Acland comes back to life for census night

FOR one night the Queensland town of Acland lived again.

110813 Acland

FOR one night the Queensland town of Acland lived again.

On Tuesday evening - census night - about 50 people piled into town, lit a fire and filled in their forms by torchlight.

On paper and in person they ensured that Acland remained alive a while longer.

For months, Acland has made headlines as the home of the "last man standing".

Glen Beutel, the town's lone resident, has been fighting the might of the mining companies, defiantly refusing to sell his 11 properties to New Hope coal, which wants to expand its open-cut mine.

Nicki Laws, who lives in nearby Kingsthorpe, braved the freezing temperatures to join the stand in Acland on census night, saying she was "here to protest against the disintegration of a precious community".

"The area around Acland is important agricultural farming land that should be protected," she said.

Drew Hutton, veteran activist and environmental campaigner, was among the crowd and said the night was about solidarity with the "last man standing" and a community "coming together".

"The coalmine hasn't won yet, we're still here, we're still fighting," he said.

Only 10 years, and two census surveys ago, Acland was home to more than 300 residents. Some families had lived in the area for six generations.

Since then, the establishment of an open-cut coalmine less than 2km from the town centre has reduced it to a ghost town as Mr Beutel's neighbours have sold up.

Mr Beutel's act of defiance has attracted the attention not only of the national media and Sydney radio host Alan Jones, who attended primary school in the town, but also the likes of the BBC and The New York Times.

The Weekend Australian has previously reported on Mr Beutel's struggle. On Wednesday, protesters moved to blockade the New Hope mine site on the edge of town. It is now a part of the wider battle being played out across Australia, in the Darling Downs of Queensland and on the Liverpool Plains of NSW, where people are fighting the encroachment of mining companies as they explore for coal-seam gas and coal on prime agricultural land.

The protest movement is bringing together all sorts of strange bedfellows.

Ruddy-faced farmers who have never voted Labor are standing alongside environmental activists who would sooner tie themselves to a bulldozer than be involved with a conservative cause.

Some people, like Tanya Plant, are novices at the protest game. At 35, and with a Rhodes scholarship to her name, Ms Plant has decided to make a stand with her farming family and the grassroots movement mobilising against the mining of the verdant plateau in southern Queensland beyond the Great Dividing Range.

"We didn't pick this fight. It came to us," Ms Plant says. "We're just local people who grew up here and want our kids to have somewhere, too."

Pensioner Glennis Hammond, 63, is another unlikely radical. She retired to the nearby town of Jondaryan from the Gold Coast two years ago and says she has since experienced breathing problems, which she blames on coal dust. "I'd never been to a blockade before the other day . . . It felt really good," she said with a grin.

"A driver got down from his truck and told me, 'I've got shares in this company and I have a family to feed'.

"So I said to him, 'Why don't they come over and eat coal, like I do'. "

Mr Hutton is a key figure in the protest movement.

He is the co-founder of the Australian Greens and a one-time anarchist who cut his teeth in the anti-dam campaign on Tasmania's Franklin River in the early 80s with the likes of Bob Brown.

Mr Hutton is the driving force behind the "Lock the Gate" blockade, which is backed by environment group Friends of the Earth. It is trying to halt the encroachment of coal-seam gas projects on viable farming land, including on the Darling Downs.

Mr Hutton recalled that when he first approached the farmers around Acland, they told him: "Oh, you're the bastard who caused all our problems in the first place. It was a bit hard for them to accept us at first, that we were serious about protecting prime agricultural land, but after a while they realised there were no hidden agendas.

"I said to them right at the beginning, 'You're not going to win this west of the Great Dividing Range'. The only way to do this is to get the city involved through the environmental movement and that's what we've done.

"This is an issue that goes beyond left and right, beyond greenie-farmer or tribal loyalties. It's about whether or not you believe our resources should be developed sustainably or if we're just in it for a quick buck."

Additional reporting: Mitchell Nadin