How a small regional community beat a multinational coal giant

Paul the Apostle converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus. Peter Martin converted to conservation on the Hume Highway, while shopping for a holiday home.

In 2001, having recently left his role as CEO of Rothschild Australia Asset Management, Martin and his wife, Kim, went looking for some peace and quiet, a parcel of land where they could potter about, garden and spend time with their four children. After a year of searching, they found the perfect place: 44 hectares near Sutton Forest, a small town in the NSW Southern Highlands about 90 minutes’ drive south-west of Sydney. Dry and heavily grazed, the land didn’t look like much, but it had great potential, with low, rolling hills, a sizeable lake and even a small pocket of endangered Shale Woodlands.

Martin, who is 71, is amiable and articulate, with a head of silvery hair and the air of a man who could be a stalwart friend or a formidable foe, as the moment requires. Before moving into finance in 1987, he spent his career in the fossil fuel industry, building offshore oil and gas platforms. But in the early 2000s, he became increasingly concerned about climate change, the impact of which he saw up close on his Sutton Forest property.

By 2006, the Millennium drought was at its peak, and the NSW government was in advanced talks about building a desalination plant in Sydney. It also planned to drain the Kangaloon aquifer, in the eastern part of the Southern Highlands, and pipe the water to Sydney. Martin and Kim campaigned against the proposal, which was dumped in 2008.

“It seemed mad to us,” Peter Martin tells me. “We calculated that it would only deliver less than a week of water and destroy some pristine wetlands.”

The Martins soon came to regard their property as a perfect regreening project. Over the next five years, they planted 30,000 native grasses, shrubs and trees, together with elms, crabapples and maples. They installed a 14-metre-long greenhouse and built vegie gardens. They also began rehabilitating the remnant Shale Woodlands and put in 2400 oak trees, which they plan to one day set up as a truffière. “It’s pretty free form,” says Martin. “The place has become a haven for bird life.”

Then, in August 2010, Martin read in a newspaper a small notice that the multinational mining company Anglo American had sold one of its coal tenements to a company called Cockatoo Coal. The tenement, which was for an underground mine, covered 115 square kilometres of the Southern Highlands, including the land beneath the Martins’ property. Looking into it, Martin discovered that Cockatoo Coal was in partnership with the giant South Korean steel manufacturer Pohang Iron and Steel Company, or POSCO. Concerned, he sought a meeting with Cockatoo Coal in its Sydney office.

The Martins arrived at the company’s art-deco headquarters one morning in November 2010, and were shown into a wood-panelled boardroom on the second floor, overlooking the street. The chairman was there, together with four senior executives. “The meeting started well enough,” says Martin. “The chairman was all sweetness and light. There was plenty of smooth talk about the benefits the mine would bring to the community, and how Cockatoo Coal always looked after the locals.”

But when Martin began asking more pointed questions – about how groundwater would be affected and the possibility of subsidence – the mood soured. “The chairman, in particular, got very testy,” Martin says. “At one point he went red in the face.” According to Martin, the chairman then told him and Kim that, “if the community doesn’t like the idea of the mine, there will be trouble”, whereupon the Martins took their leave. “At the end I just remember saying: ‘This mine is not going to go ahead’, ” says Martin. What the couple didn’t know was the lengths the company would go to make its mine a reality, and the toll that stopping it would take on their community.

Peter and Kim Martin had rehabilitated their 44-hectare property when they learnt of plans to build a coal mine beneath it.Credit: Tim Bauer

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The Southern Highlands is only 130 kilometres from Sydney, but it may as well be another country. Leafy lanes lined with elms and pin oaks wind through the hills, past farms and wineries and lushly grassed pasture, and onto the villages of Burrawang, Exeter and historic Berrima, a jewel of Georgian architecture that boasts Australia’s oldest continuously licensed inn: the Surveyor General, which opened its doors in 1834. With its hedgerows, churches and cool, shady woodlands, the Southern Highlands has something of the Home Counties about it, a civilising calm that, even in 1820, prompted NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie to compare it to “a fine, extensive pleasure ground in England”.

