About From Hill 60 to Home: The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company
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 generations.
This is not just military history. It is the story of endurance, memory, and the cost of freedom - told through one family, and the Company that shaped them.
Producer & Host: Dr Paul Watters. A production of Cyberstronomy Pty Ltd.
This podcast is supported by the Department of Veterans' Affairs through the Saluting Their Service Commemorative Grants Program.
Episode 3 - The Gas Attack - A Minute-by-Minute Account
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 the long medical aftermath. Beginning in the tunnels around Loos, Béthune, and Hill 70, the episode...
29 Dec 2025
Episode 0 - Beneath the Western Front: The Tunnellers’ War Begins
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 how trench stalemate forced both sides to dig beneath no-man’s-land in a deadly contest of listeni...
29 Dec 2025
Episode 4 - The Long Shadow: Family, Memory, and the Next Generation
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 with Albert in the years after the war: physically weakened by mustard gas, struggling to breath...
29 Dec 2025
Episode 2 - Into the Earth: The War Beneath the War
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 darkness beneath enemy lines. Through sound design and narrative reconstruction, the episode explains...
29 Dec 2025
Episode 1 - From Maitland to the Front: The Making of a Tunneller
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 against the industrial landscape of West Maitland in 1916, the episode reconstructs Albert’s early l...
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