Environment

Coal floods?

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As central Queensland floods, I am hearing much in the media about the economic damage to the coal mines there, but not what those mines are contaminating as the floods surge through them. Or as the exposed coal stockpiles at every mine, rail loader and port loader wash into the floods.

 When the town of Theodore was evacuated, I immediately thought of the flatness of the country and the road to Theodore, which runs for kilometres beside the Moura mine’s heavy metal-laden overburden dumps, now washing into the rushing flood, and of their contaminated mine water, usually stored in earth-walled tailings dams.

And if you ever thought road and rail were solid things, just look at how they have been pushed aside by  water — lifted like frosting on a cake, as shown by this photo of the Banana to Theodore route, passed on by Avriel Tyson from near Rolleston.

What will such power have done in all the mines up there?

In previous floods, such walls have broken or been overflowed, and mines fined (tuppence!), as at the Ensham and Rolleston mines in the Emerald region, for releasing these toxic waste waters into the river system — and hence to the Great Barrier Reef. This photo, of the Rolleston mine flooding in that previous event, was taken by Avriel Tyson.

The Tysons have been isolated on their homestead island of slightly higher ground (which I had thought was flat when I was there) by the current unprecedentedly high flooding since late December, creeks breaking their banks that never have before, their road washed away — one of their heifers turning up 20 kilometres away! — and they are told that the next-door mine has had two metres of water over its railway line. 

As the waters dropped, Avriel took photos of flooded Sandy Creek near their boundary, with the Xstrata mine behind.

Tysons have been here for over 100 years but Avriel says that this is a first; that the normal flood direction is baulked by the mine’s ‘ring tank levees and overburden piles’.

She wonders what the mine is doing with its water, and, looking at the debris on the fence and grid at their boundary with the mine,  I too wonder what invisibles the mine has deposited.

Farmers expect to work with flood plain systems, mines can’t.

There are about 40 mines in the Bowen Basin, many of which interfere with the natural spread and flow system of floodwaters, their massive earthworks blocking and channelling so the plain no longer functions as nature designed.

In the Surat Basin, increasingly sieved with a network of gas wells and test bore holes — Taroom, Chinchilla, Dalby — what will the aftermath damage be from all the submerged and tumbled drilling sites and pipelines? The photo above, passed on by Avriel, is on the Taroom/Roma road.

 Mine management ‘plans’ for hazardous materials and wastes may tick the government boxes for approval but they only work on paper, not on the flood plains. Thirty more mines are planned for the Bowen Basin in the next five years, and half of the existing 40 are expanding.

Poisoned river systems, poisoned silt deposited on farmland?  We need to hear from the mining industry how they are dealing with this aspect of multliple flooded mines, not just how it will hurt their profit margins.

Scenic drive

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I always hate leaving my mountain, but I especially hate it when my destination forces me to drive through the Hunter Valley between Singleton and Muswellbrook.

Each time I carefully consider which route will be the least distressing, with the least overwhelming views of the open cut coal mines that are almost continuous in this 50-km stretch.

At first I would stop and take photos of the looming overburden mountains or the milkiness of the polluted lower air layer. Now I rarely do.

Yet the other day, on a clear bright sunny morning after days of rain, returning to the land of dirt and disrespect for country and community, the scope of it struck me afresh.

I stopped on a hill: on one side of the road I looked back to the power stations and the long multi-coloured piles of what the miners can’t use — just sitting there waiting for the breezes to blow their contaminated dust all over the valley.

On the other side of the road — facing the opposite direction — of course, another coal mine and more exposed overburden heaps. Thousands of hectares of this have replaced what was a rural valley, as the mines creep across the landscape, feeding and growing fat on coal, while the rest of us live with their waste.

Acland – death by coal

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After 120 years as a town, Acland, only 35 km north of the city of Toowoomba in Queensland, has lost its community and services, almost all its houses and almost all its people.

It’s down to one landowner, Glenn Beutel, and the tenants to whom he has leased the old bakery building for the last decade, plus the occasional looter, visiting sympathiser or shocked and sickened ex-Aclander.

The rest have been cleared out, their house bought up by the (to me) obscenely named New Hope Coal, for their New Acland Coal subsidiary, which runs the New Acland Mine. Having worked their way through Stages 1 and 2, buying up farms in its relentless creep towards the town, New Hope is now awaiting approval of Stage 3, the application for which states they require ‘the removal of the town of Acland’.