Plenty of famous names have bought into the area, including Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and actor Nicole Kidman. Former Cold Chisel frontman Jimmy Barnes also has a place here, as does 1970s pop icon Leo Sayer and broadcaster Alan Jones. Indeed, with the possible exception of Byron Bay, it’s hard to imagine an area that has so happily accommodated such a disparate assortment of characters, from investment bankers to potato farmers and the odd retired colonel.

But one thing that has always been here is mining. Despite the Southern Highlands’ sylvan charms, the area is rich in coal and has some of the oldest workings in Australia. Which is how Cockatoo Coal came on the scene.

News of the mine spread fast. In August 2010, Martin called a meeting at Sutton Forest Hall. It was pouring with rain but 300 people turned up, many standing outside. Two representatives from Cockatoo Coal attended. According to Martin, they came straight from the Sutton Forest pub, and proved less than impressive. They said the company had purchased the mining licence “sight unseen”, and appealed to the crowd’s patriotism, assuring them that it was the first time in 75 years that the mining lease had been owned by an Australian company.

“They lied to us about that, right to our faces,” says local farmer Doug Graham, who checked the ASX website the next day and discovered that Cockatoo Coal was in fact majority owned by South Koreans. “That was their first mistake.” (Sometime around 2011, POSCO’s joint venture with Cockatoo Coal was rebranded Hume Coal.) That night, Martin, together with some other residents, including Tim Frost, a retired colonel in the Australian Army, formed the Southern Highlands Coal Action Group (SHCAG).

Landowner Brigid Kennedy: “Giving out money to people gave the company credibility, but it did the reverse for the people who took the money.”Credit: Tim Bauer

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The mining lease extended from the village of Exeter through Sutton Forest to the Belanglo State Forest, and north toward Berrima. It would, over a 23-year period, extract 50 million tonnes of coal, most of which would be shipped to South Korea to be used in POSCO’s steel-making. The mine would be underground, but even underground mines need surface infrastructure, including, in Hume’s case, conveyors, railyards, shedding, a coal washery and coal stockpile, a car park and a construction accommodation village, or “CAV”, for up to 400 workers. Since its lease only gave Hume the right to mine underground, the company had to buy the surface land from the locals.

Over the next three years, then, the company embarked on a mammoth – and stealthy – real-estate splurge. Using a series of shelf companies, including S. F. Pastoral, Aurelius Rural and Cavalaire Rural, it spent $35 million buying some of the Southern Highlands’ largest land holdings, including a 425-hectare cattle farm called Wongonbra, an 800-hectare estate called Evandale (where, as it later emerged, it planned to sink a mine shaft), and the historic property of Mereworth, which dates back to 1820 and was last owned by the Oxley family, descendants of the Bushells Tea company founders.

Each sale was like a wound in the side of the community. Shortly after Hume’s purchase of Mereworth, the house’s storied contents – ornate chandeliers, clocks, antique maps and prints, 19th-century French Boulle furniture, a vintage tea mixer – were wheeled out for sale, a grim metaphor for what the mine’s opponents saw as Hume’s trashing of the area’s heritage, both cultural and ecological. Some locals considered the use of shelf companies to be in bad faith. But Rod Doyle, Hume’s project manager, describes it as “smart”. “We used those company names to minimise the purchase price,” he tells me over the phone. “That’s common practice through any commercial transaction. It’s normal, and it’s smart, and it probably saved us a bit of money.”

Doyle, who joined Hume in 2013 as an exploration manager, has a long face, weary eyes and a snowy beard that puts one in mind of a bushranger. At 65, he remains an unreconstructed fan of fossil fuels, for whom coal is a natural bounty, a gift from prehistory that we would be remiss not to exploit. “That coal has been in the ground for 250 million years. It’s like a bank, and it’ll stay there till it’s mined.” He describes the umbrage over shelf companies as a “smoke screen”, a cynical attempt to piggyback on the panic that many Australians felt at the time about the Chinese buying up Australian farmland.

