Mining companies leave many Queensland farmers’ land barren and broken. When they go belly up who pays for rehabilitation?

Farmer Trish Goodwin’s property in Bluff, in central Queensland. An open-cut coal mine on her land has been left without being rehabilitated after the mining company went into receivership. Photograph: Sylvia Liber/The Guardian

Sandstone cliffs rise from the brigalow scrub around the tin and timber farmhouse of Patricia Goodwin at the back of Bluff, a tiny town in the central Queensland highlands.

One ridge stands out from the rest. Stripped of all vegetation, the blacks and browns of its earthen ramparts loom over the landscape like the citadel of a Mad Max warlord. This is no natural formation – it is the spoil of an open cut metallurgical coalmine.