"blue sky mine"

A song based on real history events

"blue sky mine"

There are a lot of songs that are bases on real history events, but there is this cool song wrote by midnight oils in 1990 named "blue sky mine". This song talks about the wittenoom asbestos mine in western Australia where blue asbestos was minded between 1947 and 1966. The once-triving town is now a ghost town witch no one visits. Shops are boarded up, the only tow schools are closed, and the local cinema is abandoned. it is estimated that 5000 persons from the 20000 men who mined asbestos there will die from related diseases. The word “blue" refers to the blue asbestos, and the phrase "sugar refining company" refers to colonial sugar refining company (CSR), the owner of the mines. CSR never did something to improve the working conditions of the mines. Miners had to crawl around on their knees scratching for blue asbestos. 20 years later the CRS built vents so that miners could breath fresh air. This was described as the "greatest industrial disaster in Australia" by the asbestos diseases society of Australia. The main theme throughout blue sky mine is also workers right, no one should have to work in the conditions that the CSR gave to the miners, unfortunately for most of the people, it was there only choice, they had nowhere else to go. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Midnight oil is an Australian rock band recognized because of their particular hard-rock sound, live intense presentation and the open political activism.

Fans know this band like "the oils". They started like a progressive rock band called "farm" in the 70's. Later they transformed into the known hard-rock group of midnight oil. They were associated withe the surfer communities near Sydney. One of the firsts bases of their fans were on the north beaches

Lyrics
There'll be food on the table tonight
There'll be pay in your pocket tonight

My gut is wrenched out it is crunched up and broken
My life that is lived is no more than a token
Who'll strike the flint upon the stone and tell me why?

If I yell out at night there's a reply of blue silence
The screen is no comfort I can't speak my sentence
They blew the lights at heaven's gate and I don't know why

But if I work all day on the blue sky mine
(There'll be food on the table tonight)
Still I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(There'll be pay in your pocket tonight)

The candy store paupers lie to the shareholders
They're crossing their fingers they pay the truth makers
The balance sheet is breaking up the sky

So I'm caught at the junction still waiting for medicine
The sweat of my brow keeps on feeding the engine
Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night

And if you blue sky mining company won't come to my rescue
If the sugar refining company won't save me

Who's gonna save me?

But if I work all day on the blue sky mine
(There'll be food on the table tonight)
And if I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(There'll be pay in your pocket tonight)
And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing's as precious
As a hole in the ground

Who's gonna save me?
I pray that sense and reason brings us in
Who's gonna save me?
We've got nothing to fear

In the end the rain comes down
Washes clean the streets of a blue sky mine

Witches and witchcraft

According to wolframalpha witches are beings, usually females, imagined to have special power derived from the devil.

Many years ago, from the 15 to the 17th century, witchcraft was classified as a really big crime. In this time, Switzerland was one of the Europeans countries with the biggest number of witches. In order to this number Switzerland was also the country with the biggest number of executions because of these crime. This county had 3 and a half thousand people killed because of being witches. It was rare to see a male witch. almost all witches were woman. When people knew that someone was doing witchcraft, they were tortured and then killed. Witches were tortured to make them know that what they were doing was wrong and to know the name of other witches. People tortured witches until the witch told them what they wanted to hear: that they were witches and that they had made a pact with the devil.

People believe that witches had their power like a present from the devil because of making pacts with him. There was a book written in 1496 that helped to identify if someone was a witch or not and described how to deal with them.

I think this was a really unfair because a lot of innocent people were killed for no reason. Many individuals had to accept they were witches and that they had made a pact with the devil in order to stop being tortured. But after accepting that they were witches they were killed.

Since prehistoric time there have been people that believe that witches, spells and witchcraft can damage the work of other like the crops or the farms, show the future, fight sickness or even punish their enemies. 

One early god was half human and half coat. Early Christians added these god wings of an angel to make this the representation of Satan. People thought that this devil needed servants to help him with some works on earth so he recruited witches that were people that made pacts with him. The pacts were some special powers in exchange of their complete and eternal soul and sexual pleasure.  

In the beginnings of the 1490’s Europeans churches begin a campaign to destroy all witchcraft. By the late 1600’s the world is entering a new era of secular government and science. It is a time of great changes but not everyone is happy about this changes. A religious movement started names puritanism. Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1628. The idea of this religious movement was to purify the English church. As the original puritans colonies moved to the north the English begin to encroach on the Wabanaki land. In North America they found native residents and they believed that those people were worshipers of the devil. They also thought that these people didn’t have the right to the land because they didn’t cultivated. When a group of Wabanakies comes to a town to trade the people from the town captured them and sold them into slavery. They were mostly women and children. Wabanikies were really angry and in 1675 they started many wars Vs. the English.

After 1692 there were no more persecutions for witchcraft, people didn’t stop believing in witches but the legal systems stop dealing with the accusations of witchcrafts. It was too devastating to see how hundreds of people died because of this kind of accusations.

videos