Hume soon became involved in every facet of the local community. In 2011, then project manager Mike Cunnion turned up to a jobs expo in nearby Mittagong, to talk to school children about opportunities in mining. The company sponsored local horse-riding events, including Eventing Equestriad Australia, as well as the local business awards and apprenticeships programs.

It joined the Moss Vale and Rural Chamber of Commerce, and established the Hume Coal Charitable Foundation, which threw millions of dollars at schools, sports clubs, childcare centres, disability services, the local youth radio station, and drug and alcohol programs. There was scarcely an ice addict or aspiring young dressage champion who didn’t benefit from the company’s largesse.

Even the garden nursery got a free truck – with Hume’s logo on the side. The company also became the biggest advertiser in the local newspaper, the Southern Highlands News. “You’d call them up to settle an account, and bang, they’d pay, like, $10,000, just like that,” says a woman who worked at the News at the time. “They were wonderful, beautiful people to deal with – they weren’t stupid.”

The company’s generosity divided the locals. “Giving out money to people gave the company credibility, but it did the reverse for the people who took the money,” says Brigid Kennedy, a local landowner and president of the Moss Vale and Rural Chamber of Commerce, who worked with Battle for Berrima, a community group that formed in 2015 to fight the mine in concert with SHCAG. According to Kennedy, many of the recipients badly needed the cash. “They were forced to take the soup,” she says, referring to the Irish potato famine of the mid-1800s, when Protestant Bible societies set up schools which fed soup to starving children, on the condition they convert to Protestantism.

There could be repercussions for those who “took the soup”. In 2014, the Exeter Soccer Club accepted a $7500 donation from Hume. For the club, which had just years before been on the brink of folding, the money was a lifeline. But after members of the club and wider community raised what the News coyly described as “concerns”, the club handed back the money. (The shortfall was subsequently made up by community fundraisers.)

Others decided to keep Hume’s cash and weather the opprobrium. In 2015, the Bowral Blacks Rugby Club took $100,000 from the miner, which helped fund the club’s new function centre. In return, Hume got naming rights on the club’s jersey. “I copped a fair bit of abuse for that,” says club president Mark Freund. “I got anonymous phone calls telling me I was a lowlife scumbag and a mongrel and I ought to be ashamed and that I was killing my kids.”

Freund, who is 43, has spent his entire life in the Southern Highlands. He doesn’t own land there – “I couldn’t afford to”. Instead, he manages other people’s farms; he’s also a director on the board of the Bowral Co-op. He believes the mine could have provided a huge boost to the area. He also says he knows more people who supported the project than opposed it. “But it’s like all these things,” he says. “It’s usually the opponents that make most of the noise.”

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By 2012, Hume was conducting widespread exploratory drilling. Under the NSW Mining Act, a mining company has the right to come onto any private property that lies above their lease area, whether the landowner likes it or not. Some landholders let the drillers on, for a price. Others refused. “One of our neighbours told the Hume liaison officer that if she ever came back on his land, he would shoot her,” says Kim Martin. “And he was serious.” SHCAG offered legal advice to people who refused Hume access; it also produced fridge magnets with tips on what to do should a Hume representative arrive on their doorstep. (“DO NOT sign anything without legal advice”; “NEVER agree to keep your arrangement confidential.” )

In 2012, SHCAG blockaded a private road in Sutton Forest that led to several properties where Hume wanted to drill. “We set up a chicane with a caravan and a bombed-out ute, and manned it 24/7,” says Peter Martin. Hume staff regularly turned up in a company car to request the obstacles be removed: SHCAG members would politely decline. The blockade went on for seven months, before Hume obtained a court order to have it dismantled. (The company was awarded $120,000 in costs, which SHCAG raised via donations and fundraisers, including raffles and a jazz event.)

