Mount Mulligan was a company town, raised around a single coal seam at the foot of a great sandstone escarpment, and on that Monday morning its working life was concentrated underground. The men who went down the pit were not statistics. They were husbands and fathers, brothers and sons - the breadwinners of almost every household in the place. When the explosions came, the town lost them all at once. Women who had waved their men off to the morning shift became widows before lunch; children became fatherless in the time it took the sound to travel to the next valley. The grief did not stay in the township. The dead had kin in cities and towns across the country, and news of the disaster carried the loss far beyond the escarpment that overshadowed the mine.

A Royal Commission was convened, and its findings were damning in their ordinariness. The mine, it turned out, had no recorded methane - the gas that haunts most coal mines - and so naked flames and candles had been used underground throughout its six years of operation. The danger lay elsewhere. The coal seams at Mount Mulligan were conspicuously dry, and dry mines breed coal dust, which hangs in the air and, in the right concentration, will detonate like gunpowder. The Commission concluded that a charge had been fired on top of a block of coal, most likely to split it, and that the firing ignited the suspended dust. Explosives, the inquiry found, had been stored, carried and used with careless disregard, and the legally required measures to render the coal dust safe had simply not been taken. The men had been working, without knowing it, inside a bomb.

The work of recovery was grim and slow. Seventy-four of the seventy-five bodies were brought up by the time the Royal Commission closed its hearings; the last man was not recovered until five months after the explosion, after the mine had been reopened. The disaster forced a reckoning that should not have required seventy-five deaths to prompt. It became the direct impetus for a new Coal Mining Act in Queensland that banned open flames in underground coal mines - the very practice that had turned a routine shift into a catastrophe. The reform came too late for the men of Mount Mulligan, but it was bought with their lives, and it made the mines that came after safer.

Life at the mine went on with unsettling speed. The pit had suffered surprisingly little structural damage, and it reopened just four months after the explosion; the Queensland Government bought it in 1923, and coal was hauled from Mount Mulligan until 1957, when cheaper hydro power from the Tully Falls scheme finally closed it. Soon after, the township was sold off and its buildings carted away, until little remained but foundations beneath the looming sandstone wall. Today Mount Mulligan - Ngarrabullgan, a sacred Dreaming place to the Djungan people long before any miner arrived - is a quiet place of ruins and red rock. But the cemetery is still there, and so are the headstones, row upon row sharing the same date: 19 September 1921. They are the surest reminder that this was never a story about coal. It was a story about the men who died for it.