The Country They Never Rehabbed

What she would not sell

BLUFF, CENTRAL QUEENSLAND · SEPTEMBER 2025

Patricia Goodwin — Trish to neighbours — keeps a tin-and-timber farmhouse at the back of Bluff, where central Queensland sandstone cliffs meet brigalow scrub. Family cattle have moved across that ground for almost 120 years. When Chinese-owned Carabella Resources began open-cut metallurgical coal operations in February 2019, it had bought out her brother’s holding — about 460 hectares inside a mining footprint of more than 1,100. Patricia would not sell. Roughly 590 hectares of her farm sat under the mining licence; the land court ordered Carabella to compensate her to lease, and that payment was made.

These details were reported by Joe Hinchliffe for The Guardian from Queensland on 14 September 2025. This Field Note is a secondary editorial account of that reporting — not an original interview.

Spoil beside the paddock

Beside and over the grazing country rises open-cut spoil — a stripped ridge against the highlands. Carabella put Bluff into care and maintenance in October 2020 as coal prices fell; receivership followed the next month. Bowen Coking Coal bought the mine from receivers in 2021; Carabella was in liquidation by the February that followed. An additional “good neighbour” contract sat beside the court lease — terms she says were not fulfilled.

One company paid for Starlink after the landline was ripped up for the mine; another laid a dirt road where crushed blue metal to the highway had been — both inferior, she told Hinchliffe. She tore down kilometres of fencing on a promise of new fences that never arrived. Eroded gullies and creeks left some paddocks unmanageable.

I just want them to pay up what they owe me, rehab that country and get the hell out of here.

Years of limbo

Bowen mothballed Bluff a second time in November 2023 after about a year of operations, and drafted a similar neighbour contract that never reached signing. By late July 2025 Bowen itself had gone into receivership and voluntary administration. Queensland’s unrehabilitated mined land grew 9% from 2019 to 2023 to more than 218,691 hectares, a mine rehabilitation commissioner figure cited in the same piece — background behind one farm that has waited through two owners.

“My whole life’s been in limbo for that long – it’s not funny,” she said. Of unfinished follow-through: “I don’t think they ever had any intentions of ever following through and finishing up anything.” She called one settlement “piddling in my pocket,” and of living beside operators who might still pay: “You don’t want to bite the hand that might feed you.”

What remains open

Hinchliffe’s September 2025 reporting settles the lease order, the mothballs, and the receivership dates. It does not settle who will rehabilitate the spoil beside Goodwin’s paddock, or who pays unfinished neighbour contracts after Bowen’s administration.