Landline - Mineral Sands by Gillian Aeria 17 Nov 2024
This final segment “Mineral Sands: Striking the balance between mining rare earths and farming” of the 17 Nov 2024
episode of Landline on ABC TV was transcribed by Elizabeth O’Brien of The LEAD Group Inc, and illustrated by screenshots
from the show. The full episode can be viewed for the next three years in you have an iView account, at
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2314Q040S00
Pip Courtney (Main Presenter, Landline): Rare earths and minerals
are in all sorts of products from mobile phones to electric cars, even
ceramic bathtubs. Some of Australia's vast deposits of these
valuable global commodities are under prime cropping land in
Western Victoria, just one of 12 proposed mines cover 3,500
hectares and could impact on those cropping operations for
decades. Farmers told Horsham reporter Gillian Aeria they feel
powerless to protect their land from big mining.
Screenshot: Map showing Dooen in Wotjobaluk Country,
Victoria, Australia.
Gillian Aeria, Reporter, ABC, Horsham: The Wimmera Plains
in Western Victoria grows pulses, canola and wheat bound
for markets in China, India and Vietnam, fetching a premium
price.
Harvest is time to celebrate.
Lachie Johns: "This is like the grand final. Yeah, it's like your payday. It's that time where you get to reap the
rewards of your hard work from the year. You just love it. You can't get into it early enough. and, you know, it's
always a slog. It's a busy time of year but that's just part of it and… Yeah just living the dream."
Gillian Aeria: The Johns
family farm at Dooen,
near Horsham in Victoria's
west.
Chris Johns is the fifth
generation, and farming
has always been his
destiny.....
Now their world is being
turned upside down.…
Chris Johns: it's about half
of Victoria [that has]
exploration licenses or
retention licenses over it.
Donna Johns: roughly 361,000 acres in the Wimmera Mallee.
Gillian Aeria: their farm and house are in the middle of a proposed mineral sands mine known as Avonbank.
The company behind the mining bid is WIM Resource which is majority Chinese owned.
Chris Johns: This house is over 100 years old, built in 1920. Mum always had a beautiful Garden here. They've
told us we can't use the house for 36 years - reason being the dust, the noise, the vibration, the lights and they
told us that we can't live here because of the toxic dust.
Gillian Aeria: for the Johns, it's heartbreaking. Their family has farmed here since the 1880s. They've planted 30
trees here to commemorate both world wars. Although it will all go.
Chris Johns: there’s not too many memorials you’d see get pulled out. we’ve worked our guts out to have what’s here and
to have a foreign owned
mining company come in and
do what they’re doing to us.
I just can’t understand and it’s
not just me. This is all my
neighbors my community.
Donna Johns: our future is on
hold, especially our son,
Lachie. He lives here on this
property. At this stage, he
won’t be able to live in the
house for 36 years so it’s
concerning not knowing what
his future is or where he’s
going to be able to live. It’s
not easy to watch the stress
that it’s causing to my husband and my son and then, you know, what it does even to my father-in-law, Max.
Gillian Aeria: beneath this
topsoil are mineral sand
deposits – A lucrative global
commodity.
James Sorahan [Minerals
Council of Australia (MCA),
Victoria]: rare earth minerals
in particular these days are
used in electric vehicle
batteries, in green energy,
wind turbine magnets, so we
know demand for these is
growing. Zircon is in ceramics
and also ilmenite and rutile in
titanium.
Gillian Aeria: more than
3500 ha of cropping land
across 25 rural properties
falls into the footprint of
WIM Resource’s proposed
Avonbank mine.
Andrew Weidermann,
Grain Producers Australia:
in terms of proximity, you
couldn’t have picked a
worse spot even if you
tried.
Gillian Aeria: Andrew
Weidermann is on the
proposed Mines Advisory
Board.
Green growers are
worried nearby crops and
grain handling and export
facilities could be
contaminated.
