Sharyn Munro lived for decades in a solar-powered mudbrick cabin on her remote mountain wildlife refuge in the NSW Upper Hunter Valley, the heart of her first two books, The Woman on the Mountain (Exisle 2007) and Mountain Tails (Exisle 2009).
Mother of two, grandmother of five, concern for their future drives Sharyn to use her very personal nonfiction style to reach beyond the converted. In The Woman on the Mountain, sustainability and global warming concerns mix with memoir, nature writing, and survival adventures with chainsaws or snakes. Threatened species is the theme underlying Mountain Tails, a self-illustrated collection of short pieces for animal lovers.
Her short stories have won many prizes, including The Alan Marshall Award; she wrote regularly for The Owner Builder Magazine, and her essays have been published in the Griffith Review and famous reporter.
The very different Rich Land, Wasteland — how coal is killing Australia (Pan Macmillan/Exisle 2012) arose from her empathy with the people and places of the nearby Hunter Valley being devastated from runaway opencut coalmining. The aim of this self-designated ‘commonsense activist’ was to shock Australians into action, with the truth about coal and CSG. People have compared her book to Silent Spring in its passion, its exposure of issues and the possibility it may lead to a change in the way we treat our world.
In late 2014 she moved to a different mountain, closer to family, and with new wildlife to be discovered and chronicled in her blog. After her house was flooded in 2021, she moved to the mid north coast, where once again, she is discovering different Nature and sharing it on her blog.
A few health scares have made her determined to reclaim her path in fiction writing, especially her much loved short stories, and the Peeping through my fingers collection is the first result. As she nears her 75th year, she aims to use her way with words for both storytelling and activism. Our world needs both – to understand life and to save it.
Listen to this illuminating 2016 podcast interview by Natasha Milne with Sharyn about her life, her books and her activism:
Hi Sharyn I do still read your books & material on the net from time to time. I thought you’d like to know I (finally) had the article published quoting from your first book. Its in the latest copy of ‘Grass Roots’ which is their 40th anniversary issue so pleased about that & hope it helps you a bit too. We’re a bit old now to do much activism but we support when & where we can. I admire what you’re doing & what’s happening in the Hunter is nothing short of tragic! What kind of a world do our grandchildren & their children inherit? Sad! But we all do what we can however small it seems. Lots of luck with the present book tho’ it makes grim reading.
Cheers Val S
Hi Alec,
Thanks for letting me know it’s out and bravo for doing this. I look forward to reading it and I’ll put up a link on my facebook page too. (Alec’s website is http://waterwarrior.info/)
Hi Sharyn and hello again,
After reading Rich Land Wasteland I contacted you many months ago saying I was also intending to release a book. Road to Exploitation subtitled Political capture by mining in Queensland was launched in Gladstone Queensland on Friday 19 July 2013.
The book documents how the Joh Bjelke Petersen government in the 1970s entered into a gratuitous arrangement with a resource company on a minimum compliance basis that bound the regulatory and administrative agencies.
In 1995 the Goss Cabinet, without any environmental assessment or public objection process, reinforced the minimum compliance conditions and political policies, for a fast tracked $220m expansion to treble production of an open cut limestone mine privately owned by the world’s largest cement company.
Subsequently, in circumstances of widespread water depletion due to mine dewatering, and controversy over the interpretation of the science, property values for a decade, failed to reach the asset value of improvements.
My book is partly autobiographical and has a human interest storyline. Our experiences over the thirty four years of the mine’s operations, by example, authenticates landholders’ concerns about lack of regulatory enforcement and CSG’s impacts upon their strategic cropping land, dewatering / contamination of aquifers and devaluation of property.
The book is the equivalent of a precautionary manual, and deals with much wider issues including abortive legal experiences.
Finally, it calls for a royal commission that includes a thorough review of Executive Government, the judiciary and restoration of an upper house. Presently available in print and ebook formats from my website.
Hi Howard,
Yes the fossil fuel barons ( and our ‘needs’)have caused much harm to people and places for a long time but the vast scale is what is so different now. Thanks for those references, which are new to me. Please come back and let me know what you (and your wife) think of the book.
