The Vindication of Mrs Margaret McAfee

On 30 October, 2014, the Victorian Planning Minister Mr Matthew Guy, announced that plans for two open cut pits near residential areas in Stawell had been cancelled.

A proposal in 2000 had similarly been denied because of "environmental effects".

Of particular concern to the Minister were "the potential impacts on air quality, amenity and social well-being, and risks to the community, especially nearby residents". The impacts were "too great to ignore".

It seems at least some lessons have been learned over the past decade or two from the Costerfield experience. Let's hope that, should they decide to send the mine underground, the regulators remember to look at the vents.

It has taken an Environmental Effects Inquiry Panel since March to reach this welcome decision for the people of Stawell. We congratulate everyone concerned on an eminently sensible decision. It is encouraging to see Public Health prioritised above short term economic gain by the Government.

The permanent impacts of mining activities, environmental and otherwise, require the application of a precautionary approach at each and every stage of development. Especially before works commence. If mining cannot be conducted in a manner that recognises its irreversible impacts - no one ever puts the gold back - and mitigates them to the utmost degree, such that they pose little or no risk to the Public, then the time is not right for mining.  

Is that really too much to ask of our elected so-called Representatives and our Public Servants in the regulatory authorities?

It should now be time for the Costerfield gold and antimony mine to be subjected to the EES process so that the community can have a say in determining the future of their town and address the problems with "air quality, amenity and social well-being, and risks to the community, especially nearby residents" by the under-regulated mine.

Residents of Costerfield have known the solutions to the problems that seem to plague the various departments for quite a long while and have always been willing to share this knowledge. They have told the government on numerous occasions. At no stage has any credence been given to these suggestions or offers of assistance. What would we know?

What would the residents know about their own town? The answers can apparently only be discovered by desk-bound seat shiners who visit Costerfield for a couple of hours, tell everyone we’ve got dusty roads, refuse to consult with the residents and then disappear with their consultancy fees. And who pays the consultancy fees?

Current mining activities are never to blame. It’s as if the authorities actually believe that Best Practice is being and has always been undertaken and regulated at this mine. Seriously. 
Here's the beginning of a little background to the Costerfield debacle for those unfamiliar with such things. The mine and mining operations referred to here, it must be stressed, is NOT the current mine or mining operations. The purpose of this story is to show the consistent regulatory under-application and acquiescence.

This is just the beginning.

***

When it whips up, the Costerfield wind can carry dust for miles. It circles and swirls chaotically, scooping up and swooping the light-as-air particles in lazy fractal gusts. The dust is churned and rolled in 3D Paisley curlicues through the atmosphere, mixing and blending the various chemicals and compounds.

Sometimes the toxic dust is spun from the twisting mass of air and dissipates relatively quickly and with a minimum of impact on the area. Yet, at other times the dusts are spun together into small concentrated clouds of poisons that range out over the countryside at the whim of the wind and along lay of the land, and are deposited on the roofs of a handful of houses; sometimes on just a single house.

***

Please allow us to introduce Mrs Margaret McAfee.

We’ll be hearing more about this stoic and dry-witted lady - a lovely lady with the sparkle of cheeky wisdom in her eyes - in the course of our continuing investigations into the travesty that is the regulation of the Costerfield mine. Margaret is a long-time Costerfield resident, having moved to the area in the 1970s, pioneering with a young family what would much later become known as a ‘tree change’, rural lifestyle. She had received her Science Degree in 1962, and qualified as a Radiographer.

Half a century in Science. That deserves a show of respect. One would think.

Here are some snippets from various communications and objections made by Margaret on behalf of Costerfield residents regarding the dust generated by mine in Costerfield that was reported by the residents to the government. Someone should have been listening to Margaret. But then again, what would a Radiographer with decades of experience know about “small particles” that can be "ïnhaled"…?

The investigation [into tank water contamination] is due to the wide variations in the levels of antimony detected. We have lived with rain water as our sole water supply for many years, have local knowledge, and a knowledge of all of the variables affecting water supply, but we have not been consulted, and are viewed with suspicion. Authorities seem to have made silly assumptions about things they can’t explain. All relevant authorities are refusing to disclose information.

If all of that sounds a little bit familiar to you, given recent events – variations of antimony levels in rainwater tanks; ignoring local knowledge; residents and the community viewed with suspicion; inability to explain the findings; oh, and of course, “All relevant authorities refusing to disclose information” – then you’re in for a surprise.