Andrew Weidermann:
we've asked questions
about radioactivity. You
know, clearly, once you start to get into the mesonet [middle?] soil profiles and down lower, you're looking
at potential radiation issues.
Gillian Aeria: WIM Resource declined an interview with the ABC. But James Sorahan from Victoria's Minerals
Council is adamant there's little risk because of strict government regulations.
James Sorahan: all aspects of the environment, soil, water is all looked at very closely, all involved in mine
planning, rehab rehabilitation and all of these environmental and safety measures are fully integrated into a
mine plan before the mine is approved.
Gillian Aeria: it's
estimated the
Avon bank
deposit
contains nearly
500,000,000
tons of ore from
which 13
million tons of
heavy mineral
concentrate will
be extracted
and shipped to
China for
further
refinement.
It'll end up in smartphones and electric vehicles. The potential returns are immense. landholders feel they're
fighting a losing battle.
The Environmental Effects Statement for the Avonbank project, released for public scrutiny last year, to 6000
pages of technical information. The farmer say they were at a loss to present their case at the state government
planning inquiry into the proposal.
Gavin Puls, Farmer: We don't feel equipped at all. It's well beyond us. We just like putting plants in the ground
to watch them grow.
Dean Johns, Landholder: The biggest problem was, you know, we sort out legal advice and after about three
weeks after the first communication They told us that there was a conflict of interest, so it didn't give us a lot
of time to get through to the EES and I decided to represent myself.
Gillian Aeria: Those who could afford legal advice joint forces to share the cost.
Christopher Johns, Farmer: That was over $80,000 and at this stage we're well over $100,000 we've spent on
Solicitors.
Donna Johns: I think for the farmers, the land owners don't really have a lot of say in this and there needs to
be a body for people on the land that they can go to to get the information they need to deal with these
situations because we're not lawyers and we don't know all the steps in the process.
Gillian Aeria [pictured at left]: these
are just some of the thousands of
pages that were under public
review. It's what the government
uses to assess whether a mine
should go ahead. And now
landholders here in Dooen are now
awaiting the government's decision
as to whether a mining license
should be granted and if it is, these
farming families will need to decide
whether to sell up or negotiate
compensation and lease their land.
Gillian Aeria: mining companies
must rehabilitate affected land
At the end of mine's life. WIM
Resource has built a test pit to
demonstrate that crops can be
grown on land Post mining. The
results showed successful barley
and lentil crops in 2021 and
2022 but the local farmers
remain sceptical. Gavin Puls'
cropped a paddock alongside
the test pit.
Gavin Puls: They've
overestimated their yields. We
know what the crop looked like
when they harvested it and ours
was going next door and theirs
was nowhere nearby.
Gillian Aeria: so you're not
convinced?
Gavin Puls: no, not convinced at
all.
Gillian Aeria: local
claim to get those
results, WIM Resource
would have had to use
at least 15 times the
amount of gypsum
farmers normally
would.
WIM Resource doesn't
deny using extra gypsum
farmers simply don't
believe the soil, once mind
can be returned to its
former fertile state.
Andrew Weidermann,
Grain Producers Australia: I don't know that there's been realistically, where there's an open cut mine that it's
been successfully rehabilitated back to the state that it was before it was actually mined. And we're talking
about mining an area, basically that is set aside for food production and turning it into a mine. I think there's
got to be other areas in Australia where they should be looking at first, rather than trying to tear down, you
know, 150 years of agriculture.
Gillian
Aeria: WIM
Resource
Plans to
mine no
more than
400 ha at
one time
before
moving on
to another
hole.
James
Sorahan,
MCA (Vic):
Mineral
sands
mining is
particularly
small footprint. It's backfilled. It's progressively rehabilitated which means it's continually rehabilitated. It's sort
of around four years to 5 years that the land is returned back to farmland.
Gillian Aeria: But farmers don't
believe that can happen. They
point to farmland that was
mined further south. Iluka
Resources Douglas Mine
finished extracting ore in 2012.
