‘Do you vacuum your lampshades?’ It was an idyllic town. Now it’s cursed by coal dust

“Do you vacuum your lampshades?” Margot White asks me. It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’ve been watching the retired nurse move around her country home in the Wybong Valley, 26 kilometres from the town of Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter region of NSW, effortlessly doing a thousand things at once. Dressed in white pants and a red linen shirt, sleeves rolled neatly up to her elbows, she prepares two pizza bases for that evening’s dinner, then herds the four grandchildren she and husband Michael White are baby-sitting outside to play with the dog, all while asking if I want tea or coffee and something to eat. I politely decline, but as I sit down at the dining table a pot of tea and a plate of neatly cut fruit appear from nowhere.

Margot, who is 66, joins me at the table. She’s telling me how she was raised beside the Warrego River, towards the small town of Enngonia in far west NSW, when three-year-old Arthur interrupts, his little head the only thing visible above the level of the dining table. He wants to know if it’s time for a swim yet. Margot looks at him, raises her eyebrows. “Have you been leaning on the gauze door again?” she asks. Arthur, wide-eyed and innocent, shakes his head, not realising he’s already been given away. The tip of his nose is covered in a black smudge.

“Coal dust,” Margot says and stands up. This is when she asks about my lampshade habits. Before I can answer, Margot leads me through the house to her bedroom. She points out two lampshades on bedside tables. Both are black-and-white-striped. The white is the original colour, the path cut by the vacuum cleaner that Margot has run through the coal dust before my arrival. She vacuums them every few weeks.

“Out here, it’s worse,” Margot says, throwing open the double doors to the verandah. It’s enclosed with mesh – good for keeping out flies, useless for stopping the coal dust that lies thick on the skirting boards and floors inside. I run my fingers over the fly screen; they come away black. “This used to be our favourite place to sit in summer. Because of the shade,” says Margot. “We don’t come to this part of the house any more.”

We return to the dining table and Michael enters from outside, the screen door banging behind him. Michael, a wiry 67-year-old, speaks from behind a large moustache that reminds me of Henry Lawson in his prime. It was coal mining that first brought Margot and Michael to the area. The couple arrived in Muswellbrook in 2001 for Michael to take up a job as a mining engineer at the BHP-owned Mount Arthur mine, the largest thermal coal mine in NSW. When they purchased their forever home in 2002, they never imagined that, within 20 years, coal mining would dominate the town, and the edge of the Glencore-owned Mangoola open-pit coal mine would be a mere two kilometres from their enclosed verandah. “If I could wind the clock back, and we were arriving here in 2024 instead of 2001, I wouldn’t have bought here,” Michael says. “I wouldn’t have wanted to settle in this town. Because of how it is now.”

Driving into Muswellbrook, I barely recognise the landscape. I grew up in the nearby town of Denman and travelled this road to and from Muswellbrook High School. The school bus ran past dairy farms, gently rolling hills and some of the oldest vineyards in the country. All that’s gone now. One Saturday morning I walk around town, heading towards the main street, which is all but deserted. The Sportscene and fishing-tackle shops where I spent hours growing up are gone; kids no longer fish in the river that runs through town. Even the local IGA, often the lifeblood of a regional community, has closed. Shops sit empty. I walk past sporting fields devoid of children.

Muswellbrook is a coal mining town. There are plenty who’ll tell you mining has ruined everything here, from the Hunter River to the air the 16,000 residents breathe. Others will argue that, if it wasn’t for coal mining and the jobs and economic activity that accompany it, the town would have died long ago. The former hope a recently announced project to repurpose the coal-fired Liddell Power Station into a solar panel manufacturing hub is the beginning of a cleaner future, while the latter have thrown their weight behind the expansion of a new mega coal mine.

‘The lifestyle roster allows ­people to travel from further away to take jobs in the mines, without them having to live in Muswellbrook.’

