Hidden History: 100-year-old books found at Waroona dump tell of tragedy and timber

A strange page in history has been turned after a pair of books dating back more than 100 years were found at Waroona’s waste facility and picked up by a curious local. Dusty pages coated in elegant cursive writing are what caused Waroona resident Michael Simpson to pick up two old books, that tell two very different stories, during his trip to the Buller Road rubbish dump. “Looking at the handwriting, you would think it had come off a computer or something, the lines are perfect, the penmanship is all on the same angle, then I saw the date and thought ‘this deserves better than being chucked in the tip,’” he said. Both of the books are derived from the 1800s however the history of their contents is separated by more than 14,000km with one describing a disaster relief fund for a small Scottish town and the other a WA mill store register. The first of the two books is a stringent list of funds donated in 1889 after a fire broke out at a coal and iron ore mine in Mauricewood Scotland — loacated just outside Edinburgh — and resulted in the death of 63 people. Familiar names fill the margins of the second book which lists a series of inventory stores sent from a major WA timber mill to outlying timber mills in areas such as Yarloop, Nanga Brook and Navirno. More than impressed with Mr Simpson’s find the president of the Waroona Historical Society Debra Tyler said she has no idea who owns the books or how they ended up in Waroona, but she says they are an important part of monetary and industrial history. “We’re hoping that someone might come forward that can give us some ideas as to who may have held (the books) and what their association was with them,” she said. “We’ve been communicating with the National Mining Museum of Scotland on the best way of getting the (disaster fund) register to them, so they can display it in their museum.” Mr Simpson said while the material in the books is interesting the story of how he found them is not. “I was just taking some rubbish out to the dump and just saw these books lying open, saw the beautiful handwriting and thought I’d take it home and show the kids,” he said. “I’ve marked a few exams, and you don’t see handwriting like that anymore.”