David Ashen retired three years ago but he still tinkers around in a local Men's Shed as a way of keeping busy after 34 years of working in a Queensland coal mine.
The 70-year-old started as a mining operator at Meandu, about 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, when it opened in 1985 and finished as a trainer-assessor in 2020.
"I loved it … I'd still be there now if I wasn't getting so old," he said.
"The majority of the people who work [at the mine] have started from young children. Now, they're men with their own kids.
"No one ever leaves.
"Everyone tries to get their [children] to work there – it's a good community."
Mr Ashen's daughter also followed the tradition – she works at the nearby Tarong power stations, which run on up to seven million tonnes of coal from the open-cut mine each year.
They're now one of 500 families in the South Burnett region who face an uncertain future as Queensland phases out coal-fired power by 2035.
It's prompted calls from the Queensland Mining and Energy Union for a clearer roadmap to ensure coal communities such as Kingaroy are not left behind in the move to renewables.
"They're gutted [with] the way they've been treated," vice president Shane Brunker said.
"A lot of people don't want to leave these regional towns but they're going to be forced to go.
"Kingaroy has a lot of manufacturing shops [and] small engineering works that supply the local power station and the coal mine.
"So when [they] ramp right down, that work will dry up."
At a crossroads
Mr Ashen said the coal mine was an important source of livelihood for the nearby town of Kingaroy.
"When we came here, it was just a small country town – not much at all," he said.
"Since the mine started and gave money to the community … the town has just built up, the streets are all done up … and we've even got Maccas for the young ones."
Mr Ashen said the prospect of secure, well-paying jobs had generated a lot of excitement when the mine opened more than 30 years ago.
"Everyone wanted to be a part of it … it was gold to them," he said.
"That was farmers and farmers' sons because they were going through bad times, and they'd get the money to keep the farms going."
Mr Ashen said he was worried about the future of the town now that the power stations were going to be converted into a large, clean-energy storing battery.
"It's frightening actually," he said.
"Everything the city's got, without the mine or the power station, that would not have happened.
"If it happens to close or they wind it down, well naturally, if there's no work here, then people have to move … and those things will just die."
Ensuring no one's left behind
The South Burnett is set to become home to Australia's largest state-owned wind farm by 2026, which would generate enough clean energy to power 230,000 homes.
But Mr Brunker said the new project would not provide one-for-one jobs for the community.
"There's a few hundred jobs in the development of the wind farms … but once they're up and running, there's no real jobs, no numbers there to take up the slack of the displaced workers," Mr Brunker said.
A spokesperson for the Queensland Energy Minister said the Energy Worker's Charter offered a job security guarantee for all energy workers.
"Queensland's publicly owned coal-fired power stations will continue to play an important role in our future energy system as clean energy hubs," the spokesperson said.
"We will not shut the gate on these power stations, their workers, or communities who will play a leading role in the energy transformation."
The spokesperson said the energy transition would provide 100,000 new jobs in the hydrogen, renewables, manufacturing, and critical minerals industries, with the majority of the $62 billion plan to be invested in regional Queensland.
Mr Brunker said the union was satisfied with the terms of the Workers' Charter but it wanted to see an action plan to begin preparing workers for the future.
"There are no real plans yet from [the state government] on what they're going to do with these displaced workers and how they're going to retrain them," he said.
Mr Bunker said many workers were already leaving the coal industry for other mining jobs.
"They're going to have to put golden handcuffs on them – that is, 'we need you to stay until the plant closes and we will pay you X amount of money if you stay until the completion date'," he said.
"So that they've got something there and they can retire with dignity."
A green energy future
While some Kingaroy residents were worried about the future, others were confident the town would adapt.
Retired teacher John Dalton, who has lived in Kingaroy for almost 40 years, said he couldn't help but boast about its fertile red soil and "sheer beauty".
"Using the power from the solar farm and wind farm will still contribute to our local South Burnett economy in a really interesting way," he said.
"This is a really diverse economy. We've got grazing, we've got crops, you've got small crops, and we've got this energy sector as well. And it's a good mix for a stable economy. And we've always thought that's worth fighting for."
Plans to build a second coal mine near Kingaroy were abandoned in 2020 after Mr Dalton and a group of residents rallied against it for half a decade.
Mr Dalton said the Kingaroy Concerned Citizens Group was never "anti-jobs" or "anti-development".
"We understand that we're at the intersection of the past and the future," he said.
"How you manage the expectations of people who've had secure, well-paying jobs in the mining sector [and] who have to transition to something they can't see yet is a real juggling act.
"We've always said, though, that all economies and societies have always undergone change, and [they] always managed it somehow … there are still no unemployed blacksmiths – that was the past, those people transition[ed] to other skills, other industries."
Mr Dalton said Kingaroy's transition into a clean energy hub was the most "sensible" outcome.
"We've always loved the red scrub, the wonderful trees, the bird life – just the whole sense of living in it," he said.
"Other people combine that passion for the beauty of it [with] making a living from it as well, and that's as good as it gets."