Hume continued to engage with the recalcitrant landowners, including the Martins and a close neighbour, Kathy Roche, who was then 80 and undergoing chemotherapy for bowel cancer.

“We realised this was a powerful weapon. We could essentially fortify our properties by making the necessary improvements... [The] landowners were incredibly brave. Had we lost that appeal, we could have been up for more than $1 million in costs.”

There were lengthy and stressful land access arbitrations. As these arbitrations wound on, SHCAG’s lawyer, Marylou Potts, identified a little-
known provision in the NSW Mining Act called Section 31, which prevents a mining company from accessing land without permission where the owners have made “significant improvements”, such as gardens, outbuildings and fencing.

“We realised this was a powerful weapon,” says Peter Martin. “We could essentially fortify our properties by making the necessary improvements.”

Together with Potts, the Martins began criss-crossing the district, advising the locals to install gardens, plant trees and replace gates, which miners are allowed to pass through, with fences, which they are not.

“We even planted lucerne in our paddocks because by law you can’t drill in cropped areas,” says Martin. After two failed attempts to use Section 31 in the Land and Environment Court, SHCAG appealed – and in 2016, won. “Kathy and the other landowners were incredibly brave,” Martin says. “Had we lost that appeal, we could have been up for more than $1 million in costs.” The victory was a landmark not only for the mine’s opponents; it established a powerful legal precedent, protecting landholders in NSW from the predatory exploration of an unwelcome miner.

Concerns were raised that the mine would affect local waters.Credit: Tim Bauer

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Building mines is a high-stakes game. A mining company can have hundreds of millions of dollars in play; opponents, meanwhile, can fear losing their homes, health or livelihoods. Tactics on both sides can range from cattiness to intimidation and worse. In the case of the Southern Highlands, it was all of the above. Hume staff were reportedly harassed in Berrima, and rubbish was dumped at the company’s groundwater monitoring sites. A deal struck by the company to advertise on the sides of local buses was dumped after the bus company received threats. Opponents were similarly targeted. Battle for Berrima members received abusive emails, at least one of which was taken to the police.

In 2017, the group’s president, Michael Verberkt, was collecting signatures in town one afternoon when two young men approached, yelled at him for “taking our jobs” and, using a cigarette lighter, tried to set his petition on fire. Kim says Hume staff secretly taped her and other SHCAG members during the 2012 blockade, and tried to use the recordings in a subsequent land access case.

In 2014, Brett Delamont, whose drilling company Hume had contracted to do their exploratory work, was bashed in his home near Sutton Forest. Shortly after, following an anonymous tip-off, Peter Martin and Tim Frost were questioned by police. (Martin and Frost were cleared in late 2014, after police charged two other men with the attack, which was unrelated to the mine.)

Distrust grew on all sides. Hume claimed the mine would initially generate 400 local jobs but, as it later conceded in a submission to the NSW government, 90 per cent of those jobs would come from outside the area. Coal dust was another concern. The Southern Highlands sits atop a plateau some 700 metres above sea level, and is notoriously windy. (Fields and paddocks here are cross-hatched with windbreaks.) Berrima residents worried that they could be exposed to coal dust from the mine’s stockpile, which was projected to be six storeys high and 800 metres long, and only two kilometres from town. “Hume said it was no problem because they’d modelled the maximum average wind gust at 13 kilometres per hour,” says Michael Verberkt. “We later discovered that they’d measured it from a protected gully.”

Battle for Berrima president Michael Verberkt.Credit: Courtesy of Michael Verberkt

Most concerning, however, was what would happen underground. Hume wanted to mine a seam that lies, in places, up to 180 metres deep. Sitting immediately above the seam is an aquifer: essentially a layer of water-soaked sandstone, 100 metres thick. Local farmers have depended for more than a century on this aquifer to irrigate their farms and water their animals. The mine’s opponents feared that by removing the coal that lay under the aquifer, the water could drain out, just like, as Doug Graham puts it to me, “pulling the plug from a bathtub”.