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.
Thanks Jane. I’ll pass on that evocative image and hope somenone takes it up…
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
Hi Jon,
Yes, I remember you. Thanks very much for sharing your stories; they reiterate the current industry standard, the sham that is ‘rehabilitation’. You certainly tried. And I do think far more people are ready to take to the streets now!
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.
Hi Russell, Thanks for your comments. I’ll be interested to hear what you think about ‘our’ longwall practices then.
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 Tanzim,
Thank you for your comments. Yes I sympathise with the plight of your country under the sham processes and aid projects that will ruin precious farmland for mining. I hope your PhD exposes much of this. So blatant to call it a nature conservation project and yet give no funding for that aspect! Rather like our national Caring for our Country scheme, where properties are conserved in perpetuity – unless a miner wants it!
My very best wishes for your work.
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 Robyn,
Thanks for visiting to comment. Yes more people need to know, and that’s why I am still giving talks all over the country. There are many specific petitions related to these issues out already via avaaz. I think every bit helps to force the tipping point that I see approaching.
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.
Thanks Robbi; let me know when Kindred Connect has a website etc. so I can give it some publicity. I will try to facebook you but am not great at that.
Nice to meet you too; you have a very positive manner!
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
Hi Jorg,
Paul’s book actually came out three months after mine, and yes we do come from different perspectives. We need every exposure possible on these issues. Re the video, will link it up on my FB pages etc. Thanks for putting us on to it!
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.
Hi Sharyn
Thanks for your marvellous and disturbing book Rich Land Wasteland. You have made the personal cost of the mining juggernaut vivid and real. It has inspired me to act. We have made some donations and encouraged others to read your book and so on but my wife and I would like to do something more and thought we could offer respite to embattled mine sufferers. Perhaps you know of a network that already does this or someone who desperately needs to have a break from their home. We live on the Sunshine Coast hinterland and can accommodate a few guests or we could house swap and guard someone’s gate while they relax here and go to the beach etc. Any thoughts? John
Thanks for taking the time Ken. The publishers decided against maps and glossary and index, as others also have since wished for (and photos), so as to keep the size and the cost down, so more could read it. I actually cut 90,000 words to get it to this, as there was so much injustice and shortsightedness uncovered.
(While not the subject of the book, personally I think solar thermal and wind can make the transition, but not while we subsidise coal so heavily.)
Hi Sharyn
Since my comment above I have now finished readinf RL, W L and really want to congratulate you on such a superb effort. Some additional commenets below are meant in the best possible way.
Firstly, as a person like you that is fearful about our future, particularly because of the health, destruction and harm to individual lifestyles, and the fact that mining is a relatively short term “boom”, if you could call it that. You document all the trauma and I won’t comment other than to say it is digusting and sad, and shouldn’t happen.
Now, on the other hand it must be recognised that millions of people rely on coal in many ways and to stop it without filing the void would be disastrous on a global scale. The greenies are always talking about wind and solar as our saviours but unfortunately in their present form they are far from solutions. Until there is viable large scale storage of energy they simply don’t work on an industrial scale. Around 5 years ago I wrote an essay, mainly for me, on electrical power generation in Australia. I had it checked for accuracy by a retired Uni professor. I updated it a couple of years ago then started a third version a year ago. The latter was based on large scale use of CSP plants spread across the top end of Australia coupled with large scale liquid salt energy storage. I gave up when I looked at the cost of the energy storage! It is politically unacceptable but the real truth is that the only source that goes close to solving the problem is nuclear.
A couple of other observations: the book does tend to become repetitive after a while and tends to mute the feelings towards the extremely badly done by folk. It would help to have a few maps, a glossary of the less well known terms, and a summary of some kind.
Nevertheless, it’s a great book and every politician should read it, although I don’t think they would understand given their avreage level of intelligence.
Well done, I will recommend it to all in sundry.
Sorry about the length of the comment.
Ken Hungerford
Hi Ken,
Thanks very much for commenting; I should note that on the book’s website (www.richlandwasteland.com) there are photos for each chapter.
