Open Cuts: Tearing the Heart out of the Upper Hunter

Fiona Uncategorized

hunter-valley-coal

Another poignant – and timely – post from Janice. Thank you so much.

Open Cuts: Tearing the heart out of the Upper Hunter

Of her book Rich Land – Waste Land (published by Pan Macmillan, Australia), Sharyn Munro says:

I am talking of an invasion of our country, a taking over of land and clearing out of people.

… and

I mean this literally.

Sharon Munro’s account, exploring the real costs to the land we love and call home, is worrying and distressing. She paints a vivid picture of everyday Australians battling to defend their land and rights against the might of the corporate giants, often in the face of devastating personal consequences, shattered health and displaced lives.

A little more than 20 years ago the Upper Hunter was a beautiful rural valley where a few small mines and a couple of power stations co-existed with vineyards, horse studs and dairy farms. Suddenly, insidiously, the number of mines increased six-fold and grew bigger as they were bought out by international companies which imported bigger machines for higher production and profits. Then they began to merge and run feral across the Upper Hunter.

Export dollars was the driver, Big Business and Governments the enablers.

If you understand that one new mine will create disturbance over 2,000 hectares, then you can imagine the impact four or five of these open-cuts has on a small community/town in close proximity. The open-cuts, a hundred meters or so deep, surrounded by mountains of overburden, run across the landscape like gaping sores, belching millions of tonnes of toxic dust particles that are harmful, if not fatal, to human life.

Muswellbrook has become an island in the middle of the open-cut mines. Overburden mountains have risen up all around the town and the life has been squeezed out of it. Muswellbrook people were promised there would be jobs for locals and largesse provided by the mining companies. Of course, it was too late when it was realised that any ‘local’ jobs would be mostly for those who had such skills as the mines needed – plumbers, electricians, boilermakers, mechanics etc. etc. In a year or two the citizens of Muswellbrook and its surrounds discovered they only had plumbing and electrical servicemen on a part time basis because they’d all been enticed to the mines for higher pay packets.

Today the town has dozens of vacant shops and if it weren’t for the passing highway traffic, you could roll a bomb down the main street and not hit anyone. Shoppers keep to one or the other of two large shopping complexes, do their shopping, and go home. There is now no incentive to linger. People who live in Muswellbrook complain of the layers of filthy coal dust that seeps into their homes and covers their verandahs, patios and garden plants.

Wybong, 20 kms to the west of Muswellbrook, was a small farming community. A scenic bit of country known as the Ark of the Hunter for its biodiversity treasures, there were many people who tried to stop Centennial Coal from going ahead with the Anvil Hill mine and in 2004 they won a Federal Envirofund Grant for ecological studies which found more than 30 threatened flora and fauna species.

In 2006 an unprecedentedly diverse group – farmers, newer locals on small rural blocks, winemakers, tourism operators, Greenpeace, climate change activists, climate-concerned city and country folk, and academics – joined forces to stop the mining of Anvil Hill. It was the first major fight against King Coal.

Hundreds of people arrived to camp on private land within the exploration lease. They walked out to a paddock and lay down to form a human sign – “Save Anvil Hill” – and were photographed from a helicopter. In response, NSW Minerals Council CEO Nikki Williams wrote an open letter to Sydney papers attacking “publicity stunts by a handful of activists” and claiming that “shutting down coal production” would “destroy NSW’s economy”.

In December 2006, a young activist named Peter Gray won an historic victory in the Land and Environment Court against Planning’s acceptance of the “flawed and invalid” environmental assessment for Anvil Hill.

But it didn’t matter what anyone did or said, because in June 2007, Planning Minister Frank Sartor approved Anvil Hill. Centennial Coal sold the project to Xstrata who renamed it Xstrata Mangoola to get rid of the taint of opposition, and let it sit awhile as the Anvil Hill Protest Group was bankrupted by its court cases against Centennial. The protesters won, yet still lost because the NSW (Labor) Government gave the green light anyway. Wybong is now a totally depressing place for the many kilometres Xstrata has fenced.

Ten kilometres to the south of Wybong is the small town of Denman, the people of which believed the claims that the mine would bring more jobs and business. They were soon to realise that this was an illusion of huge proportions. What happened is it removed many small landowners and their custom, and the mine does not buy locally. There were no new jobs, Instead, the mine stripped the town of its tradespeople as they took advantage of the higher wages offered. As happened in Muswellbrook, Denman’s agricultural store is struggling to survive as the mines swallow up the farms. In Muswellbrook four irrigation and farm machinery companies closed their doors and as I write, there are four new mines proposed on the western side of Denman. If these go ahead, Denman will lose farms, vineyards and wineries, and the jobs associated with these rural businesses – and the town of Denman will shrink further.