In 2014, SHCAG released a study, peer reviewed by the University of NSW Water Research Laboratory, which projected that the mine could “de-water” the aquifer across a 300 square kilometre area, with significant impacts on 200 bores. Springs and creeks could also be affected. As SHCAG made clear, the Southern Highlands forms part of the Sydney catchment. Were water to leak out of the aquifer and down through the mine, it could pose a significant risk to Sydney’s drinking supply. (This is precisely what has happened at the old Medway Colliery, south of Berrima, which closed in 2013 and has been bleeding heavy metals into the Wingecarribee River ever since.)

Hume disputed SHCAG’s modelling, at one stage calling it “quackery”. It claimed, moreover, that they were using Pine Feather mining, an innovative method that involves pumping slurry and mine rejects back into the voids where the coal had been, and sealing them up with an impermeable concrete bulkhead. The company also set up a Water Advisory Group (WAG), and invited locals to be a part of it.

“That group was a PR exercise from the start,” contends Doug Graham, who sat on the WAG for five years. “I had stand-up arguments with some of the project managers during the meetings, because they were trying to railroad the discussions.” Graham says he was never against the idea of a mine per se, but that Hume could never guarantee the safety of the aquifer. “It didn’t make sense to me,” he says. “Long after the coal is dug up and burnt in a furnace, we’re still going to need that water.”

Former pop star Leo Sayer and fellow Berrima resident Penny Piccione. “Our lives changed completely,” says Piccione, recalling the time they learnt about the planned mine.Credit: Tim Bauer

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In 1975, the diminutive, densely afroed English pop singer Leo Sayer was on his first Australian tour. He and his crew had to get to Canberra, but were reluctant to fly. “I was sick of going through airports and getting mobbed by young girls,” he tells me. “So we drove, and on the way we stopped in Berrima.” The town immediately reminded him of the sweet, unpretentious little villages in West Sussex where he grew up. “I thought, ‘If ever I lived in Australia, this is where I’d be.’ ”

In 2014, he did just that, buying a former pottery shop opposite Marketplace Park, Berrima’s central green. “I thought I’d be in for the quiet life,” he tells me, sipping a peppermint tea on his verandah, where we have been joined by fellow resident, Penny Piccione, a fine-featured woman with startling blue eyes. “Then we found out about the mine.” Piccione nods. “From that moment on, our lives changed completely.”

Piccione, who is 60, bought a block of land just outside Berrima in 2015 with her partner, Gordon. Two weeks later, news came through that the mine was going to be much closer to Berrima than previously thought; her land would be just two kilometres from the coal stockpile and crushing yards. Piccione wanted to pull out of the sale but was advised by her lawyer that the vendor could sue. So she and Gordon went ahead and built their home, with two studios attached, which they intended to rent out to visitors. (Tourism is one of Berrima’s main sources of income.) “As a massage therapist, I never had any superannuation,” she says. “The idea was that the studios would provide anincome stream. But the mine threatened all that.”

“We felt like the cards were stacked against us with the way things get approved in this country. It’s all about money. The anxiety became overwhelming. I cried a lot. I couldn’t sleep. Financially, we had everything on the line, and were constantly in fear.”

Piccione began canvassing for Battle for Berrima, organising pro-forma submissions and collecting signatures from the locals, together with their phone numbers. “I’d then spend hours a day calling them back and seeing if they could man a stall or help out,” she says. At times it seemed hopeless. “We felt like the cards were stacked against us with the way things get approved in this country. It’s all about money.” The anxiety became overwhelming. “I cried a lot. I couldn’t sleep. Financially, we had everything on the line, and were constantly in fear.”

Then, in 2018, Piccione was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. “I definitely think the stress contributed to it,” she tells me. “Stress is so bad for the immune system.” (Piccione had a mastectomy in September 2018, followed by chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and is now cancer-free.)