Local councillor Jeff Drayton

Since the early 1900s, coal mining has played a part in the area, but it was only ever one component of a mixed economy, coexisting with dairy farming, grazing, horse breeding and viticulture. The balance started to shift towards mining in the 1970s, growing off the back of Asia’s demand for thermal coal. Since 2002, Muswellbrook has been at the centre of large-scale open-pit coal mining in Australia, with five open-pit operations and one underground mine operating near the town.

Over a beer at the Railway Hotel, local councillor Jeff Drayton tells me that the thousands of mining jobs ­created over the past 10 years in the area have not led to more people living in Muswellbrook. It’s five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, but the place is silent apart from a pair of old-timers arguing over a horse that ran last at Scone on Tuesday. Drayton is personable and energetic. Today he works for an irrigation company. His background, though, is in mining. He spent 20 years at BHP’s Mount Arthur Coal, nine of those as the union delegate for the CFMEU. On the other side of the negotiating table for many of those years was Michael White. Today, they’re on the same side of the mining debate.

According to Muswellbrook Shire Council, the town added only 363 people to its population between 2013 and 2023, despite the start-up or expansion of numerous large-scale coal mining projects. These projects have employed thousands of people, but the jobs have not translated to growth in Muswellbrook. The reason, according to Drayton, is a thing called the “lifestyle roster”. “Every single mine in our local government area [LGA] has moved to what they call a lifestyle roster. It [might be] four shifts on, five shifts off, or five shifts on and four shifts off. So, you work for longer periods. Everyone works a 12-, 12-and-a-half-hour shift,” Drayton explains. “The lifestyle roster allows ­people to travel from further away to take jobs in the mines, without them having to live in Muswellbrook. They’ll travel up for their shifts, they’ll stay here, then they will go back to where they live.”

A local economy has sprung up to service the needs of this transient population, many members of which live in nearby Maitland or Newcastle. Takeaway food outlets are the third-largest employer in the Muswellbrook LGA. But these provide low-paying jobs compared to mine workers, who regularly earn $160,000 and upwards a year. The rosters raise demand for rental ­properties, too, driving up prices and making it hard for locals to find affordable housing. In 2021, Muswellbrook became one of the few regional councils to cap the number of Airbnb-style nights permitted in the town; tourist mecca Byron Bay followed in 2022.

“Workers will rent a unit, and there are heaps of examples in town of what they call ‘hot beds’. There’ll be a two- or three-bedroom unit, and they’ll have three people on one side of the roster live there, and three people on the other side of the roster,” Drayton says. “The house has someone in it all the time.”

The council has tried to get ­developers interested in building more homes in town to ­alleviate the housing stress, but with no success. “We’ve got land to develop,” Drayton says. “But there’s no certainty. Developers say, ‘Hang on, we’re only going to develop here if people are going to live here.’ ”

It’s early morning, and I’m driving along Wybong Road, 10 minutes outside Muswellbrook. At one point the road runs between two open pits, the mines screened from view by dirt embankments. I stop the car where a gap in the embankment allows me to peer in. It’s a window into another world. Steep walls plunge hundreds of metres to the floor of the Bengalla mine pit, where heavy machinery is put to work. There’s a strong smell of rotten eggs and a murkiness to the air; I’m unsure if it’s dust raised by the machinery or smoke given off by the spontaneous combustion that sometimes occurs when coal is exposed to air.

‘If you had one coal miner and his family live in town, that would far outweigh any donations of the mining company.’

Jeff Drayton

I cross the road. Before me stretches the Mount Pleasant coal mine, approved in 1999 to produce coal through to 2020 and later to 2026. It lay dormant, however, until 2018, two years after its 2016 purchase by MACH Energy, a company owned by Indonesian noodle magnate Anthoni Salim. In September 2022, the NSW Independent Planning Commission (IPC) approved it to continue operating until 2048, and to double production from 10.5 million tonnes per annum to 21 million tonnes.

