Cattlewoman Trish Goodwin should be celebrating.
Last Friday, her parched property off the Capricorn Highway near the tiny town of Bluff in the central highlands of Queensland received “very good soaking rain” – nearly 200mm would fall in a few days.
“It was proper wet season rain,” she says. “And we needed it. We needed it badly.”
Instead, Goodwin finds herself “stuck in a hole”, stranded and alone in the humble tin and timber home in which she was raised, carefully rationing her instant coffee and milk – worried her health could give out again, that she should need an ambulance.
For if the 62-year-old does require urgent medical attention, she says, paramedics would need a helicopter to pick her up.
Goodwin attributes her predicament to a coalmine mothballed for the second time in late 2023, whose current owner, Bowen Coking Coal, went into receivership in July. Because between Goodwin and the highway, where a crushed blue metal road once ran through pastured land and timber, there is now a blasted and gaping hole in the Earth: an open cut mine called Bluff.
Her old road, Goodwin says, held up just fine under the odd monsoonal downpour that characterises this coal and cattle country 150km or so inland from Rockhampton. But the new gravel road that skirts the black and brown slag heaps of Bluff, built to compensate Goodwin in order to lease the 590 hectares she refused to sell, is now unusable thanks to the downpour from ex-Tropical Cyclone Koji.
Sections of the new road have been washed away, exposing rock and wet ditches impassable to her 200 Series Landcruiser. And the boggy oak country through which it passes, she says, “has no bottom”.
“If you go off that hard surface – that’s where you’ll stay,” she says.
Goodwin’s farm buggy can still negotiate the track. On Tuesday, she made it to the highway with her UTV, where a friend met her with a bottle of milk.
The damaged road connecting Goodwin’s home to the highway is now only passable by UTV. Photograph: Trish Goodwin
In another few days, she’ll use the buggy to rendezvous again, this time to hitch a lift into the town of Blackwater to restock her fridge and pantry.
“I should not have to do that,” Goodwin says. “It’s just ridiculous.”
Her isolation may have left Goodwin ropable, but she’s far from surprised. Goodwins have run cattle on this country for 120 years. When Guardian Australia visited her in August, Goodwin said that the road was only one downpour from being washed away.
And she may have to rely on friends for supplies for some time yet. Goodwin estimates it will be “a good month” before a machine can get on to the road to patch it up.
“And that’s if the rain stopped now and the sun came out,” she says on Wednesday morning. “But I think there’s more to come too – it’s only going to get worse.”
The Bluff coalmine has been closed since 2023 and its owner is in receivership. Photograph: Sylvia Liber/The Guardian
Goodwin is no stranger to living in limbo. The six years since the now liquidated miner Carabella blasted open her land, she says, have been a continuation of uncertainty, bad faith negotiations and broken promises that have gone on for more than a decade, destroyed her infrastructure, degraded her land, worsened her health and, now, left her vulnerable and isolated.
In its comparatively short history, the mine has twice been placed into care and maintenance, its two owners both gone into voluntary administration.
Before 2019, when the mine took it down, Goodwin had a land line. She is speaking now on a mobile whose reception can be patchy.
Goodwin says the mothballed Bluff mine has left her materially impoverished, but it is her health to which she returns.
“Yesterday I got this instant headache and I thought, oh not again, it’s all starting again,” she says.
Trish Goodwin pictured at her home central Queensland in August 2025. Photograph: Sylvia Liber/The Guardian
The farmer was not so isolated on the last occasions she was “carted off” by ambulance, she says. She earlier had a “gallbladder attack” and then antibiotics triggered an anaphylactic shock. On that latter occasion, Goodwin thanks her lucky stars that a guest was present to call in paramedics.
“Otherwise I’d be pushing up daisies now,” she reckons.
Claire Gronow, the Lock the Gate alliance’s central Queensland coordinator, said that Bluff had so little prospect of ever operating profitably that it was time to start returning the land to grazing condition – a task which is not due to be completed until 2060.
“I would love to see the state government permanently close this mine, which would give landholders and the community the certainty they need, and the government the ability to access the rehabilitation bond that is in place to start rehabilitating it,” Gronow said.
In the meantime, the anti-coal campaigner said the state should be calling on Bluff’s owners and receivers to fulfil Goodwin’s unmet expectations.
“Particularly the access road,” Gronow says. “Trish has health problems and – even without that – she ought to be able to drive to Blackwater to get her groceries.”
In 2016 the land court ordered Carabella to financially compensate Goodwin in order to lease her land. The court-ordered payment was made, and Carabella went on to sign an additional “good neighbour” contract to compensate for other work at the site. The terms of the additional contract, Goodwin says, were not fulfilled before the miner was liquidated.
Bowen met repeatedly with Goodwin and drafted a similar contract when it took over, but the mine was mothballed before the contract was signed.
Queensland’s Land Access Code states that mining lease holders must keep access roads in good repair.
Bowen Coking Coal did not respond to a request for comment and receivers FTI Consulting declined to comment. The office of Queensland’s resources minister, Dale Last, referred questions to the natural resources and mines department.
A spokesperson said that department was “in regular contact with the administrators of the Bluff Mine, which is currently in care and maintenance during the administration process”.