The people of Dysart in central Queensland are used to seeing workers come and go.
When news broke that the nearby Saraji South coalmine would be mothballed by November, however, they began preparing to farewell many more.
“The closure of a mine is always a concern around here,” baker Toby Teelow says. “Because the town only survives when the mines are open. There’s nothing else in the town. There’s no other sustainable business without the influx of mining.”
BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) announced the decision to place the Saraji South coalmine into care and maintenance and slash 750 roles across the state on Wednesday.
According to the Mining and Energy Union (MEU), most of the BMA jobs cuts will be corporate and support roles, with only 72 of them being coal production jobs.
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And other mines in the larger Saraji metallurgical coalmine complex will continue operating.
But losing six dozen mining jobs can rock a place like Dysart, which was founded in 1973 to service the burgeoning coal industry. At the 2021 census, the town had a population of about 2,900 people – with a workforce in which more than 41% of worked coalmining. The next biggest sector was labour supply, which amounted to less than 6% of Dysart’s workforce. People living in Dysart were younger, more likely to be male and earn a bit less than double the weekly wage of the average Queenslander.
“Here, everyone wears an orange shirt,” Teelow says.
Teelow put down the blades of his old profession as a butcher in the southern Queensland city of Toowoomba to pick up the rolling pin more than 800km north after his wife took a job teaching in Dysart about three years ago.
It was around that time Saraji South was ramping back up production after having been mothballed for eight years from 2012.
“That definitely brought people to the town,” Teelow says. “And more people in town means more business … so, yeah, it [closing] is a bit of a shock. But people around here just keep going on with life”.
Another small business owner to move to town in recent years is Hitesh Patel.
Patel and his wife run a cafe and pizza shop that employs a friend and five high school students.
“Business … it’s OK, but I can’t tell you it’s steady,” Patel says. “Up and down, up and down.”
A chef who moved up from Melbourne, Patel says he was already preparing for work to become more sporadic as summer loomed and more mine workers opted to fly in and out.
“And this will make it more difficult for us,” he says of the Saraji South mothballing.
But as small businesses prepare for a slow down, one shop is bracing for a surge in work: Vinnies. A volunteer at the op shop, who did not want to be named, says every week already brings an influx of unwanted goods – and much of it brand new.
“Mondays are exhausting every week,” she says. “It’s overwhelming. Look, this town, they come and go”.
The volunteer says the mine closure has been the talk of Dysart for months.
“Now that it is out in the open, we don’t know when the influx of more unwanted goods and donations will be coming in,” she says.
“Next week? We don’t know.”