How best to make that a non-issue for consent conditions? Why, remove it in advance; hint to the residents that the mine will be on their doorsteps so they’d be better off selling now, start a panicked rush not to be left in a ghost town, get rid of the houses immediately, demolish the brick ones that can’t be moved and insist the buyer of the rest remove them all at once. Erase all traces of human habitation.

It’s a bit hard for a stranger like me to even find Acland, as the sign is gone from the turn-off.

Then pray — or Hope? — for the coincidence of the local Rosalie Council choosing to assume your company will win rather than support the townspeople, hence jump in and prematurely offer you all ‘their’ property, including the historic Acland No 2 underground Mine site and Museum, and the Park, war memorial and all.

You’d think that pretty well seals the fait accompli of Acland being replaced by New Acland, a town by an opencut coal mine.

But New Hope didn’t take into account that a town is more than buildings, a home more than a house, a war memorial more than a lump of polished stone. New Hope doesn’t seem to understand human feelings.

Glenn Beutel has stayed on because he rightly feels that it is premature to pronounce what’s left of Acland as dead until that Stage 3 is approved. If and when that happens will be the time to think about what he might do.

He has continued to care for Tom Doherty Park, Acland’s remaining history, so closely bound up with his family. It was largely due to the voluntary work of his late parents, Thelma May and Wilf, that the Park was  created, that Acland won Queensland’s first statewide Tidy Towns Award and that it was known as the Town of Trees, especially for all the Queensland Bottle Trees they had raised and planted. His mother was the instigator of raising funds to build that war memorial.

You don’t bury the loved one, no matter how seriously wounded and close to death, while they live and breathe. Acland is very alive still: there may not be many humans left, but plenty of koalas and snakes and lizards and birds and bees and butterflies call it home.

Despite New Hope selling off Bottle Trees for relocation, there is a habitat corridor of trees and shrubs and flowering succulents and geraniums and daisies — Thelma May’s legacy of water-saving plants — left in the Park and the median strip and verges and Glenn’s own garden.

The war memorial has been the focus of an Acland Anzac Day service since it was built in 1991; nobody knows just what New Hope will do with it.  People feared that 2009 might be the last Anzac day in Acland, but things have dragged on in tensions and irresolutions – and so I was there for the 2010 service, along with 200 other people. Not a bad turn up for an almost dead town.

Glenn had the Park and the memorial looking great, his ‘Beutiful’ handmade wreaths of Acland flowers were handed out, ready to be laid at the base of the Roll of Honour.

It was a moving if painfully ironic ceremony, given what had been allowed by the government to happen to Acland, the opposite of the Aussie values, the Australia for which our forefathers had fought. They wouldn’t have believed this possible. 

When we all stood for the Last Post, I think most of us would have had those twin sorrows in our minds.

But the worst part was when the New Hope representative stepped forward to lay a wreath. The sudden intensity of the silence and the sharply focused resentment should have felled him on the spot if he had any sensitivity about what his company had done, was doing to these people.  This was not any Anzac Day ceremony; New Hope could have laid a wreath somewhere else if they wanted to pay homage. Like any enemy soldier, he would have acted under orders, but it would surely have occurred to them that as the invaders, the perpetrators, they should not be present as people here grieved, not just for the fallen soldiers, but for the fall of Acland.

Lest we forget indeed.

Another who was there that day and who has followed the Acland tragedy for some time is Frida Forsberg. Like me she has been driven to write about it, but Frida is a singer/songwriter so here is her deeply moving tribute to Acland.  She tells me she will be re-recording this more professionally and setting it to a slide show for YouTube later, but I couldn’t wait to share this. Get your hankies ready:

Anzac Day at Acland

Contact Frida here

Bat squatters

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If you became homeless because your house was being demolished, obviously you’d have to find a new home to live in. It’s no different for other animals; we all need shelter, a home, habitat.

However, I suppose we wouldn’t be allowed to choose the amenities block or the bandstand in a public park, let alone bring all our relatives. Similarly, there is much ado when a whole colony of wild creatures takes up residence in civic gardens or parks. Grey-headed Flying-foxes are a common ‘nuisance’ in many town and city parks as land clearing proceeds for development such as mining or housing, and their natural habitat is disturbed or lost. Communities are then divided with debates about how to make them move on before they defoliate all the long-established and cherished trees in a park like this one.