Its main pit is still being
backfilled after burying leftover
soil and waste byproducts,
Including radioactive material,
f rom interstate mines. The local
council refused a permit for that
waste, which Iluka contested and
won in the Victorian Civil and
Administrative Tribunal.
Ian Ross, Wool Producer: it was
supposed to be a moving
footprint, but that never
happened. The whole mine was
mined and 14 k's of pit was still
open and today in 2024 it's still
not fully closed up. So, the
moving footprint was a myth and we were misled as a community by the government, and the regulators let us
down.
Gillian Aeria: Wool producer Ian Ross, sat on the Douglas Mine's Environmental Review Committee. He says,
large stock piles of soil were left nearby on private farmland, compacting the ground beneath it.
Ian Ross: The compaction
there and the loss of soil life
because it was too piled for a
dozen years, 15 years instead
of three years, which means
the organic matter, all the
microbes in the soil - the
compaction of the soil - they
tried to deep rip - but the
soils would stay damaged.
You can still see in the crops
where the pits were and
were the stock piles were.
Gillian Aeria: Iluka Resources
showed the ABC a pit at the
Douglass mine that they say has been rehabilitated and returned to the land holder. The companies head of
rare earths, Daniel McGrath, says that land can be cropped.
Daniel McGrath, Iluka
Resources [pictured at left]:
I'm very confident that the
land we've handed back is
the equivalent to, if not
better than it was when we
took it over. A lot of the land
here prior to us being here
was not suitable for
agricultural uses.
Gillian Aeria: And is the
landholder happy with the
state that it's been returned
to?
Daniel McGrath: ah... we've handed a closure and completion notice back to this landowner earlier this year.
Gillian Aeria: OK. Are they happy with the results?
Daniel McGrath: We've handed the completion notice to the land owner so I'm comfortable that they are very
happy with the results.
Gillian Aeria: The land holder told the ABC there's still more work to be done, but declined to comment further
because they're bound by a confidentiality agreement.
Ian Ross: What was said in the environmental effects statement and what we signed off on as a community
and the government signed off on never happened because the regulators didn't regulate. So, there's a lot of
protection for mining and the farming community is not protected.
Gillian Aeria: Ian Ross is also a counselor at Horsham Rural City Council, the local government area where the
Avonbank project is being proposed. After the experience of the Douglass mine, he doesn't have faith in the
government regulator.
Ian Ross: for there to
be an equitable
balance, the farmers
need to be far more
empowered than we
are. You have billion-
dollar corporations
coming onto farmers
small operations and
they're not expert at
managing PR [public
relations] or working
with mines yet
they've got a well-
oiled machine coming
into a community
with great resources
and then [for] each
individual farm
environmental affect
statement [farmers
need to] look at the science to make sure what they're being told is actually true.
Gillian Aeria: The Victorian minerals council says modern mining methods mean less environmental impact than
in the past, and landholders have stronger laws to protect them.
James S..., MCA. (Vic): We don't want mining and farming to be pitted against each other. There's no need for
it. Mining can bring good jobs, give reasons for young people to stay in a local area, and grow towns in
northern western Victoria that needs more industry. We need more economic diversification.
Gillian Aeria: at Dooen near Horsham, the Johns family and others here would welcome that, but only if it
doesn't ruin their lives and livelihoods. They're waiting to hear if a mining license over their farm will be
granted to WIM Resource.
Donna Johns: Watching your loved ones suffer and ... you know, just not knowing what they can do - the stress
that it's caused has been fairly immense. The not knowing, and the lack of information too, has been a bit hard
on us. Probably more is the sleepless nights and, yeah, just dealing with the whole process. It would be
devastating if we have to, you know, leave this land.
Pip Courtney: Landline learned
late last week that WIM
Resource had contacted
landholders around Dooen,
saying the project is going
ahead.
At the time of our recording,
the government had not
publicly commented.
