Behind my eyelids I saw red
As we drive down the highway, I glimpse the void of Hazelwood to my left, obscured by trees, a large fence, then to my right, the footy field packed with people, the game we had heard on the radio in the Salvos. Our assumption for why Morwell was a ghost town that day proved right. Claudia has fallen asleep in the car. It rains intermittently and the sky is clouded. Every now and then the sun finds a way through and warms the car.
Morwell exists in the middle of three open-cut brown coal mines in the Latrobe Valley: Loy Yang, Yallourn, and Hazelwood. Mines that are invariably known for being either the biggest or dirtiest in Australia. This area is referred to as coal country where the rolling hills of Gippsland dairy farms hide the kilometres long pits that have been mined for the past hundred years. Fifty metre high dredges weighing 5000 tonnes scooping a tonne of earth at a time to remove the overburden from coal seams created by a 30 million year old swamp.
After a century of coal in the valley, the power stations are being closed down one by one. Hazelwood was the first to shut at the end of March 2017 and Yallourn is planned to close in 2028 and Loy Yang to follow in 2048. On the day Hazelwood closed, it is reported that bagpipes were played as workers hung their hats on the chain link fence and signs were pinned to the fence reading ‘GOD HATES GREENIES’ and ‘FUCK THE GREENIES’.
We follow the signs that direct us towards the ‘Hazelwood Rehabilitation’ but all we find is an office and unpassable boom gates. We find a better vantage point to gaze into the pit and notice a security car has come down to the gate. As I turn around from the wire fences I spot a security camera watching us. The surveillance is unexpected and I proceed with a clench of paranoia.
On the drive from Loy Yang to Hazelwood we pass through acres of paddocks with horses and cows. The road is dotted with mining adjacent businesses. Engineering, logistics … The valley is crisscrossed by power lines. There’s so many of them I find it hard to follow where each line is travelling to or coming from. After this first day in the Latrobe Valley, I speak to my dad about the trip. He says that there’s a power line that travels from the Valley across Victoria to the Alcoa aluminium smelter in Portland. By car, that is about 525 kilometres. The closest I can get to validating this claim is an article confirming Alcoa and AGL have signed a nine year contract to supply power to the smelter[1].
I’m aware that I’ve come to the Valley, to coal country, with my own ideas and fears about mining, about climate collapse, about corporate greenwashing, about the decline of regional and rural communities. The way I see things (glimpse or otherwise) is affected by what I know or believe.[2] I know I’ve come to view open-cut mines that are the size of Melbourne CBD but I’m still shocked by their size. I’m shocked by the inability to fully see and comprehend them. The hundreds of signs on fences that read ‘KEEP OUT’, ‘RESTRICTED’, ‘NO TRESPASSING’ and ‘TRESPASSING PUNISHABLE BY 1 YEAR IMPRISONMENT’ and the pervasive security cameras. I understand that there is an element of safety, companies don’t want people falling into 130 metre deep pits, or being crushed by dredges, but the combination of deterrents creates a sinister atmosphere.
I am on edge, waiting to be yelled at, expecting to be told to fuck off. I don’t want to stop anywhere even as we get closer to Loy Yang. I want to look without being seen. Technology obscures the relationship of seeing and being seen. Surveillance technology enables someone to see without being seen and can render you vulnerable to the vision of another. I want to look from an organisationally designated spot where I can’t be asked any questions.
You see the cooling stacks and conveyor belts of Loy Yang well before you can see the brown coal pit and even then it is obscured by trees, rises and fences. I glimpse it again and again, craning my neck to see while trying to keep my eyes on the road. The less I’m able to see the more impatient and paranoid I become. The road snakes between the huge cooling stacks that are tinged orange from the heat, curtains of water falling at their base to aid the task. It begins to rain gently. Utes pass on the other side of the road. The car parks for Loy Yang A and B are dotted with the cars of the weekend workforce. The conveyor belt looks like a rollercoaster that comes from the depth of the pit across the road and over to the furnace where the coal will be burned, transformed into energy for the state.