Sydney’s Botanic Gardens has the same problem. Bat droppings, bat screechings and bare trees are not the most inviting ambience for picnickers, walkers — or Anzac Day ceremonies.

But they are merely the victims, like many of us, of shortsighted ‘planning’.  In fact, these Grey-headed Flying-foxes (sometimes called Grey-headed Fruit-bats) are listed as a vulnerable species.

I took the chance to observe them at a stop at this park. After all, it’s pretty amazing that bats are the only mammals capable of sustained flight.

They spend the day in large camps and head out to feed at night, using sight and smell to find their preferred foods, the blossom and nectar of eucalypts and native fruits and lillipillies.

From introduced trees like jacarandas and firs they were hanging like thousands of leather lanterns with bright furry tops — each upside-down, and by the claws of one forelimb, daredevil style.

They can see quite well in daytime so that must be why they tuck their heads in. Many seem to have trouble getting comfy – they screeched and chattered and wriggled, stretched and flapped their amazing wings, which can exceed a metre in span, before rewrapping themselves in their slinky Batman blankets.

These Flying-foxes, with their foxfire collars, do have faces like foxes, or dogs, as the reversed photo of this restless one shows. They are not at all ugly, and certainly fascinating.

I don’t think I’d want them as close neighbours, but then I’m increasing rather than reducing habitat here, so there’d be room for us all.

Outback Eden under threat

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If the Galilee Basin in central-west Queensland sounds biblical, the scale of the threat facing it is certainly of epic proportions. The coal underneath it has always been there, but cattle and drovers, not coal mines and drillers, have dominated the land.

If you’re listening to the Queensland Government or the mining industry they’d use words like wealth and opportunity, revenue and development, but they would agree with the scale. Some of the world’s largest coal mines are proposed for the region, and coal gas industries scramble to tap into the underground energy potential.

If the powers-that-be have their way, the Galilee Basin could provide enough coal to almost double Australia’s current thermal coal exports, especially to China, to be burnt in coal-fired power plants and contribute billions more tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. That’s the global reason why we should leave it in the ground, there or anywhere, but the rustle of prospective dollars drowns out that argument.

Yet there’s also a critical precedent here, a unique regional reason why we ought not allow the Galilee Basin to be degraded from an outback Eden to an industrial wasteland.

Nobby-tailed Gecko

On top of the coal seam that Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal wants to dig up is Bimblebox Nature Refuge, 8000 peaceful hectares of biodiverse remnant woodland. If allowed to proceed, it would be one of the first protected areas, part of the Australian National Reserve System, to be lost to coal interests.

All of Bimblebox, as well as many surrounding properties, are under Waratah’s exploration permit. As current legislation stands, as long as the company receives the standard approvals from the state and federal governments – as we know they usually do – there is nothing to stop the innumerable living treasures, the plants and animals of Bimblebox, from becoming nothing more than dead overburden.

In 2000, when Queensland’s land clearing rates were amongst the highest in the world, several concerned people, aided by funding from the Australian National Reserve System program, bought the land and signed it up in 2003 as Bimblebox Nature Refuge Agreement with the Queensland government, to permanently protect the conservation values of the property.

White-browed Woodswallow; Kookaburra and Grey-crowned Babblers

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The tallest White Gum in the world

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In Tasmania I learnt to expect plantations like these when I saw the word ‘forest’. I drove through miles of this to reach the Evercreech Forest Reserve, 52 hectares that wasn’t clearfelled.

I reached the tree for which the Forest is famous.

The White Gum, Eucalyptus viminalis, is thought to be 300 years old. I walked around the wooden platform at the giant’s base, looking up at its ninety-one metres. Awesome. But then I read its history, and the platform seemed more a collar imprisoning it, like a bear in a sideshow.

Twice it was saved from being felled, neither time by altruism or respect. In the logging of the 1940s and ‘50s, it and its fellow White Knights, as they have dubbed them for the tourists, were too big for the bullock teams to take out. By the logging resurgence of the ‘70s, they had bulldozers, which brought the road to the very base of this tree.

One of the foresters, thinking it seemed exceptionally tall and might set a record, had it measured. They then had to convince the world that it really was Eucalyptus viminalis, so far above the known limit was its height. With such a trophy to show off, they reserved 52 hectares as a display case for it.

But … how many others, almost as big and as old, did fall to the dozers? This is tokenism; the saving of the tallest tree was an accident of egotism.

