It feels like a genteel country garden party. The women prepare platters of food, tea and coffee. A marquee filled with chairs stands outside. It is the home of farmer Kate Gunn, looking out over Liverpool Plains, which is a mosaic of rich chocolate brown soil, crop stubble and grassland.
Those plains and the land right up to the Pilliga forest near Narrabri are the reason people have gathered. They are preparing to fight Santos, the big gas company who holds the licenses for what lies beneath. BHP and the Chinese state-owned Shenhua have tried to access that resource and walked away.
Two teal independent MPs from Sydney, Kylea Tink and Sophie Scamps, are among those in attendance. They came willing to listen, they say, and farmers are looking for allies in the crossbench to stop the development going ahead.
Gunn says what is facing landholders is large scale gas extraction.
“The Santos representative that I spoke with confirmed that Santos aspires to extract as much coal seam gas as possible from the Liverpool Plains,” she says. “So I assume that that is what they hope to do.”
Tony Windsor, a former New South Wales and federal independent MP and Werris Creek farmer, says he has no doubt that Santos too will be forced to walk away.
“These people will win,” he says.
When Windsor sat on the crossbench in 2013, he helped establish the “water trigger” which requires coal and coal seam gas projects that affect water resources to be assessed under national environmental laws. He thinks the potential threat to water will be Santos’s undoing, given the Namoi groundwater system is the largest in the Murray-Darling.
“That’s the part that [Santos] wants to drive a pipeline through,” says Windsor. “I think there’s massive risks in doing that.”
The long war
The community first blockaded fossil fuel companies from accessing the Liverpool Plains in 2009, stopping BHP’s engineers coming in to look for coal. Back then, Santos too were exploring for coal seam gas. They told locals that they would not mine the gas for years. Now they are back.
Nearby, the Santos Narrabri Gas Project – bought from Eastern Star Gas, formerly chaired by the former Nationals leader John Anderson – has been developing in the Pilliga under petroleum exploration licence (Pel) 238. It is a project that has divided the town, farmers and traditional owners.
The Liverpool Plains are covered by Pels 1 and 12. In between, sits the Whitehaven coalmine in Gunnedah. That company is still chaired by another former Nationals leader, Mark Vaile.
The three Pels owned by Santos were quietly renewed by the NSW government in April 2022, in spite of a 2021 promise by the NSW National party not to mine the Liverpool Plains.
Santos also said it had no plans to drill on the Liverpool Plains in 2018 but have been quiet since. They would neither confirm nor deny plans in response to questions from Guardian Australia.
This year, Santos restarted seismic testing in the area and farmers blocked their vehicles, temporarily delaying them.
Santos also began contacting landholders to gain access to the Hunter gas pipeline, which the NSW government declared critical state-significant infrastructure for “economic reasons” in December. The 833km pipeline connects Queensland to the port of Newcastle.
Community talks, but is anyone listening?
The electorates covering the Liverpool Plains are still mostly held by the Nationals. Barnaby Joyce, a former federal leader, holds New England, covering the southern end of the Liverpool Plains. The Tamworth Nationals MP, Kevin Anderson, holds the state seat on a margin of 28%. The Upper Hunter Nationals MP, David Layzell, sits on a margin of just 0.5%. The former Shooters Fishers Farmers MP Roy Butler holds the state seat of Barwon, which covers Narrabri. The NSW election is less than a month away.
Walhallow’s Kamilaroi man Mitchum Neave has been fighting mining projects to protect Indigenous heritage since the early days. He came to the meeting at Gunn’s house to explain his case to the federal independents in the hope that someone would listen.
“We are fighting the government as we go along fighting Santos,” he says. “It’s about time that government listened to people and started holding their own government departments accountable.”
Helen Strang is a Tambar Springs farmer and local president of the Country Women’s Association (CWA). She says her responses to successive attempts at approving coal and gas projects on prime farming land have moved from disbelief to cynicism.
“Honestly you think, ‘How could the government be so stupid?’ And then you realise it’s basically political donations,” she says.
The CWA state conference passed a motion to advocate that governments should not take political donations from fossil fuel companies. It said donations had the potential to influence political decisions against the interests of farming.
“A lot of us are feeling very much just taken for granted because we are a safe seat,” Strang says. “We’re not a priority.”
When the gas project flared again at the start of the year, the veterans of the earlier blockades joined an influx of younger farmers to organise the two-day event at Gunn’s place to educate themselves, interested politicians and the media.
Days before the event, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, granted approval for Santos to open 116 new coal seam gas wells in Queensland’s Surat Basin. It disappointed some who were hoping Labor’s approach to coal and gas would be different.
The Darling Downs farmer Liza Balmain was among those who spoke at the information day. Balmain is from the Cecil Plains where the coal seam gas company Arrow Energy has been approved to drill on the Condamine alluvium, creating tensions with landholders.
Balmain’s farmland has been classed as priority agricultural, a classification representing just 3% of Queensland. In 2013, Ian Macfarlane, a former LNP member for Groom and later resources minister, told farmers that mining should not happen in the region unless the farmer agreed. He now heads up the Queensland Resources Council.
The new projects have been approved on the back of a reported gas shortfall. But Bruce Robertson, an investment analyst specialising in gas, says that Australia produced enough gas to meet its needs – it just exports more than 70% of it.
One of the biggest concerns to farmers is the impact drilling will have on the water table.
Farmers Scott and Jo McCalman saythey have been trying new methods to ensure they keep as much water in their soil as possible. Drilling to extract gas brings up water, salt and other minerals as waste products.
“[Farmers are] realising the benefit of keeping complete ground cover all the time, keeping the land rehydrated, keeping the soil cooler and trying to encourage more rainfall so, really complex stuff,” Scott McCalman says.
“Yet the government is so arrogant and ignorant at understanding what it is we’re doing to benefit everyone.”
While old hands have been involved in the fight against coal and gas developments for years, younger farmers coming home to the district are now taking up arms. They have degrees in economics and agricultural science. They’re not easily swayed.
Brothers Hugh and Jock Brownhill have come back to their family property, Merrilong, in the heart of the plains.
Hugh says while it was possible that farming and gas mining could coexist, farming was already at risk – and the plains are a uniquely rich resource.
“If you damage an aquifer I don’t think you just affect farming country, you affect everyone,” he says. “People need water to live.”