The buildings of Loy Yang A and B peter out as we drive further along the road and we turn around to head towards Yallourn. We travel back the way we came. Along the same roads, past the same horses and cows. We pass back through Morwell and up the hill, almost making it out of the valley. The Yallourn Lookout is where we learn that the open pit we can almost see (through the fence and the trees) used to be a town of 5,000 built expressly for the purpose of housing miners. The town had stood for 30 years before it was partly moved, partly demolished to be able to mine the brown coal that lay underneath. I’m reminded of a sentence I have scribbled on a sticky note on my wall: When mining does well, Australia does well, but when mining doesn’t do well, nor do Australians. I’d heard Gina Rinehart proudly say it in a TV ad while standing in front of one of her Western Australian mines. It was a blatant threat to the mining opposition like me. That if I had it my way, mining would be down the drain and Australia would go with it. I think of the towns I have visited where mining has irrevocably shaped the lands and communities in the region and consider Rinehart’s statement. The boom and bust cycle of resource extraction industries leaving behind terrorised earth and high unemployment rates. Mining moves on to do well somewhere else.
We find a lookout to view the Loy Yang open-cut. In standing at the lookout above Loy Yang where you are free to gaze into the open-cut, the eye cannot fully comprehend the enormity of the five kilometre long pit. It brings it closer, shrinking everything around it to compensate. The cooling towers appear a fraction of their size up close, the dredges, which are 150 metres long and 50 metres high, are reduced to the size of a Tonka truck, and utes you can see descending into the pit now Hot Wheels cars to my eyes. My suspicion and paranoia is an extension of my fear for the future, a fear that we will still be mining these sites after 2028 or 2048 despite our desperate need to have stopped long ago that is mixed with worry for the future of towns like Morwell or Moe. There are information boards at the lookout that extol the good natured work of AGL and state that the world would not have the technological advancements we have now without coal fired power. Another way of articulating that these pits, and the ecological destruction both mining and burning coal have caused, continue to be a necessary evil.
Around Morwell, we see streets named Coal Court and Miners Way. The No.21 Dredger from the Hazelwood open-cut has been carefully preserved and immortalised as a testament to its 50 year working life lived in the open-cut. The new council buildings in the centre of Morwell and Moe indicate that money is flowing into the valley in some form. There is a stark difference to the apparent wealth that once existed in mining towns like Ballarat or Queenstown where grand colonial buildings still dominate the streets. McKenzie Wark in Hacker Manifesto articulates the migration of power from owning the resource to owning the means of production to owning the intellectual property[3]. The creation of wealth and prosperity have become further removed from the site of the resource - if there is even a site at all.
Over three trips, we glimpse over and over and over the colossal open-cuts without ever fully seeing them. The ‘glimpse’ becomes central to a perceived urgency in how we understand our exploration of the Valley. There is a very real feeling of being deceived, of an intentional hiding of the destruction of the land but I am suspicious of my own paranoia. How could anyone intentionally hide an open-cut mine? Why would they hide the mines when coal is the pride of the valley? The street signs a testament to this. John Berger writes that “we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” My relationship to seeing, attempting to see, glimpsing these sites will forever be grounded in fear. Even after the mines are closed and the work to rehabilitate each site begins, I will worry for the ground water and the ecosystems that depend on it once the open-cuts are filled with water. I will worry for the birds and wildlife that can’t be deterred by fences.
This essay was published as part of the exhibition, Behind My Eyelids I Saw Red, held at Schoolhouse Studios in collaboration with painter Claudia Phillips.
[1] AGL Energy. "AGL Enters into Additional Portland Smelter Contract." September 2024. Accessed November 22, 2024.
[2] Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.
[3] Wark, M. (2004). A hacker manifesto. Harvard University Press.