In low spirits I took the walk along the moss-bouldered creek, where the tree fern trunks are so thickly furred with moss that they bulge like bottle trees. This is an intensely green world — rocks, logs, trees, sticks, earth — all green.

But the mossy ground was peppered with millions of tiny fallen leaves, shaped and shaded like roasted slivered almonds in their range of ambers, and bright colours from orange to burgundy intermittently called attention to clusters of fungi feeding on rotting logs.

My jeans became soaked as the track took me through waist-high ferns still dripping from earlier showers. I persevered to the promised waterfall, a dainty lacework train with a graceful bend, forever trailing down the shining dark slide of the rocks. Pretty. But I was cold and wet, and over ‘green’, as I wouldn’t be on a hot summer day.

I was glad to drive up into sunlight, the heater drying my jeans, but not looking forward to retracing my way through the other sort of forest.

Evercreech Forest Reserve is beautiful — if poignant. A reserve means a remnant; it reminds me of what is lost, the major part of a natural world that wasn’t reserved. An island of forest reserve in the midst of plantations has no wild edges.

Lithgow landscape

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Recently I visited Lithgow, partly to see how the area just south of it compared to the Hunter Valley, since both are now threatened with a third power station, also likely to be coal-fired.

At Wallerawang power station the village of the same name is extremely close by, as the church shows. I wonder if the residents are aware of the toxic contents of those plumes of smoke? In the Hunter, Ravensworth, once probably the closest village to those power stations, is now obliterated, the abandoned school the only testament that once it thrived.

South of Wallerawang, between that and the Mt Piper Power station, with a 200MW extra power station planned just 2 km away, is  the village of Blackmans Flat. It reminded me of Camberwell in the Hunter — being choked out of existence by coal. 

Blackmans Flat only has 13 houses, but they are surrounded by open cut and underground mines plus a power station fly-ash dump, all blaming each other for the dust, noise and blasting cracks. 

With more open cut mines in the wings, and  a new 10 million tonne fly-ash dump proposed to be placed 800m from the village, and Lithgow Council’s Regional Garbage dump proposed to be 600m away — how much more can these villagers take?

Why doesn’t the government take the cumulative effects of these approvals into account? It must seem to Blackmans Flat residents that it’s because people don’t count.

In the village cemetery I see that people have lived here for over a hundred years. With the health hazards that surround them now, and worse looming, I fear for the village and its residents. But how can they leave, for who would buy their houses?

 

 As the valley fills with dust and noise, the cliffs split and fall away and the filtering hanging swamps drain dry through the cracks from undermining, we must remind ourselves that all these operations are under ‘strict environmental guidelines’.

I wonder if Lithgow Council, who support the third power station, know what they are allowing to happen to their scenic region and its inhabitants. While underground mines currently dominate here, unlike the Hunter’s open-cut moonscape, the pollution and the destructive impacts are increasing and so are the mines.

As my bumper sticker says, ‘Coal costs the earth.’

Defeating the dinosaurs

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coal-dinosaurIn the months before the international climate conference in Copenhagen the dinosaurs of the coal industry are spending up big on lobbying to keep things the way they like them and helping the usual crew of Parliamentary dinosaurs to block the creation of hundreds of thousands of badly needed new clean energy jobs.

Now a coalition of organisations including World Wildlife Fund Australia, the Climate Institute, the ACTU, the Australian Council of Social Service and the Australian Conservation Foundation, have launched a counter-camapign.

You can add your voice to it by visiting the WWF’s Road to Copenhagen website and sending a message to your local MP.

A walk on the wild side

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Having shown you the civilised side of The Old Brush reserve, we now walk just beyond the mown edges and into the forest, where owner Robert maintains and marks kilometres of narrow paths.

wildside-1They tempt you to walk into the wild side, but with safety, and to experience the greatly varied vegetation of the surrounding bush.

wildside-3Robert has chosen the paths to take you through hillside forests and gully jungles, past luminous blue gums and thriving cabbage tree palms, the oldest, wartiest paperbark tree I have ever seen…

wildside-2…and battle-scarred eucalypts so tall I can hardly see their tops.

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They show the mighty but they also pass near such richness of detail that I keep stopping to marvel — like this tree trunk parcel, its bark so trussed in its vine that it can’t escape.

Or the coachwood (I think) whose roots resemble the claws of a strange bird, feathered at the ankle with moss and protectively clutching its green egg.
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 When the narrow tracks reach the valley again, give way to the broader mown and mossy expanses, and the statuary begins to reappear, I know I am leaving the wild behind.

