New Acland mine reopening cannot come quick enough for rehired staff

Bodie Sherrington, the first person to be rehired at the New Acland coal mine, can wave goodbye to a six-hour drive for a fill-in job and resume duty as full-time husband and father.

Rehired New Acland mine worker Bodie Sherrington with wife Abby and their children, Isla and Monty, can’t wait for the mine to reopen. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The New Acland coalmine west of Brisbane is back in business and for Bodie Sherrington it can’t come soon enough. He’s the first person from the sacked workforce to be rehired.

That means he can wave goodbye to the six-hour drive that came with his fill-in job at an opencut in central Queensland and resume duty as full-time husband and father, much to the ­relief of hard-pressed wife Abby.

“It’s almost like we’ve been living two separate lives. You’re working away for eight days and you kind of have to switch off from the family,” the 33-year-old mining engineer said.

“Then when you’re back home, you kind of try to fit 14 days with Abby and the kids into six days. It gets pretty exhausting.”  

New Acland’s owner, the New Hope Group, is busily recruiting after winning its 15-year battle to undertake a pit expansion that will allow production to resume next year, a boon for the 300-odd workers the company had to retrench.

Court challenges and the ­alleged slow-walking of approvals by the Queensland government had seemed set to strangle the project, forcing the company to mothball the site near Oakey on the Darling Downs, 160km northwest of Brisbane, last November when the existing ore body was exhausted.

By then, all but a small cadre of care and maintenance staff had been laid-off, including Mr Sherrington, who lost his job in June 2021.

Instead of being 30 minutes from work, the family man was away from home eight days a fortnight at the Baralaba coalmine north of Moura – a roundtrip of nearly 1000km.

Their baby boy, Monty, a brother to three-year-old Isla, came along about the same time Mr Sherrington started on the drive-in, drive-out treadmill.

“It was really hard, especially for our little girl when she was used to Daddy being home every night,” said Abby, 30. “When Monty was born I had to adjust to having two little kids of my own for eight days at a time. Yeah, it took its toll, definitely.”

Despite securing a green light last December from the Queensland Land Court for the stage-three expansion – a saga in itself after that same tribunal rejected New Hope’s application for a mining lease and environmental approval in 2017 – the last piece of the regulatory jigsaw did not fall into place until October 20 when the conditional water licence from the state finally came through.

New Acland general manager Dave O’Dwyer said the Australian-owned company had received 818 applications for the 700 jobs on offer to build and operate the new opencut, up to 400 of them ongoing production positions. To date, 198 former employees of the mine had applied to return.

New Acland Mine general manager Dave O'Dwyer. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

More than 95 per cent of New Acland’s output of thermal coal had gone overseas and talks were under way with former customers in Japan and Taiwan to lock in new contracts, Mr O’Dwyer said. When up and running, about five million tonnes of ore would be produced annually.

On the company’s trenchant criticism of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s state Labor government at the height of the standoff, Mr O’Dwyer said: “Ultimately the government had a process and stuck to their process. But we felt the government … had the ability to kind of stop the carousel. That was probably the key frustration for us.”

Queensland Resources Minister Scott Stewart insisted the government had been “consistent”, last week telling parliament its position was to wait for the legal challenges to conclude before moving on the outstanding approvals.

Paul King, of the Oakey Coal Action Alliance of farmers and ­locals opposed to the mine expansion, would not rule out further litigation.

Mr Sherrington is just happy to have his job back. Born and raised locally, he started work at the mine as a weekend truck driver while studying for his civil engineering degree and returns as technical services superintendent.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” he said of the industry’s depiction by ­climate and green activists.

“A lot of the people saying those things have never been … near a mine site. But they’re all happy to take the money we earn for our communities and the country.”