About Sharyn Munro

Sharyn,

Two things:

(1) I just finished reading “Rich Land Wasteland” – great book ! Before that I read “Mine-Field” by Paul Cleary. Your book puts Paul’s book into a very personal context, so it is an essential follow-up.

(2) If you haven’t watched http://vimeo.com/53618201 – “Let’s talk about soil”, you should spend 5 minutes of your time doing so – and pass that link on to all the people you mention in your book. It is brilliantly made, but extremely simple – and immensely relevant to just about everything you are writing about in your book.

Regards,
Jorg.

Looking forward to talking to you more…
2013 will be a big year for us with initial foot work for the Kindred Connect Australia Incorperated Association being done – and all the hard work ahead.
I will endevour to keep my blog up to date – and I have a couple of face book pages – (really am just playing with ideas to see which takes off) my website http://www.robbi.tv ( not at all up to date at the moment and needing a little work)… more about KCA… it is an incorperated Association – which will be locally, at most regionally based. We are working on the premise that as ordinary individuals we can create opportunity and … I guess Kindred in order to create a better future for the next generation – supporting (facilitating)local role models’ markets,community groups, small business, families and individuals… Creating networks mostly but also generating income opportunies…

My idea was to create a ‘lifestyle pckage’ for carers and the creative… After a decade supporting, running, managing local playgroups, markets and school P&C’s
I realised that the way of life, I was bought up in, was disappearing – as our young adults work longer hours, people just don’t have th time or resourses to participate anymore… My idea was to create supplimentary networks and opportunity in which people could free them selves up some what to do what our community have always done -as community work or goodwill.
As a fulltime carer – and someone who has experienced a little of life – I feel the creation of supportive of friendly networks are the most important – and maybe powerful element in bringing the nature … new and old ideas like peraculture or cottage industry back in to trend – moving it in to the modern psyche… rather than presenting it as old fashion and backward…mmmm It was lovely meeting you and feel free to face book me! Robbi Coomber

Thanks for your book Rich land wasteland. I feel a lot more people need to know what’s happening to our country and the implications for our water and food resources. Would it be any benefit for the cause to set up a petition with avaaz.org ~ they have a facility for getting petitions out to thousands of people who would be willing to sign a petition directed to the decision makers on these issues.

Really impressed with your book, Rich Land Waste Land, and enjoyed reading it.

Interestingly your book so wonderfully resembles my PhD research – shall be completing soon. My superviser Dr. Tony Lynch of the University of New England has recently referred me your book.

My work is on a particular nature conservation project, now being implemented in Bangladesh.

USAID funds this so called conservation project. They now call it Integrated Protected Area Co-management (IPAC). It was Nishorgo [Nature] Support Project earlier.

But the project has nothing to do with nature conservation; more for facilitating the activities of the multinational extractive industries.

Sadly the project does not have any official budget allocation for nature conservation!

Thank you so much for being so brave.
In solidarity.
Tanzim

Hi Sharyn,
I am part of the way through reading your excellent book.

In the late 90s as a researcher in the UK I completed my PhD on “Groundwater Rebound in Abandoned Mines”. At the time we were concerned about acidic discharges emerging after the mines flooded with water (most of the UK deep coal mines were closed between 1982 and 1997). Our work predicted the timing of these outbreaks at several sites and helped with the remediation works (constructed wetlands etc)

As part of my research I studied some work carried out by Prof Colin Booth in the USA on the impact of longwall mining on water pressures in the overlying aquifers (sorry if this is a bit technical!). In certain cases the cracking did not affect the aquifers, but it is a complex story that hopefully improved the practice of the industry. Also, in the UK the coal industry mined under the North Sea successfully for over a century with no major inrushes of sea water. It appears from the case studies in your book that the mining companies here are ignoring the guidelines for best practice that exist in other regions of the world.

I plan to make a list of your case studies, particularly the ones in “Who Needs Water” and research them further. Being a research engineer I like diagrams and graphs, otherwise your book is excellent!