Key to the decision was the economic case MACH Energy made, particularly jobs for the local area. The IPC accepted the company’s claim that extending the project would contribute a net benefit of $855 million to NSW, including royalties and company tax, and ­create up to an average of 447 full-time jobs in the Muswellbrook and neighbouring Upper Hunter LGAs. These jobs were forecast to contribute $140 million in disposable income for the LGAs. The IPC accepted that “no significant adverse social impacts” were anticipated.

Jeff Drayton sees adverse impacts every day in the hollowing-out of his town. His solution is simple: require mining companies to house their employees in the local LGA alongside the mine. “We have mining companies who profess to be responsible corporate citizens. They might donate to the local show or donate to the local sporting club. They might give $30,000 to whoever in the community,” he says. “The reality is, a coal miner – and they are some of the highest-paid miners around here – has a disposable income of much more than $30,000 a year. If you had one coal miner and his family live in this town, that would far outweigh any donations of the mining company.”

When the Whites moved to Muswellbrook, Margot went to work at the town’s hospital. “We still did operations back then,” she tells me. “You could have a hysterectomy, you could give birth, you could have a caesarean.” In March 2022, thanks to staff shortages, the hospital stopped delivering babies. Muswellbrook’s lack of maternity facilities made news earlier this year, when a local woman had no choice but to give birth in a toilet cubicle at the hospital’s emergency department.

Margot fears the inability to attract health professionals was a tipping point for the town. “The mines say they employ local people, but they know that most of the workers’ families aren’t here, their children aren’t here. I don’t even have a GP any more,” she says. “The high schools have a shocking time getting teachers. Schools aren’t any good without teachers.”

The story is, of course, common across regional Australia, with many towns in a downward spiral thanks to ageing populations, a housing affordability crisis, a lack of services and youth unemployment. The difference here, though, say locals, is the mining industry; the streets should be paved with gold due to the billions of dollars worth of coal pulled from the ground. “We’ve got the coal mines but not the miners,” says Drayton simply. “It’s not just about the money that comes into the community, it’s mum and dad taking the kids down to the local ground to play football and working in the charity groups in town, volunteering and getting involved. That’s the issue.”

I meet Wej Paradice at The Cottage cafe in Scone, 20 minutes’ drive up the road. It’s mid-morning and the place is busy. Paradice, who grew up on a farm in the area and still lives nearby, sits on several community consultative committees, including the Mount Pleasant mine’s, for which he’s chair. The role of these committees is to ensure mining companies engage with the local ­community and stakeholder groups about approved, ­state-significant projects. Being chair enables him to see both sides of the mining debate.

He admits getting young families to live in Muswellbrook is difficult – the dust issue is “a live one” – but is reluctant to place the responsibility at the door of the miners. “Some people say, ‘You should make them live in Muswellbrook.’ Well, it’s not that kind of society we live in, where you tell people where they have to live,” he says. “And how would the government regulate that?”

‘The coarse-particle dust is visible in the air and people will notice it, wiping it off their outdoor furniture. A layer can accumulate every 24 hours.’

Dr Ben Ewald

There would also be a cogent health argument against it. Muswellbrook was named the most polluted postcode in NSW – and the third-worst in the country – in 2022 by the Australian Conservation Foundation. Sulphur dioxide, mercury, coarse and fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides were all present, partially attributable to the coal mines (coal-fired power stations, wood-fire stoves and vehicle emissions also contribute).

Dr Ben Ewald works at Doctors for the Environment Australia, a not-for-profit that focuses on the health ­impacts of climate change, and has spent almost 20 years teaching epidemiology and public health at the University of Newcastle. “The open-cut coal mines really have pretty poor performance in terms of dust,” he says. “Muswellbrook can be a very dusty place, especially in dry weather.” In the world of dust, there are fine and coarse particles. “The coarse-particle dust is visible in the air and people will notice it, wiping it off their outdoor furniture. A layer can accumulate every 24 hours. That’s most associated with respiratory health problems. It’ll trigger off people who get asthma and can cause upper-airway irritation in the nose and throat.”