From its founding in 2015, Battle for Berrima’s main job was garnering support and raising awareness. The group organised 30-second advertising slots in Sydney cinemas, and an advertising campaign on the back of local taxis. They had 1500 “SAY NO TO HUME COAL” signs made, and commissioned studies into the mine’s potential effect on the town’s air quality and heritage values. Leo Sayer and Jimmy Barnes played fundraisers.

By 2018, the group had raised $180,000, and gathered 16,000 signatures on a petition protesting the mine. But the battle had taken a toll. There were divorces and broken friendships; several activists for both Battle for Berrima and SHCAG died before seeing an outcome. Piccione tells me of a local olive farmer who had a breakdown, began drinking and died of liver failure last year.

By 2018, however, matters were coming to a head. Hume’s preliminary Environmental Impact Statement had attracted 12,666 public submissions, most of them pro-forma and some from Sydney, 12,212 of which were objections. (Included in these were 2000 individual or “unique” submissions, all of which opposed the mine.) Hume undertook further research into slurry-pumping and potential groundwater impacts, but the plan for the mine remained largely unchanged. For the next two years, the gears of government ground on: there were more reports and amended reports; there were two public hearings and site inspections and a further round of submissions and more submissions on the submissions.

“We’re too old for [tears] … It was more a great pride in what we’d achieved, and that knowledge that we’d stuck with it for so long, even when it seemed hopeless.”

Then, on August 31 this year – 11 years and 11 days after Peter Martin first became aware of the mine – the Independent Planning Commission (IPC) issued its final report, rejecting Hume’s proposal. According to the IPC, the mine would result in “unacceptable groundwater impacts” and a risk to Sydney’s drinking water. There were also concerns about air quality, possible subsidence and the mine’s potential impact on local tourism and farming. (A spokesman for Hume expressed disappointment, and said Hume hadn’t ruled out an appeal, but that has since been abandoned.)

“I was at home and I got a text message from Peter Martin,” says Leo Sayer. “I went out of my front door and saw all the neighbours gathered across the road in the market square park. It was around 5pm. Someone brought out a bottle and we all joined in a toast. It was a wonderful, though quiet and quite private celebration because officially we were in lockdown.”

I ask Sayer if there were any tears, but he says no: “We’re too old for that … It was more a great pride in what we’d achieved, and that knowledge that we’d stuck with it for so long, even when it seemed hopeless.”

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In mid-September, POSCO put its Southern Highlands land holdings – some 1300 hectares – up for sale, in one job lot. The company initially wanted $60 million, but buyer interest soon pushed the price to $80 million. It had been rumoured that Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes and mining magnate Andrew Forrest were interested. There was also talk that the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who owns the Godolphin horse stud in the Hunter Valley, wanted to buy the land and turn it into a horse-breeding and training facility.

“Hume gave us a community, there are so many people in the surrounding villages whom we had never engaged with, and now we know them all. So sometimes we actually sit back and go, ‘Thank you, Hume Coal’. It sounds strange, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”

In the end, it was a little-known Australian tech start-up investor called Peter Crown who bought the properties, in mid-November. Crown, who is 37, and his wife, Vanessa, also own a home in Burradoo, 10 kilometres east of Berrima. Crown couldn’t be reached for comment, but it’s thought he paid almost $100 million for POSCO’s land.

The Martins, meanwhile, have become a kind of clearing house for anti-fossil fuel activists. “I am regularly approached for advice,” says Peter Martin. “Kim and I have also been out to other communities in NSW, the Northern Territory and Queensland, to speak to people who are in coal or gas fights.”

Their most recent efforts have been in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin, where Santos and Origin, among others, are trying to frack on a number of cattle stations, against the wishes of some pastoralists and traditional owners.

According to Kim, beating the mine was a victory in more ways than one. “Hume gave us a community,” she tells me. “There are so many people in the surrounding villages whom we had never engaged with, and now we know them all. So sometimes we actually sit back and go, ‘Thank you, Hume Coal’. ” She pauses. “It sounds strange, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”

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