Col Faulkner
outside his c. 1904
ex-butcher’s
shop home in Wollar
Col ‘Midget’ Faulkner still holds
the record, he says, for the longest tube ride on Sydney’s south side. Never
one for publicity or competitions, Col – not to be confused with Bernard
‘Midget’ Farrelly – watched the greats come and go, and gave most of them more
than he got: even world-champion Nat Young once made the mistake of dropping in
on Col’s wave at Cronulla Point!
Nowadays Col lives a long way from the surf, in the tiny, dying hamlet
of Wollar, 50 km north-east of Mudgee, five hours’ drive from Sydney. He lobbed
there 30 years ago to visit his uncle, helped out with the shearing for six
months, and never left. Col loved the peace and quiet - of being quite a way
from anywhere. But for the past decade his town has been stealthily besieged,
its social fabric eroded by the insidious intrusion of multinational Peabody
Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company – recently declared bankrupt
in the US), which operates the Wilpinjong coal mine, ever-closer to town. The NSW
government is currently considering (i.e. about to approve) Pit 8 – an
expansion which will bring more unacceptable dust, noise and division to the
town and its dwindling population. Already residents have lost the mechanic and the hardware/stockfeed supply … and the school’s down to eight pupils. Since the bottleshop closed there's not even anywhere you can buy a drink.
Photo: Sharyn Munro
On the invitation of long-time local anti-coal campaigner Bev Smiles,
members of WRVAP attended a meeting convened in the Wollar Memorial Hall on 20 April 2016 to discuss ways in which the townsfolk might get
a better deal (or rather, how a really bad deal from an industry now in its
death throes, might be sweetened)…
Wollar Memorial
Hall
After a number of residents (including Col) have had their say, several
of us speak against the mine expansion – about degraded environments, compensation
for ravaged social fabric, and mine remediation. Although the meeting is
locally framed we feel impelled to emphasise that the extraction and burning of
coal is currently destroying not only Wollar’s but the entire planet’s social
and environmental fabric. [Only the day before we’d learnt that the corals in Sydney
Harbour were bleaching due to dangerously warm ocean temperatures]. After a
comfortable night’s sleep @ BIG4 Mudgee we drive back to Wollar next morning to
take some photos. In the car we re-visit the complex traumas of coal mining and
struggle once again to devise a manner in which we might capture its inhuman
face, its incalculable costs within the spaces of a Sydney art gallery. Suddenly
I see Col pacing within a cage, a white-maned man/lion neutered by
circumstances beyond his control, speaking to (and perhaps growling at)
visitors. When we meet him again later that morning I tell Col that we might
need HIM for our exhibition, adding
‘but you probably wouldn’t want to come down to Sydney, would you?’. ‘Na’, he
drawls, ‘I got outta there’.
