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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.
From Hill 60 to Home: The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company
Episode 2 - Into the Earth: The War Beneath the War
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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 how underground warfare worked: the silent excavation of galleries, the placement of massive explosive charges, the constant listening for enemy tunnellers, and the brutal close-quarters encounters that occurred when opposing tunnels met. It shows how tunnellers lived and worked in airless, unstable conditions where collapse, flooding, gas, or sudden explosion could strike without warning.
Personal stories anchor this broader history. Alongside Albert, listeners meet fellow tunnellers such as the teenage sapper Lyle Ranger and others whose service - and deaths - illustrate the human cost of this subterranean war. The episode situates Albert within the aftermath of major actions like Messines and Hill 60, explaining how the ground itself was reshaped by mining warfare and how tunnellers shifted from offensive mining to defensive and counter-mining operations as the war evolved.
Drawing on war diary entries, the episode recreates the psychological strain of listening for enemy activity underground: interpreting faint knocks, vibrations, and metallic taps that might signal an imminent counter-mine. It also examines the daily toll on the body - exhaustion, illness, lung damage - and why tunnellers were especially vulnerable to gas warfare, as poison vapours pooled in the low, confined spaces where they worked.
The episode culminates in the lead-up to Albert’s gas exposure in 1918 and the expanding role of tunnellers as the front moved, including clearing hidden mines and preventing catastrophic explosions in captured territory. Into the Earth reveals that the tunnelling war was not only about destroying the enemy, but about survival, endurance, and engineering skill under extreme pressure - setting the stage for the personal consequences Albert would face in the episodes to come.
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.