From the early twentieth century, carbide lamps were widely used by miners, either worn on the hat or carried by hand. These basic lamps produced and burnt acetylene (C2H2) created by the reaction of calcium carbide (CaC2) with water. This portable carbide miners’ lamp stands as a symbol of Tasmania’s mining history and serves to tell a story of human endeavour and tragedy – with the epicentre at Mount Lyell, at Queenstown on the island’s west coast.

The Mount Lyell mine has been synonymous with Tasmanian mining since the 1890s, after the discovery of gold at the Iron Blow in 1882. The early gold mines proved uneconomic, and the Mount Lyell Mining Company was formed in 1892 to mine copper. By 1894, the profits from the mine’s high-grade copper and silver ore enabled more development, including the Abt railway from Strahan.

In 1895, Robert Sticht arrived to serve as chief metallurgist. He perfected pyritic smelting and, within six years, there were eleven blast furnaces and the desert-like landscape of the hills and valley developed. Various local companies merged in 1903 to form the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company.

Mount Lyell was the site of Tasmania’s worst mining disaster, in October 1912. A fire broke out in a pump house of the North Lyell mine, as 170 miners were working on six underground levels. As it was initially believed that the fire would burn itself out and not spread to the wet, heavy timbers that supported the roof of the drives, the next shift entered the mine. But the fire continued burning and deadly carbon monoxide fumes killed many miners, with 42 men dying in total. Fifty-one men were finally rescued, five days after the fire broke out. A royal commission was unable to determine the cause of the fire.

As for the carbide lamps, they were implicated in coal seam gas explosions in America in the 1930s, and were phased out of mining.