A visit to Miss Barbara Woodward
Recently Miriam Way and I were delighted to visit Miss Barbara Woodward.
She is 105 years old and lives in an aged care home in Malvern, Victoria. Miss Woodward has an excellent memory and we were most interested to hear of her early life and that of her family. Why, you might ask?
Miss Woodward is the daughter of the late Oliver Holmes Woodward who was an eminent member of the AusIMM. He was a metallurgist and mine manager who was President of the Institute in 1940. He was General Manager of North Broken Hill from 1935 to 1947. Additionally, he was particularly known for his earlier career when he had served with great distinction in the Australian Army during the First World War.
Barbara Woodward, Miriam Way and Dr Sandra Close.
As Lieutenant and later Captain, he had the rare tribute of being awarded a Military Cross and two Bars. He led a group of the Australian Tunnellers, a notable unit within the Australian Army. The Tunnellers comprised men with mining experience drawn mostly from the WA goldfields, the coal mines of NSW and also from Queensland. They were often older than many servicemen and were known for their independent attitude to Army discipline.
One of the major undertakings which Captain Woodward and his men became famous for was their role in tunnelling beneath German lines, setting explosives and blowing up enemy surface positions. Most notable were their exploits beneath Messines Ridge in Belgium where enemy forces held the higher ground. Here they engaged in claustrophobic undergound mine warfare with the enemy in both offensive and defensive strategies.
The zenith of their activities was the firing of the Hill 60 and Caterpillar Mines, (the most important of the 19 mines placed by the Allies under Messines Ridge), heralding the commencement of the Battle of Messines Ridge at 3:10 am on 7 June 1917. Craters still visible on the ridge today bear testament to the terrifying magnitude of the underground blast.
Several of the individual goldmines on the Mt Magnet, WA field were named after the individual tunnels and some of those names still exist at Ramelius Resources’ Mt Magnet operations over a hundred years later.
Ross Thomas, a past AusIMM member, now retired and previously a Mines Inspector in Queensland alerted us to Miss Woodward being in Melbourne, as he is associated with the AusIMM Heritage Committee. He was an executive producer and the technical consultant for the film “Beneath Hill 60” which was shown in movie theatres in 2010 and is still shown on TV from time to time. It is closely based on Oliver Woodwards’ letters which Miss Woodward gave permission to use. Ross Thomas is still researching the story of Oliver Woodward and the Tunnellers in the First World War, together with colleagues in Belgium and France.
Miss Woodward told of her family’s background and her earlier years growing up when her father worked at Port Pirie, SA and later at Broken Hill, NSW. She graduated BA from the University of Adelaide and then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. We hope to visit her again to hear more of her father’s and her career.