Hi Sharyn
have not yet finished reading Rich Land, Wasteland but wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the huge effort you have put into this book. It is really quite depressing what is going on with the mining industry and it just shouldn’t be. I do wish you had included some graphic photos – that would have really added a lot of impact. When I have finished reading it will will post more comments.
Thanks and regards
Ken Hungerford
Thank you for all those detailed and empathic comments Gary; much appreciated. The more folk like you talk to others about your concern – and horror – at what’s going on, the better!
Hello Sharyn,
I am on the last chapter of your wonderful book, Rich Land Waste Land, and I have been horrified all the way through this book, as I was unaware coal mining and gas mining were devastating our wonderful country the way they have been so far.
I went to your wonderful talk at Taree library a few months ago, and once more, I had no idea mining was such a problem until then.
In April we drove through the rough dirt roads skirting the Wollemi forests, and on to Mudgee, where we noticed mine vehicles everywhere in and out of town, and observed how property prices had risen dramatically since mining began.
We then drove to wonderful Gulgong, where we were horrified to see such a heritage town being devastated by mining companies building eighty new houses on the outskirts of town, thus ruining the historical value of this wonderful town.
The next day we drove to Ulan, and couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the huge mines for many kilometres.
It was sad to see little villages on the way from Ulan to Merriwa as ghost towns now, when they would have been happy communities before mining came along.
We continued through to Scone, and then across Barrington Tops, which is still such a wonderful wilderness, but according to your book, not for too much longer, as mining is probably going to occur there as well.
Then onto the beautiful Gloucester, which is also about to be devastated by the greedy mining operators.
Then back to the wonderful Manning Valley, where we are lucky so far to have escaped the nasty gas miners.
I was amazed to see in your book that Mark Vaile was chairman of a mining company, but not surprised, as he was one of the rednecks wanting to divert part of the Barnard river system in Barrington Tops to Tamworth.
I have also read your wonderful Woman on The Mountain, and loved every page of it.
I hope more and more people read you wonderful books, and hope many more become aware of the dangers of mining.
Thanks for being so passionate.
Gary Hayes
Taree
Hello Sharyn
I’m sorry, I can’t remember how I heard of your book; either I read about it in a bookseller’s booklist, or I read a review in The Saturday Age. I’d love to meet you when you come to Tasmania, so I’ll look forward to hearing from you again closer to the time.
I wonder what the response was to the lady sending copies to politicians?
Hi Christine,
Thanks for commenting; it’s good to know the book is doing its job of shocking and angering Australians into action. And thanks for spreading the word. One lady bought 100 more books after reading it, and sent one each with a private letter to 100 politicians, so they couldn’t say they don’t know the harm they are doing!
May I ask how you heard of the book?
Myself and Paola from Bimblebox (see posts) are trying to get to Tassie for public book talks and screenings of the eye-opening Bimblebox film about our coal and gas rush, so if you have any contact ideas, I’d welcome them.
Hello Sharyn
I am nearly finished your Rich land, waste land. I am full of admiration for your enormous amount of work and travel and commitment in putting this book together. I live in Hobart, and while the problems of Tasmania with big companies wanting to destroy what we have here, and which we should be protecting with all our might are different, the situations you describe are so outrageous they are almost unbelievable. I put your book on my request list at the library, and wondered why on earth I’d requested a book on coal. But I’ve not been able to put it down, and have been talking about it to all sorts of people.
How can we be so monumentally stupid as to endanger not only our food growing areas but the health and well-being of such a huge number of people? So much for democracy. And why do we not know more about this? Your book should be required reading for all politicians, not to mention the public at large. I am particularly appalled by the attitude of the National Party, which I’d always understood supported the farming community.
But then, I’ve just read about the horrors of the Murdoch empire, and it seems to be the same old story: if you’re big enough it takes an enormous amount to call you to account.
Thankyou so much for your work in producing this book. I shall now try to track down your other books.
With best wishes
Christine
Thanks John. Well put, and Tim Flannery agrees with you re coal and asbestos. I make that point in my talks too.
Will put the comment up on the book’s website as well.