The lift door thuds shut into darkness. "Go on" the Wakefield miner shouts. With a jolt and a thud, the wheel mechanisms turn descending us deep into the earth. Stephan Oxley, turns his hat light on piercing the darkness. 900 feet down we go. We turn our lights on in response. I'm operating the video camera for a friend and colleague Sai Kumar, who is also taking the photography for this documentary. The lift seems to be descending relatively quickly as we see the variable earth levels like one of those diagrams they use in school showing the progress of soil to the earth's core. The ducking and diving begins as we reach the bottom through narrow and low archways in pitch black all apart from our headlights and the occasional wall light, which seems ominous in such black.

We are visiting the Wakefield Mining Museum to reflect on the infamous strikes, which began in 1984. The museum was an active mine and the employees are previous miners who now provide the services of guide and experts mostly to school excursions.

The further we ventured, the further it felt like an abolition from earth though really we were getting further into it. Stephan guides us through and says how the mine used to operate with various great drilling machines left abandoned, obsolete, yet formidable enough and are still able to break through anything in its path. The absence of light seems to be replaced by tremendous noise as he turns on the generator. In a bleak narrow path we almost have to crawl through he states, "there were 3 union boards, The NUM (National Union of Miners) was the biggest but the problems started when some when some went back to work." His words slightly echo in the narrow tunnel blindness, giving us a focus of sound barely without any vision. "If we went for consultation, compromise with other unions, rather than conflict, I think we would have saved something of the industry."

"We burn about a million tons of coal per week, vast majority we now get in from abroad. It would only take 20-30 collieries to make that up. Of course supporting industries would also be kept employed."