But suspense is key, and Margaret and the Resident's Assocation had more to say on the issues:

[The authorities are] also underestimating the possible effects [of dust] because the so called ‘conservative recommended levels’ fails to acknowledge the risks (carcinogenicity unknown) and fails to factor in the additional risks from small particles inhaled from the atmosphere. (In the air antimony is attached to very small particles that may stay in the air for many days.)

Looking at the wrong form of antimony; “conservative levels”are underestimates; respirable particles aloft for days. Pretty interesting stuff for those who want to hear. But just as it is today, nobody wanted to hear back then, either.

You see, these words are from Mrs Margaret McAfee’s response to the Shadow Minister for the Environment Conservation and Land Management, Ms Sherryl Garbutt, regarding the letter issued from the Office of the Deputy Premier Mr Patrick McNamara and signed by the Acting Minister for Agriculture and Resources, Mr Bill McGrath, dated 23 September, 1998.

1998

Of course, you’ll say, it’s easy to figure out what has happened after the fact. (Well, at least for those who are not so blind that they will not see…) How could anyone have possibly foreseen that dust issues would accompany the construction and operation of an open cut pit in the middle of a windy, dusty country town? The question of antimony contamination of rain water tanks was something no one had even considered before the mine was allowed to go ahead in 1997.

But, really, that is not the case.

Once again, from the pen of Margaret McAfee:

Issues raised by objectors that have not been satisfactorily answered.

(a)    Dust.

We have many gravel roads in Costerfield so dust is a common problem in summertime, but the dust generated by this open cut mine, particularly during the 16 week construction period, would be intolerable, especially for those downwind and only 200 metres away.

Because all residents have rain water from their roofs stored in tanks as their only domestic water supply, information was requested about the potential for contaminants in our water supply from the disturbed rocks. When asked at the objectors’ meeting what other contaminants ‘might’ be there, Mr Price, AGD Director, replied “I don’t know”. This question has still not been answered to our satisfaction and it would seem to us prudent to err on the side of caution. After all mining is for antimony and the rocks contain arsenic – both of these are poison. Because of AGD’s inability or unwillingness to provide assurance that particle contaminants in the air and in our drinking water would not pose a health risk, we initiated our own investigations. Our inquiry has been forwarded to Dr Anne Geshke in the Environmental Health section of the Health Department. Due to the early call-in of this submission we still don’t have answers.

This is the first point of objection raised by Costerfield residents in their submission of objection that was presented to the Minister when the mining licence was called in, in January 1997.

1997

(Margaret's withering response to Dr Geshke's obviously inadequate reply can be read here. We are yet to locate the Geshke reply.)

The residents' objection submission is a remarkable document. It is a very well-compiled and well-evidenced argument, but obviously rushed to only near-completion by the calling-in. Still, even rudimentary hypertextual elements - in hard copy, mind you! - are confidently applied to the residents' concerns. It is amazingly generous-of-spirit considering the mine built a 500m open cut pit in the middle of town, redirected local roads and waterways and turned the Bombay Dam, a recreational body of water that also served to replenish the community garden and as an emergency water supply for the CFA, into a tailings storage dam. And all of this within 200 metres of homes. One objector recounts how the mine cut a chain to open a gate to access powerlines, churned his wet field into a mud bath and then left it without so much as a thanks, a sorry, or an offer to fix it up.

Even so, the objectors generously offer up local knowledge to show the mine which proposed roadways are less prone to flooding! 

And yet it’s all so familiar. The authorities won’t listen to the residents. Their concerns are ignored. Their familiarity with local conditions – conditions they have dealt with all or most of their lives – are dismissed as irrelevant, when they are even listened to at all. The residents undertake their own investigations in desperation. The residents provide evidence of issues, solutions, but are ignored. And, after a poor but self-laudatory pretense at consultation and objective analysis, the predetermined outcome is allowed to play out and the mine proceeds under the not-so-watchful eye of our apparently grossly-overpaid regulators and politicians. Who say not a word.

Margaret had this to say about the objectivity of the government's analysis: The "DHS investigations do not reveal high levels of 'naturally occurring antimony' as Mr McGrath claims. They tested areas of old tailings with high antimony content, some areas being recently disturbed with drilling and trenching".

And the mine was allowed to go ahead. Guess what? Dust.

When you have a preconceived notion of what can or cannot be occurring you must sometimes skew the answers to fit the hypothesis. No matter what or who gets in the way. The various Departments refused to even consider particulate contamination of the Costerfield water tanks and the obvious explanation it provided – and still provides. There were puzzling variations in the levels of antimony detected in the tanks and so – ignoring particulate contamination, because that would bring the mine into the picture – the Department of Human Services did the only thing that could be done under the circumstances.

They allowed the mine to insult and defame in the media those people of Costerfield who opposed the mine and its dust, and then they brought in the police!

