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The communities around NSW’s biggest coalmine are determined to stop its expansion, for the sake of the natural world and their livelihoods. By Manjot Kaur.
The communities campaigning against NSW’s biggest coalmine
A lone emu stands on a square of grass. Around it, deep dark pits spread out in all directions. Giant trucks dump dusty sediment, dark ribbons of coal line the holes. How to describe what a coalmine looks like? It’s an open wound in the valley.
On the left it trails out to the remains of the once-lively village of Wollar, bought out and gutted by the mining company. Directly behind, the lush green of the Munghorn Gap Nature Reserve comes to a stop on the edge of the pit, as if hitting a force field.
Our bus passes the open-cut mine, pit by pit. I’ve invited 50 people to join me on Wiradjuri Country for the weekend, touring from the village of Wollar to Mudgee, where I was born, 260 kilometres north-west of Sydney. We are a diverse group of city slickers, locals, students, grandmas, first generation migrants – and so much in between – ready to stand against the expansion of New South Wales’s largest coalmine by production, Moolarben.
Even though I grew up here, I had never seen the mines up close. At 17, I hosted the first School Strike 4 Climate in Sydney. My parents come from Punjab, a farming region that feeds much of India. A core tenet of my culture is seva – selfless and meaningful service. For me, that means protecting our planet from further climate-fuelled disasters. I never expected that fight to come to my home town.
Ben Cheetham, a young teacher, is returning this weekend to his childhood home at the end of Wollar Road. He has concerns for his friends and family who work in the town’s mines. “The export market for coal, it’s just not going to be there forever … The transition is going to happen. Mudgee’s got to capitalise on it. It’s a matter of whether it happens now on our own terms or on the mining company’s terms,” he says.
As we drive, people in our group will point out a pit that used to be a family vineyard, a place where they’d gather to help with the harvest, the home of a long-gone friend.
We reach The Drip, a great sandstone gorge along the Goulburn River, and a popular tourist site. The river gives life to the valley and it is also the dumping zone for polluted water from three mines: Wilpinjong, Ulan and Moolarben. Mudgee’s environmental group lobbied successfully for The Drip to be included in the national park estate. Despite this, underground coalmining is planned to come within 200 metres of the riverbed, threatening the delicate stone with vibrations and disrupting groundwater inflows.
As we wind along the gently bubbling river, we pass red-ochre handprints on the cliff face – this is an area full of cultural heritage for the Wiradjuri people.
We return to Wollar as the sun sets. Everywhere in this town are the picked-apart bones of a community. Dilapidated houses and rusty cars, a shuttered post office and empty fuel pump. This weekend, though, the community hall is alive. It glows with warmth as the locals make soups and place freshly picked flowers on the tables. A wall outside is lined with a colourful mural funded by Wollar Solar Farm.
My dad sends dhal and warm yellow rice from our restaurant to the hall for dinner. He’s a hard-working local businessman who migrated here in the 1980s. He knows what it’s like to carry two homes in your heart. Mudgee feels not unlike the farming villages we come from in India: the same green fields, the same hills in the distance, the same strong sense of community. And both places are feeling the impacts of climate change. Punjab is being hit hard right now – unrelenting heat in June, followed by devastating floods. For me, these two homes are inseparably linked by coal – mined just down the road, shipped all over the world.
Around the fire, locals share their stories. The Wilpinjong mine that now owns Wollar was approved in 2006, pushing out almost all the townspeople. Bev Smiles stayed and has spent the past two decades fighting for a coal-free future, which remains uncertain. “People are moving back now, but the government is approving more and more expansions,” she says.
In Smiles’ words, there’s a sense of pride about NSW’s first Renewable Energy Zone to the town’s north-west.
“I’m not aware of a single renewable energy project that has completely depopulated an entire area, caused schools to close down, closed services and basic supplies, postal services, the things that have happened to Wollar community and neighbouring communities Ulan and Bylong from coalmining projects.”
