Mining companies leave many Queensland farmers’ land barren and broken. When they go belly up who pays for rehabilitation?

‘I just want them to pay up what they owe me, rehab that country and get the hell out of here,’ says farmer Patricia Goodwin

Sandstone cliffs rise from the brigalow scrub around the tin and timber farmhouse of Patricia Goodwin at the back of Bluff, a tiny town in the central Queensland highlands.

One ridge stands out from the rest. Stripped of all vegetation, the blacks and browns of its earthen ramparts loom over the landscape like the citadel of a Mad Max warlord. This is no natural formation – it is the spoil of an open cut metallurgical coalmine.

Mothballed for the second time in late 2023, the Bluff coalmine’s current owner, Bowen Coking Coal, went into receivership in July.

Which left Goodwin with a list of unanswered questions. Chief among them: who is going to pay the promised compensation which she claims she is owed? And who is responsible for rehabilitating land upon which her family’s cattle have roamed for almost 120 years?

The blasted and barren earth at Bluff is part of a growing footprint of un-rehabilitated mined land in Queensland; the failure to adequately compensate landholders has been called a “silent epidemic”.

Goodwin says she was strung along by more than a decade of negotiations with two different mining companies.

“I don’t think they ever had any intentions of ever following through and finishing up anything,” she says. “I call it piddling in my pocket.”

One mining company paid for the Starlink satellite connection that replaced her landline, which was ripped up to make way for the mine; the other put in a dirt road that replaced her previous crushed blue metal connection to the highway. Both services are, she says, inferior to what was there before.

Both Bluff’s first and second owners failed to honour years of hard-won concessions or provide redress for the impacts to her farm and business, Goodwin says. Like the kilometres of fencing she tore down on the promise of new fences, which never arrived, and the severely eroded gullies and creeks that have made some of her paddocks unmanageable.

“I just want them to pay up what they owe me, rehab that country and get the hell out of here,” she says.

Bowen Coking Coal went bust and entered voluntary administration on 30 July, putting hundreds of coal mining jobs in central Queensland at risk.

But the jobs at Bluff were already gone – Bowen mothballed the mine in November 2023, after a little more than a year of operation. In its 2024 annual report, the company described this “tough lesson” as “undoubtedly a lowlight” for the Queensland miner.

Bluff began operation under Chinese-owned miner, Carabella, in February 2019 after buying out Goodwin’s brother, whose farm amounted to about 460 hectares (1,140 acres) of the mine’s more than 1,100ha footprint. Patricia Goodwin had no intention of selling her neighbouring farm, almost 590ha of which overlapped the mining licence.

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The matter ended up in the land court, which ordered Carabella to financially compensate Goodwin in order to lease her land. The court-ordered payment was made, and Carabella went on to sign an additional “good neighbour” contract to compensate for other work at the site. The terms of the additional contract, Goodwin says, have not been fulfilled.

In October 2020, the Chinese-owned miner announced it was placing Bluff into “care and maintenance” due to low coal prices. One month later, the company went into receivership. Bowen bought Bluff from the receivers in 2021 and by February Carabella had entered liquidation.

Carabella signed a contract with Goodwin to compensate her but had not fulfilled all its conditions by the time it went bust. Bowen met repeatedly with her and drafted a similar contract when it took over, but the mine was mothballed before the contract was signed.

Bowen Coking Coal referred Guardian Australia’s questions about Goodwin’s situation to receivers FTI Consulting.

Without specifically mentioning Bluff, FTI said in a written statement it expected “to receive strong interest from potential acquirers and/or investors as we proceed to undertake a sale and recapitalisation process in due course”.

The Queensland environment department says that “even in administration” mines were required to comply with their environmental obligations.

‘Untold damage’

The failure of miners to “adequately compensate” landowners is a “silent epidemic” in Queensland, says Chinchilla-based workplace health and safety researcher Shay Dougall.

Environmental protection laws, the key legislation managing the impact of mining projects, fail to recognise that farms are also people’s workplaces, homes and livelihoods, Dougall says.

“It is causing untold damage to our food security and the sustainability of our agriculture,” she says.

Not all are willing to speak out about their tribulations. As farmers cannot deny access to a mining lease upon their land, they are forced to negotiate with companies often backed by far greater resources and legal expertise. Goodwin says she remained silent for years.

“You don’t want to bite the hand that might feed you,” she says.

Another grazier in the Bowen Basin who spoke on the condition of anonymity and whose land is leased by a different coalminer says that operation is having “a hell of an impact” on his cattle farm.

That mining lease covers more than 4,000ha of his farm. The open cut coalmine itself forms his boundary line, but his paddocks are littered with several hundred exploration holes. The small, uncapped holes make it too dangerous to muster cattle on horseback or dirt bike – he now uses a helicopter.

The previous owner of that mine – which dug most of those exploration holes – fairly paid the farmer compensation for disturbing his cattle, he says. The current owner does not.

“Well, they say they’re going to cap those holes one day, but I dunno, they’ve been talking about it for that many years,” he says.

Corinne Unger, a research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, says Australia lacks a national approach toward post-mining land use.

The states and territories, she says, have seen this regulation as of “largely environmental concern” – without “always considering” the needs of those whose lives were directly affected by abandoned or closing mines.

That has changed in recent years: Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have all committed to or already created new institutions to manage mine closure or post-mine land use.

“Arriving at the end of a mine’s life to discover that it’s unclear who’s going to look after a township and communities more broadly is far from ideal,” she says. “It should be part of the ongoing planning. But the social dimensions around closure planning are still very much neglected”.

Since Bluff broke ground, Queensland has enacted several reforms aimed at improving regulations of mine rehabilitation.

From 2019 mines were required to provide financial surety equal to rehabilitation costs or to undergo annual risk assessments and to create a progressive rehabilitation and closure plan.

In 2021, the state appointed its first mine rehabilitation commissioner, James Purtill, to advise the government on best practice.

Purtill says the reforms are building a capital base to provide confidence to the community that “any bad actors are able to be managed”.

His most recent report, however, found the amount of un-rehabilitated mined land in Queensland had grown 9% from 2019 to 2023 and now covers more than 218,691ha.

Purtill says this figure reflected a number of factors, including increased levels of mining, but adds that it shows the “simple reality of mines having a slower than desirable rate” of rehabilitation.

Goodwin is used to waiting. Since prospectors found coal on her land more than 15 years ago, she has lived with uncertainty.

“My whole life’s been in limbo for that long – it’s not funny”.