In June 1998, when this barely-regulated mine failed to adequately secure the pipes that transported “cyanide-laden tailings sludge," five tonnes of the toxic material was spilled. The Director of AGD was adamant that it was not the company’s fault: “The Company believes the only possible explanation for this was that a person or persons removed the restraints and physically moved the pipeline.” Only possible explanation.

The investigating officer Sergeant Leon Clegg, on the other hand, concluded that “the four-inch poly pipe, which had been held in place by a rope tied to a metal star picket, had moved while slurry was flowing". He deduced this from the fact that the "cyanide-laden tailings sludge" had "spilled in an arc". It was Sgt Clegg's opinion that "the spill could possibly have been the result of vandalism, but [he] urged the mining company to secure the pipe in position more thoroughly and secure the dam surrounds. At this stage, police had no further avenues of investigation to pursue. The EPA was also at the site on Monday investigating the spill, but no report was available”. Only a possible explanation.

(The more things change the more they stay the same. The mine obviously still has a surplus of star pickets now that it no longer – we presume; we hope! – uses them to secure tailings pipes with rope. So the EPA allows their use for these.)

Once again, EPA are right there on the spot… after the fact… “no report available”. At least we had Sgt. Clegg to accomplish what the EPA hadn’t bothered to oversee: regulation of tailings transportation at the mine.
Police as mining regulator. Amazing, no?

Two days after the newspaper article above was printed, the mine wrote to the Australian Stock Exchange to explain its decision to "suspend oxide mining operations at Costerfield pending an assessment of operations". Recent "acts of sabotage and theft" were to blame. A generator went missing. No one was charged. But, as Margaret told the Minister in her letter to Ms Garbutt, the "so-called sabotage... occurred two weeks after residents noted work had stopped". The mine was 200m from their houses; so they knew.

As you can read in her letter Margaret was quite suspicious of the timing of an unfavourable geological report that told of lower yields than expected and suggested that alternative mining operations be undertaken at other locations in the area. The Costerfield mine itself was "speculative" and it was "unlikely that the programme in its present form would be sufficient to justify mine development". And then the tailings spill. And then the ASX notification.

But by then it was all too late. Costerfield had become as fractured as the aquifer system it sits on. And the winds of change had blown through the town.
Neighbour refused to talk to neighbour. Families divided. Decades-long friendships were broken. The town was split into pro- and anti-mining camps. People moved away; shunned. Animosity. Turned heads in the street. Gossip and innuendo. The silent treatment. The legacy remains.

But the victimisation from the mine was allowed to continue and escalate.

Also from Margaret’s reply to the Minister:

On 1^st of September when the mining licence was not renewed, Mr Byrne from AGD, told the press that we were ‘trouble making blackmailers’. And now we have the police investigation of our water supply going on, and residents are simply left to wonder why. We are told the investigation is due to the wide variations in the levels of antimony detected. We have lived with rain water as our sole water supply for many years, have local knowledge, and a knowledge of all of the variables affecting water supply, but we have not been consulted, and are viewed with suspicion.

That’s right. Blackmail!

Preconceived notions exonerate the mine. “Trouble makers” had “caused all the bad publicity for the company… Mr Byrne said the contamination problem was an historical problem, and would not affect a decision on the mine’s future. ‘Suggestions the levels of antimony were caused by the mine, and dust blown out of the open cut, are a nonsense,’ he said”.

“We won’t be blackmailed into buying out people’s properties. That’s what this is all about.”

The company claimed that “acts of alleged sabotage had forced it to abandon the open-cut operation”. According to AGD Chairman John Byrne, “it was a question of whether it was worth continuing to mine with continuing irritation (from the community) [Parentheses in original! Emphasis added.] and having to employ 24-hour security to protect the site”.

He also said that “the June 27 spill, containing low levels of cyanide, was the result of a pipe carrying tailings being tampered with. Certainly everyone who has looked at it believes it was sabotage”.

Everyone, that is, except Sgt. Clegg. Certainly.

Continued irritation from the community! The audacity of the man!

And Byrne was allowed to get away with it. Allowed to blow his poisonous words like dust about the district.

And then more police were called in.

And the Police undertook water sampling in Costerfield for the DHS!

Margaret had already told the Hearing into the mine a few home truths about the way residents had already been treated:
 

"I also believe that the City of Greater Bendigo, in allowing the permit, did not evaluate the long term effects of the mine. The council and the DNRE have let the locals down. To many of the people in this room, we (residents) are just lines on the maps," she said, pointing to the AGD representatives.

