silver and 45 tonnes of gold since mining began in the early 1890s: equivalent to over $4 billion worth of metal in 1995 terms. Source: Tasmanian History - Mount Lyell (Accessed: 10 June 2017) Pink, Kerry, ‘Through Hells Gates – A History of Strahan and Macquarie Harbour’, Gordon River Cruises, Strahan, 2010 Blainey, Geoffrey, 'The Peaks of Lyell', Melbourne University Press, 1959

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Queenstown pollution In the early years of the mining boom the King River was likened to a miniature Gordon — the same dark waters reflecting the cloak of rainforest along the banks of the river. To the early prospectors the forested King River Gorge and the deep waters of the lower river were a nightmare, but when the Mount Lyell mine began production the King River was its first port. Before the railway was extended to Strahan a port operated at Teepookana and small steamers traded daily from Strahan to the King River and the seven miles (11 km) upriver to Teepookana. The scenery was magnificent. For decades the King River was renowned, not for its beauty, but for precisely the opposite. It was the ugliest river in Tasmania and probably the worst example of industrial pollution in Australia. For more than 50 years the once splendid river was an industrial and human sewer. The King River remains biologically dead [...]: a slimy, yellow and grey gutter lined with dead trees — an ecological disaster.. Nothing grows along its banks and nothing lives in its waters. Its once deep valley is clogged with millions of tonnes of waste from the Mount Lyell ore concentrating plant and raw sewage from Queenstown. About 1 500 000 tonnes of mine tailings and 5 000 000 gallons of raw sewage were discharged every year into the Queen River at Queenstown and carried nearly 32 km into the King River and Macquarie Harbour. [...] Surveys in the 1980s indicated that perhaps 75 per cent of the harbour bed was covered by silt, and at the mouth of the King River, the silt was tens of metres thick. Sulphur was the curse of Mt. Lyell. When the merged company smelted its pyrite in the eleven large furnaces, Queenstown found its climate changing. Between 1916 and 1934 the mine's sintering plant had been pumping sulphur into the air. This only stopped when the sulphur was converted to agricultural superphosphates. Until 1995 tonnes of sulfidic tailings entered the river system each year, along with huge volumes of acidic, metal-rich water flowing from the workings. When it was in operation, the fumes from the ore smelter produced acid rain which also leached minerals from the bare hills of Queenstown. This acid mine drainage was an environmental tragedy — killing the bird and fish life in the river and harbour and the once towering forests and abundant vegetation along its banks. [In 1954] near the smelters [stood] the monument to the vanished era of direct smelting — a great black slag dump, more than sixty feet high, half a mile long and covering forty- three acres of the valley. The bare, coloured hills, stripped of all trees, shrubs and peat until only the skeleton of bedrock remained, also stand witness to the era when clouds of sulphur drifted over the smelters. Although the new method of treatment checked the sulphur scourge, allowed gardens to flower, and tallow-wood, cheesewood, dogwood and small green shrubs to fight their way back on to the more sheltered ranges, it painted a new scar on the landscape. Tailings from the twenty-six million tons of pulped ore that passed through the mill have turned two rivers into grey industrial gutters, silted up the beautiful lower reaches of the river where the barges glided up to Teepookana, and formed a long spit in Macquarie Harbour. The problem of raw sewage from Queenstown ended when more than A$2 million of the Federal Governments A$276.5 million compensation package provided to Tasmania for the loss of the Gordon-below-Franklin Hydro Electric Company power development was spent on a sewage treatment plan for Queenstown. In 1992 the King River was dammed above the confluence with the Queen River to generate hydroelectric power, affecting the way tailings were transported through the river system and the water quality. Tailings ceased to be deposited from 1995 with the closure of the mine however, acidity in both the King and Queen rivers remains a problem and dissolved metal concentrations continue to be highly toxic to aquatic life. While treatment options continue to be investigated and new technologies applied as part of its ongoing remediation, the King retains its reputation as arguably Australia's most polluted river. Strahan people acknowledge and give credit to the historic contribution of the Mount Lyell copper mine to the economy of the West Coast and Tasmania. But some believe the cost to past and future generations — the death of the King River and the siltation of Macquarie Harbour — was too high a price to pay. Source: Blainey. Geoffrey, 'The Peaks of Lyell', Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1959 Pink, Kerry, ‘Through Hells Gates – A History of Strahan and Macquarie Harbour’, Gordon River Cruises, Strahan, 2010

This page was created by Richard Crompton and maintained by Chris Glass		Version A6 Updated 14 May 2020