But it’s the finer particles that are most detrimental to health. “They travel down into the end of the airways and can cross into the bloodstream. They have a pro-inflammatory effect, so they set off a low-level chronic inflammation and that leads to problems of the most serious disease outcomes. They increase the chance of heart attacks and strokes,” he says. “Muswellbrook, for many years, has had air quality consistently above the national standard for fine particles.”

Burning diesel to power machinery and equipment to mine coal is a massive contributor to fine particles. The World Health Organisation classifies diesel emissions as a Group 1 carcinogen that can affect humans. Despite this, diesel engines in mining equipment are not regulated in Australia. By way of comparison, the US has regulated these emissions since the 1990s.

One source of coarse particles is the ­out-of-pit waste rock emplacement, the name given to the pile of dirt stripped away to reach profitable coal seams. The mountain is the first thing you see cresting the hill on the New England Highway before entering Muswellbrook. So high is this wall of dirt, the town’s TV signal will soon be blocked. The Mount Pleasant expansion is expected to add 40 metres to the emplacement, taking its peak to 360 metres above sea level. To mitigate the problem, MACH Energy applied for and was granted permission to construct and operate a retransmission facility. MACH’s environmental impact statement acknowledged the visual impacts of the emplacement, according to Muswellbrook Council’s submission to the IPC, but the council said these had been dismissed “as a short- to medium-term impact until people forget what the view once was like before the emplacement was constructed”. The new infrastructure will be painted “with colours complementary to the surrounding landscape”.

In 2048, when mining is completed at Mount Pleasant, the hole left in the ground will be three kilometres long, 700 metres wide and 200 metres deep. The plan for this enormous void is to leave it to fill with water, which will eventually settle at 75 metres. Initially, the depth will fluctuate due to differences in the evaporation levels and in-flows from the surrounding water table, with a steady level not being achieved for 300 to 500 years.

The NSW Department of Planning, Infrastructure and Environment hired a third-party expert to review MACH Energy’s plans for the final void. That review found that the future water-quality assessments lacked detail, that it was “unreasonable to characterise the post-mining final void lake water quality as ‘non-polluting’ ” and that the “no void” option (to fill in the hole) had not been sufficiently investigated by MACH Energy. Filling in voids is very expensive. MACH Energy estimates it would cost an extra $1 billion to fill its final void, a cost that would, by necessity, be borne after the mine has stopped producing coal – and “render the project uneconomic”.

Wej Paradice is unsure what the future final voids around Muswellbrook will be like. “There’s a lot of speculation of what they will be, such as big reservoirs for storing water and things like that. I wonder about those sorts of ideas that people have because of the chemistry and the salinity of the water.”

Michael White is less circumspect. “Hundreds of hectares of voids filled with toxic water,” he says plainly.

Interestingly, none of those I speak with in Muswellbrook hold ill will towards the mining companies operating in their midst. “As an industry it’s critical for society, it’s critical for the world, for growth and prosperity,” says White. His interest is in transitioning more quickly to cleaner energy. “If we talk about the commodity of thermal coal, it’s like the tobacco industry. It doesn’t have a place any more, it doesn’t deserve to be here, and we need to get out of it as rapidly as we can.”

Jeff Drayton works in irrigation these days and finds it hard to compete with mining wages. “We can’t get anyone to work. We’re not paying $150,000 a year,” he says. “We’ve had some really good young people come through the business, and they’ve just said, ‘Listen, I have to go. I’m going to get paid $50,000 more for ­driving a truck in the mines.’ And geez, you can’t blame them. I can’t blame ’em at all. I went into the mines for money, for no other reason.”

Any anger in the community is directed towards the state and federal governments. Drayton is clear-eyed about the importance of mining in Australian politics. “It’s the golden goose, mate. Don’t worry about that.” As to how the transition to cleaner energy might play out: “It frightens the Christ out of me.”