Permit approval in isolation from consideration of long term effects; lack of consultation. It could be yesterday. Today.

And Margaret was not the only person unimpressed by the evasive and dishonourable actions and utterances of the mine’s representatives. Other scientists, seconded ostensibly to undertake investigations into the environmental impacts of the mine, were convinced they had been employed “just to keep us quite”. Tales of deception and stalling and the misleading of council regarding threats to wildlife and the environment. A missing DNRE flora assessment...

But the mine had been allowed to proceed anyway and we know the results. Dust. From an open cut pit.

What a surprise.

So then the mine was closed. And considered taking things underground. Nothing to do with the dust, though. ‘Suggestions the levels of antimony were caused by the mine, and dust blown out of the open cut, are a nonsense’. Sabotage! Although the Minister, while confessing that  the mine was not "likely" to have been the "sole" contributor, admitted that the mine was "additional" to the problem. Not likely to be the sole... still sounds like the possibility of a sizable "addition".

Margaret was asked for her reaction to the news of the mine's closing by The McIvor Times on 2 September, 1998. This anti-mining, troublemaking blackmailer, saboteur and thief, had the following to say:

Marg McAfee from the Costerfield Residents Association said it was welcome news if the open cut mine was not to re-open.

Residents have been campaigning against the dust, noise, antimony and arsenic contamination and the loss of their quiet country existence since the news of the proposal was first announced by AGD last year.

She said the group believed underground mining would have less impact on their lives.

“If it was carried out with consideration and consultation with the people who are affected personally, we’d probably go along with that,” she said. Whatever happens, the residents want the area in the centre of their town rehabilitated properly.

Mrs McAfee said it appears this was being discussed, but “no-one was talking to us about what we would like. There’s now a hole where we used to have a road; perhaps they could ask us where we want the road to go.

“This is where we live and we’d like a say. We are not just a spot on the map for people in offices to make decisions about.”

Consideration and consultation. This is where we live and we'd like a say. We'd probably go along with underground mining. How is one to deal with such anti-mining radicalism? Oh yes, by bringing in the Police, of course.

Eventually it came to pass that the mine went underground. And that was that. As far as the politicians and the regulators were concerned.

Except the dust and the particulates kept blowing into the cold, morning Costerfield air.

***

There is much, much more to this story and we shall endeavour to bring it to you in the coming weeks and months as we further extend our investigations – the Costerfield residents’ investigations. But Margaret told all the regulators and officials about the issues and provided the answers 17 years ago. And she did so on numerous occasions. And no one listened to her. And her community fell apart. And she lost friends. And the idyllic lifestyle she had dreamed of for her family was shattered. And the regulators allowed the destruction of the community's recreational water body, enjoyed for decades by people and the wildlife, to be destroyed, and in its place they built a tailings storage facility 150 metres from Margaret's house.

But she kept on trying to make herself heard. She has only recently stepped down from the Environmental Review Committee. She has been forced to watch it all unfold again; forced to breathe it all in again.

And a six metre raise in height of the Bombay Dam has recently been approved by VCAT – after Bendigo Council, the responsible authority – shirked all responsibility and spinelessly refused to make a decision, effectively removing residents’ right to object to the proposal in Bendigo. The expensive and intensive VCAT process was their only option. So Margaret will have to watch that unfold 150 metres from her quiet, tree ringed home.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And the guaranteed (in 1997) recreational waterbody to replace the Bombay Dam has never eventuated. And the mine is allowed to get bigger and bigger right in the middle of the town of Costerfield.

***

And so, just as with the little pockets of toxic dust buffeted by the wind, the poisoned words of the shirking, willfully blind regulators and the irreproachable mine, spewed out over the Costerfield Community. Caught up and carried by the winds of gossip and a storm of media partisanship, the various outbursts of bile and bitterness swirling around the Costerfield air were mixed and blended into a pocket of poisonous blame.

And this blame was spun together with small town suspicions and slights, forming concentrated clouds of vitriol that ranged out over the countryside at the whim of the wind and along lay of the land, to be deposited on the roofs of a handful of houses; sometimes on just a single house.

***

A lot of people owe Costerfield a very big apology.

A lot of people owe Mrs Margaret McAfee a very big apology.

She was right and she tried to tell the authorities and no one listened.

We would like the mine, the government and each of the regulatory departments responsible for this decades-long debacle to pen a suitably humble apology.

And we would like them to nail it to the door of the Costerfield Community Hall.

And then we would like the recreational water body to replace the Bombay Dam that was promised all those years ago. When the mine was only supposed to be a short term affair. In the 1997 Permit with the Governor-in-Council's stamp of approval.

Get well soon, Margaret!