Selina Hearn McHugh

Selina Hearn McHugh, Broken Hill’s first woman blacksmith, took up hammer, tongs and anvil when she was widowed in 1898.

Selina was born in 1857, the seventh daughter in the McHugh family, and grew up with her nine siblings in South Australia. She married John Hearn in Adelaide and they came together to the gold mining town of Silverton, near Broken Hill. She was twenty-six when John passed away.

There was no widow’s pension, and few choices for women who needed to work outside the home. Class, gender and station governed everything, and would for some time. Some women managed boarding houses and took in laundry. Women became shop assistants, bartenders, cooks, nurses, dressmakers or tailors. There were teaching positions and commercial opportunities for a lucky few, and of course positions as domestic servants in the homes of the mining elite.

Blacksmithing was in great demand in Silverton and Broken Hill, as in any mining community, but there were no female blacksmiths in the area until Selina learned how to work with iron and fire. She made picks for breaking hard rock, and shovels for moving earth and clearing away the mounds of desert sand that blew in with dust storms. Soon she could manufacture a ‘kibble’: the iron buckets used for hoisting up minerals and silt, and a windlass, a winch to carry their weight. She made iron ‘spiders’ to hold candles for working in dark, underground tunnels.

The blacksmith shop was not just a place for manufacturing, it was also a workshop where miners and foremen brought broken equipment in need of mending and repair, and where the blades of axes and knives could be sharpened. The blacksmith’s trade was profitable in a place where fortunes were being made from moving and breaking earth and mullock.

In 1903 Selina married Joseph Boundy, who had come to Broken Hill in 1880 from the copper mining town of Burra in South Australia. Boundy already had a dairy and a blacksmithing shop, so they joined forces as partners in business and raised a family together. Their blacksmithing shop remained open until 1931.

Selina Hearn McHugh, blacksmith: another unbreakable spirit of Broken Hill.

Audio transcript available.