It’s been an easy walk, even for my knees, and my rustic cabin by the billabong is just across the creek.

A glass of red awaits me, to aid my reflections on what a wonderful juxtaposition of worlds this place offers.

Culture and kangaroos

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Recently I stayed in a rustic cabin by a billabong where Nefertiti rose serene from the water and Dusky Moorhens kept a respectful distance, trailing ripples as they trawled for food, and creating delightful reflections.

At The Old Brush reserve near Cessnock, NSW, acres of mown native grass surround eight billabongs and countless picnic spots and fireplaces with wood stacked ready. In secret and mossy spots in the forest or in sundrenched clearings, you come across statues or civilised garden seats.

culture-2Kangaroos laze in security by Grecian columns; semi-naked ladies swoon by equally ‘palely loitering’ Blue Gums; a multitude of birds other than waterbirds are attracted to the water – such as a flock of White-headed Pigeons.

Metres away from the bottom accommodation cabin, I saw a Bower Bird’s display bower, with its collection of blue objects, including plastic pegs!

The reserve is owned by Robert and Gail Bignell, and they share its beauty with the public.  Robert is a professional photographer and has his Rainforest Studio there.

Visitors are welcome to picnic, camp, or rent a cabin, and Robert keeps kilometres of paths mown or clear for easy bushwalking through the stunning bushland beyond the valley floor ‘garden’ of his 40 hectares — with access to the adjoining Conservation Area. City and overseas visitors love it!

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Juxtaposition of the civilised and the wild creates an unusual extended garden where people can access natural bushland of varying types in safe and signposted walks.

I was there to soak up some more of its peaceful pleasures than I’d had the chance to do before — because I’m going to nominate this wonderful place for an environmental and community award.

Visit The Old Brush website.

The Woman in the Warrumbungles

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warrumbungles-1I was able to sneak a few days after recent book talk commitments out west to meet two cousins who were going camping in the Warrumbungle National Park near Coonabarabran, New South Wales,

It was the perfect time to try out my new tent, a Hamersley Tourer, which is intended to go with me on various future forays into other ‘wild edge’ places than my own Mountain.

It passed the first test in that I erected it on my own. That, and being able to stand upright in it, were two of my main criteria.

My cousins didn’t arrive until dark, by which time I had a fire going. Their tent was a much bigger dome tent with several layers: definitely not a one-person job to put up!
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Next morning was fine and we walked one of the many trails in the park, heading up to a ridge and around the base of a higher spire that mad rockclimbers undertake.

The Warrumbungles are dotted with strangely shaped, spectacular volcanic remnant plugs and crater walls.
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The symmetrical native cypress pines, looking like garden escapees, share the rocky ridges with blackened ironbarks, ethereal White Gums and decorative large Kurrajongs.

This was the first time I have seen Kurrajongs in their natural shape, unlopped over their lives as fodder for stock, their shining, almost heart-shaped leaves dangling from widely spread branches.

Such hardy trees seem to be able to take root in any crack and tiny ledge on the rugged cliffs.
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Caves abound, both large and small, and all clearly put to good use as shelter by the local critters.

Lichens and mosses paint the rocks with ice blues and sage greens, between dark weepings and a range of surface weatherings.

Autumn fungi

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In the forest, after rain and while there is still some warmth in the sunshine, I am bound to find some stunning fungi popping up amongst the leaves or blooming on the tree trunks.

What amazes me is that each season I find new ones, at least, never before seen by me here. In just one week here’s some of the treasures I spotted without walking very far or looking very hard.

The black object on the bottom left is my gumboot-shod foot, just so you get the scale of this rosy trio that erupted right beside the path up to the loo.

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This rather slimy little chocolate cap came with tiny choc chips, a dollop of whipped cream and an insect visitor that I didn’t even see until I blew up the photo. It was spotted from the loo itself, which has no door to inhibit nature watching.

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Like orange sherbet ice blocks, these dainty fungi look good enough to eat, and there were hundreds of them scattered throughout the grass in a small area. I resisted.

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As if orange sherbet wasn’t tempting enough, just inside my house yard a batch of half a dozen freshly baked chocolate cakes, un-iced, had appeared overnight.

Plump and smooth and bigger than cup cakes, two of them looked as if someone else had already taken a bite. I could almost smell chocolate cake!

Any ideas of the identification of these fungi will be very welcome; I have looked in my books, but have given up!