Upper Hunter winemakers are vehemently opposed to the march of King Coal and Bob Oately, who owned the very successful Rosemount winery, spent big dollars as he joined with other concerned people to stop the Bengalla Mine – a stone’s throw from the centre of Muswellbrook. The mine was also a stone’s throw from one of Bob’s best vineyards at Edenglassie on Muswellbrook Road and his Roxburgh Vineyard a kilometre away as the crow flies. The fight went all the way to the High Court and they won. But, as happened at Wybong, Bob Carr’s Labor Government simply shifted the goal posts and the mine was approved.

Bengalla Mine is smack bang in the middle of fertile river flats. When the Carr Government gave the green light for Bengalla to proceed despite the High Court ruling in favour of the protesting group, it meant that King Coal had the door opened wide to dig up the rest of the area. In a very short period of time the Mt. Arthur Mine got underway on the eastern side of Muswellbrook Road so that, together with Bengalla, the pollution spelt the demise of the Oatley vineyards.

Bob Oatley’s two best vineyards were impacted by the pollution and became unviable. Rosemount winery at Denman was the town’s biggest employer and was a popular tourist attraction that was all lost because there is nothing ordinary people can do to save their livelihoods or property from these marauding corporate giants who wield the power to overrun and swallow up the land and its people.

The open-cuts are quickly marching south and spreading east and west, swallowing up all in their path and landholders are in a constant state of fear for their livelihoods and their health. They fear for their water as much as for their environment as coal seam gas also threatens wineries and tourism. Coalmine dust risks heavy metal contamination of the water, the soil and the air but there is nothing the people can do stop the corporate giants.

The corporate giants are nothing but kleptocrats – not only do they steal get our minerals at an absurdly low price, they also steal the land and the water that sustain us.

879 thoughts on “Open Cuts: Tearing the Heart out of the Upper Hunter”

  7. SK

    That is my youngest daughter’s catchcry. If I cook something she likes. She comes out with that phrase. We always manage to have a good laugh.

  9. Victoria,

    I think that their strategy is to quarantine the scandal in the hope that the fever will subside and the patient allowed back into the community …

  14. SK

    Daughter and I happen to have a similiar sense of humour. We laugh at the silliest things, to the point of having trouble breathing. These adverts still make us laugh like idiots. never say no to Panda…….

  16. Just to put it on the record, I emailed The Conversation’s editor, Andrew Jaspan, asking why my comment on Grattan’s column had been deleted after being up for 5 hours.

    No reply so far.

    Yet their editorial policy proudly states…

    We are real people! Please contact individual staff at Our Team.

    The comment I made noted that a simple mistake made by Grattan (calling Smith “Foreign Affairs Minister” instead of “Minister for Defence”) was corrected, with an apology issued on behlaf of Grattan, but not by Grattan.

    I asked when she was going to join in the conversation at The Conversation by responding to her readers directly.

    I also asked why The Conversation had her as a contributor when the failed paradigm of “The Political Pundit” (who mostly get it wrong, if recent Ruddstoration efforts are any indication) had contributed to mainstream newspapers going broke. Why try to replicate a losing strategy?

    Admittedly, there was some stuff in there about “bogan billionaires and idiot sons” buying up the media as a plaything – and wrecking it in the process – but, on the whole, the comment was no more “offensive” than many others I’ve seen in the same place.

    It seems The Conversation is going down the drain hole of unresponsiveness and media elitism that is destroying their Old Media cousins. In being a lifeboat for the old and the retrenched of the mainstream they seem doomed to commit the same mistakes.

    My comment was up for five hours before being taken down. I can only assume that Grattan herself requested its deletion, and the consequent deletion of follow-up comments (or “replies”) to my comment.

    If she thinks that her hiding behind the firewall of the “boss editor” will encourage readers to join in, I think she’s mistaken.

  21. Thanks Fiona for adding that link to my post and for signing the petition. Every little bit helps.

    I’m feeling a bit down at the moment because I just found out that the youngish man who has been persistently pursuing the Denman pleas to stop new mines from opening nearby, has his own battle to fight once again – leukaemia. He has been in remission for a few years after undergoing a bone marrow transplant but the cancer is back and his fight begins over. It is a bummer.

  22. Mark Butler MP ‏@Mark_Butler_MP

    Today introduced legislation to underpin the Government’s $3.7 billion aged care reforms, following a range of programs already underway.