Best wishes
Russell

Hi Sharyn,
I was at your talk at Taree the other week(first in line to buy your book).Just finished your book Rich land Wasteland.Having worked at Wallerawang in the late 70′s on the ash dam for Abi group to Warkworth mine (sacked due to a back injury) to Redbank power station across from Warkworth mine where I was on the community consultative committee.I could not have raised my three kids under the cloud of Redbank as we were only 1k from the station as the crow flies.I had at the time a few assessments from Greenhouse experts that Redbank alone would produce 10 times more bad gases than Bayswater and Liddell stations combined. In my view at the time I had to get out of there for my kids sake. Luckily for us we had Alison Howlett on our side,she some how convinced Redbank management that it would be better to buy my place from me than to have me as a thorn in their side.So we move to the coast and I reinvent my self as a bush re generator in and around the Taree area joined the local landcare group then meet Peter Andrews at a field day.I brought his first book and as with yours was moved by what he had to say.Then the sleepless nights started,I had all these dreams of my days in coalmining working on the first rehab at Warkworth mine and having a very verbal argument with the mine manager about how pitiful it was spreading 2 inches of topsoil over an area was not going to produce any real benefit to growing anything but weeds.(although at the time I had no understanding at all for how the landscape worked I just knew in my heart it wouldn’t work) so I sacked my self from that job and went back to working at the coal face.I started to write down the stuff in my dreams and took it to the lovely ladys that run our local Landcare group to see if I was just plain mad or would someone like Peter Andrews would look at what I had on paper.To my surprise he did that was 2007.It took a year or so to get a proposal to put to a mining company in that time I concentrated on getting a mining company to look at our proposal.Along came Xstrata’s Bulga Coal,we spent 2 years working on a plan to rehab 20 ha of overburden at the Broke site. Bulga Coal was spending $20,000 per ha to rehab an area with not a tree in site,we came in at $18,500 per ha to rehab the area with 1,000,s of trees and they said we were to dear.Then the lies started,I wont go into them but they were coming thick and fast.So after that they made things so hard that we walked way thinking that we could go with another coal company.Not so no other coal company was interested as they were under no obligation to rehab their mine to any usable state(for farming or any other use after they finished mining) all very disheartening.Due to my ill health we have not pursued it any further maybe in the future if the state and fed governments ever get tough on mining in our once great country.Thanks for writing your book it may well be the tipping point that is needed to get the people of our once great country of their butts and into the streets to demonstrate against the rape and pillage that happening now.
Jon Bullivant.

Hello Sharyn,
Thank you for supplying hard facts presented by many refugees in their own country, in a manner that enables those of us with other values to back up our arguments. It was a sobering read and immensely useful.

Sharyn, I am a performing artist. The image that kept coming to mind was that of workers in a coal mine or power station looking up to find an angel (or angels) gazing at them. Up on the road with a huge pair of wings and a flowing garment, just standing and gazing…

…and being filmed for YouTube as gazeoftheangel…

If there are some gutsy artists out there near a suitable mine, they and their resistence group are welcome to this idea. I am particularly tickled by the vision of the angel being ‘moved along’ showing up on YouTube as well: an image of the times we are in.

Good thoughts to you Sharyn,

Jane

H i Sharyn, as a former Lithgow boy the blight of mining, especially coal mining seemed to follow me around for many years. It was only when I stopped and looked around at the horror left behind by the “coal barons” that I decided to speak out agianst their pillage of our beautiful country. I am waiting for my wife to finish reading your book ??
Have you read the following.?
When Night comes to the Cumberland. about mining in the USA. and
Joadja Creek by Leonnie Knapman, an Australian book about 1911 shale mining.
Cheers Howard

The Ghost of Joadja
  
Now I’ve been to Joadja, I’ll tell you what I saw,
I saw the marble headstones, of children aged less than four,
And what of parents without money, what had they to do?
I’d think we just don’t see, their little ones names, do you?
  
I was saddened by vandals, who’d broken many a stone,
The wooden crosses of the poor, they are surely gone
But of the works of oil, they got from out of shale,
Makes many of our efforts, look, Oh! so very pale.
  
For these were men of Iron, the women of Stainless Steel,
Impossible to contemplate, the hardships that they did feel,
To carry in your body, for full nine months long,
A little child you knew, mightn’t live for very long.
  
Your heart would turn to granite, can’t be the other way!
You’d sob yourself to death, with the child on its last day!
So you see when I was at Joadja, the spirits spoke to me,
And a ” Spirit Woman” told me, where “Hell on Earth” can be!
 
H.M.M © 22-11-92.
 This rhyme is dedicated to those Spirits of the Shale!
The cost of the fuel for lamps in the towns, was far too high ? the cost was paid in dead children.