Despite the IPC’s approval, the Mount Pleasant ­extension is yet to receive federal approval. Opponents had hoped Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek would reject MACH Energy’s proposal, but they took a hit in late 2023 when Plibersek won a court case giving her the right to disregard the project’s impacts on climate change – specifically scope 3 emissions produced by the burning of coal mined there – when making her decision. (The Federal Court upheld the verdict in early 2024.) Under the Climate Change Convention and the Paris Agreement, scope 3 emissions are accounted for by the country in which the coal is burned, not the country in which it is mined. Most of the coal from Mount Pleasant will be exported, meaning Australia is not required to account for these emissions.

Plibersek’s legal victory stands in contrast to a 2019 court decision that rejected approval for the much smaller Rocky Hill coal mine in the Gloucester region of NSW. That decision found the project’s contribution to global climate change should be considered.

In March 2024, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a $1 billion project to transform the decommissioned Liddell Power Station into a solar panel manufacturing facility, it was clear a key ­objective was to create local employment opportunities for mine workers facing the prospect of mine ­closures. While it lacked detail and didn’t answer questions about how Australia could compete with low-cost Chinese solar panel options, it was a sign the federal government was starting to think about what a post-coal Muswellbrook might look like.

Drayton wonders if manufacturing will ever replace mining jobs, and whether they will pay enough to entice people to live there. “Muswellbrook has the best rail and road infrastructure anywhere in the country for manufacturing,” he claims. “We have massive workshops, massive infrastructure. It would be perfect for manufacturing. But we have to get people here.” Skilled people, too. “Only 25 or 30 per cent of ­people working in the mines are skilled. They’re tradesmen, electricians, boilermakers, ­mechanics, those sorts of people. And then you have 70 per cent who are ­unskilled. Truck drivers, for example.

“If a big manufacturer comes here, they’re not going to pay what the coal mines pay. That’s just a fact. If we get a big manufacturer here, one of the decisions they’ll need to make is whether they can get enough skilled people here. Will someone be prepared to travel from Maitland to Muswellbrook for a job paying $80,000? Now they’re doing it for $160,000 or $170,000, but will they still make that decision to travel for less money? I am guessing maybe not.”

And if people won’t travel long-distance for a manufacturing wage, Drayton returns to the same old problem: how do you convince people to move their families to Muswellbrook? “Would you do it?” he asks me. “If there are other mines still in the area and Mount Pleasant is still pumping out dust, would you want to live here?”

Back at Michael and Margot White’s place, Margot also has a question for me. “Give me one example of where a town impacted by coal mining has prospered as a culturally healthy, vibrant place, where people want to go and live.”

As I walk to my car, I spot an array of solar panels on the shed roof. Michael explains they’re a bit hit-and-miss due to the layer of coal dust that continually builds up on them. The Mangoola mine sends workers around to clean the panels once a month; they clean the coal dust from the Whites’ rainwater tank while there, too.

I ask Margot if she worries about her health. She says she’s too old to worry about that. Then she looks ­towards the lawn where her grandchildren are getting ready to go to the pool, goggles strapped to heads, ­noodles under their arms, and for a second her country grace slips, and a shadow of concern crosses her face. “I always thought that in my lifetime I would be around to see, if not things get better, then at least the changes made to see that things will get better for my grandkids,” she says. “But I don’t think I am going to see that now. I think things are just going to get worse in my lifetime.”

I drive out of the Hunter Valley, past the piles of dirt, past the gaping holes that are getting deeper and wider. I think about the people who have lived in Muswellbrook for generations, who have no connection to the coal ­industry, who every day look upon the upended landscapes, breathe the air. I think about their children, who will one day look out on a landscape of saline lakes. And I think about something Wej Paradice said: how the social fabric of a community is so important and that once you lose it, it’s hard to get back.

Maybe it’s not too late for Muswellbrook. I can’t see how coal mining can just stop – it’s too embedded into the Australian way of life – but one day the price of coal may fall to a point where it becomes unprofitable to continue mining. Or the coal will simply run out. At that point, what we’ve put in place for towns like this – and what we haven’t – will be our collective legacy.

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