  23. About that ‘worse off under Abbott’ poll – you can vote at the SMH and then you can hop over to The Age and vote again. All the results go into the same pool. The vote is now 52% worse off with Abbott, 11% same, 37% better off.

  25. Very peculiar advertising strategy. A malevolent standover Panda. LOL!

    A perfect metaphorical comment on either Rudd or Abbott’s attitude to not being invited to the party.

  26. About that ‘worse off under Abbott’ poll…

    Fairfax is now not only dissing Gillard all the time, but that pro-Abbott article by Alan Stokes (the journo who wrote the “open letter to Julia” telling her to “just go, and go now”) was embarrassingly saccharine.

    Incidentally I love the way that the mnemonic “NBN” has been appropriated by the Coalition as its own, as in “Our NBN” and (in Stoke’s article) “The Coalition’s NBN”.

    The two models are not the same of course, but it’s clever the way they’ve done it.

  27. I might be a bit late to the party, but here are my thoughts on the cricket debacle:

    1. Team selection is first and foremost the problem. It seems that the primary criteria for selection is how well you get along with Clarke…skill is a secondary concern. How else can you explain Hughes’ continual selection?
    2. The obsession with finding an all rounder. If they just picked specialist bowlers and batsmen with solid skills they would need to depend on an all rounder.
    3. The older obsession with finding a new Gilchrist. The guy was obviously a freak and that combination of talents will not come around again in a hurry. Why not pick an actual decent keeper like Hartley or Paine instead of iron gloves Wade? There’s no point going back to Haddin…get someone else to step up.
    4. The coach is a redundant position. Any player at that level shouldn’t need a coach…apart from specialist skills coach to brush up. An overarching coach is not necessary, particularly with the amount of input Arthurs has. How about a “team manager” style person who would help the nuffie captain with tactics and strategy for the match?
    5. Not grooming the “golden children”. It seems that CA have their special project players who can do no wrong…no matter how shit they are. How else can you explain Hughes being protected from the sharp SA bowling and eased back in against the weak SL attack? Same goes for Clarke…sure he’s getting runs now but he’s rapidly degenerating to a Ponting-class captain with very little clue. We all remember Pointing’s abilities as a captain when he didn’t have the players to dig him out from his shit decisions.

    CA should strip Arthurs and Clarke of their selection rights and should be picking the best 12 players in the country to suit the conditions of the tournament. If Clarke is incapable of managing the mixture of personalities then piss him off as captain…pick someone from the selected players, don’t shoehorn someone in regardless of ability simply because they have been groomed and are marketable.

  28. leonetwo: You can add the Brisbane Times, Canberra Times, and National Times to the list. Other “papers” (e.g. The Mercury) have the article, but not the poll.

  31. I have to admit I didn’t read the Fairfax article, I rarely bother with anything there except Mike Carlton and Pete Fitzsimons. I just went there to vote in their poll – twice. Hands up all those who did the same.

    Poor Mr Stokes probably thinks he has thousands of eager readers when all he has is voters.

  34. Crean just called Steve Lewis a “numbskull” in the most charming way. Had the whole Press Club laughing at him.

  36. Massive Spray,

    Welcome to The PUB – what is your selection for your first one on the house?

    I agree pretty much completely with your comments, especially the futility of expecting another Gilchrist. He is a one-off, and not just in terms of his cricketing ability.

  38. Tlbd – Lyndal asked a question that was calculated to give Crean a ‘go’.

    He took it and she looked pleased.

  40. She’ll get a big smile from Mr Crean next time he encounters her.

    I’m amazed when some people say that Lyndall and Phil Hudson are ‘libs’.

  41. fionajr,

    For India you would need at least 3 front line spinners in the squad…and you must play 2 per match.
    As for batsmen, I personally would ditch Warner, Hughes, Wade and bring in Khawaja and Hartley to keep. Clarke must bat at 3, no matter how scared he is of stuffing his average.

    Generally they need to look outside the borders of NSW to look for players…they have this new fangled invention called video…maybe they can use that to examine players if they can’t get to the ground.

  42. fionajr,

    Oops I misunderstood your question re: first one.
    I’m a non-drinker (i.e. social leper) so I’ll settle for a lemon lime and bitters thanks.

  44. Massive Spray,

    We at The PUB cater for nearly all preferences (well, in the food and drink department, anyway), so here is your lemon lime and bitters:

    As for your proposed selections, and where to look for new blood, I couldn’t agree more!

  49. I told you the opposition wouldn’t be able to keep up their new, nice image until the end of the week. It’s only Wednesday and they have reverted to type.

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