This community knows the impacts of climate change intimately – Smiles witnessed the massive bushfires that came to the edge of Wollar in 2017. In the 2022 floods, the road between Ulan and Mudgee was washed out, the causeway on Wollar Creek was destroyed – people lost access to their properties. And everyone in the area remembers the last drought.
The next day, we gather at the edge of the Munghorn Gap, Australia’s second-oldest nature reserve. From time immemorial it has sheltered birds, koalas, bats and countless other creatures, in a silence broken only by birdsong and the bubbling of creeks. Now, there is the unrelenting cacophony of dumping and blasting and the grind of machinery. The few people who remain live with the constant noise, coal dust on their veggie gardens and solar panels, and worry about mining’s next encroachment.
Here we meet Rosemary Hadaway, president of Mudgee District Environment Group – a mix of dedicated retirees and young parents. Over decades, the NSW planning department’s repeated dismissals of their dedicated work writing reports and submissions have taken a toll. “We’re seen as a nuisance,” says Hadaway. “It’s extremely frustrating that the deep pockets of the mining industry is what controls our government and planning system. That is not true democracy.”
Clad in a neat pink polo shirt and sun-safe hat, Hadaway is the kind of person who would always wave hello on your afternoon walk. Upon moving here, she was intrigued by the strange glow in the northern sky at night. She was horrified to discover it was lights from open-cut mines just half an hour’s drive away. “It scares me to think of dust, vibrations, night lighting and noise. What are we doing to our little bush birds?” Birds like the regent honeyeater, once abundant, of which just 250 to 350 remain in the wild. The Moolarben mine expansion threatens their habitat.
Driving back to Mudgee, we pass vineyards busy with the harvest season – the wine industry is one of the strongest parts of the local economy. Adair Imrie is one of many winemakers in the area. “Mudgee’s famous for our shiraz grapes. But now the vines are failing because of climate change and every vineyard is having to replant with more drought-hardy grape varieties,” she tells me.
What’s even worse is that, soon, Mudgee won’t be viable for growing grapes anymore, Imrie says. She remembers Black Summer, when the smoke damage reduced many wineries’ grapes to garbage. Even this year, without a bad fire season, one late frost cost a winery its whole chardonnay harvest.
Mudgee is not a traditional coalmining town, it’s a diversified economy and community. It’s not just the resources from the land that are at risk, but its people and culture. Millie Jones grew up in Mudgee’s artist community and has contributed to the campaign with stunning portraits of species endangered by the mine expansion. “The beauty of the people here is born from the beauty of the place itself,” Jones says. Locals proudly wear her art on T-shirts, with the slogan #StopMoolarben.
I worked with another local creative, 19-year-old filmmaker Jess Nipperess, to produce a documentary on community resistance titled Voices for the Valley. Local doctor Peter Bryant organised a screening at Mudgee Uniting Church.
“It’s easy not to think about what’s happening in our backyard,” he says. “The film is a bit of a wake-up call.”
I ask Bryant if he is worried about blowback from speaking out against the mines. He sees a lot of the town’s residents – everyone comes through his clinic at some point. “We sometimes overestimate the pro-mining sentiment in town. I haven’t experienced any vicious responses. And so what? These are conversations we need to have. It’s bigger than any one of us,” he says.
“Hopefully we can help our decision-makers make sensible decisions.”
The federal Labor government isn’t making climate safe decisions – it has approved 13 coal projects since coming to power. We cannot afford any more expansions: NSW still bears the scars of the floods on the Mid North Coast earlier this year, and my own family back in Punjab is battling unprecedented flooding right now.
There’s only one way forward, for regional communities and for communities across the world. End coal and gas expansion, starting with NSW’s biggest-producing coalmine. Those of us living on these sacred lands need to step up and draw the line.
Out here, amid the mine pits, the emu wanders on, feathers ragged but stride unbroken. It endures, just like this community.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Digging in".
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