BLAKE Graham is uneasy about the changing nature of his home town of Emerald in central Queensland, now the coalmining boom has bust.
?It?s like a ghost town,? admits the 31-year-old, who works for his family?s mine machinery hire company, Grahams Plant Hire.
?Heaps of my mates were working out here in the mines but they?ve had to move back to the Gold Coast and Brisbane; they?ve lost their jobs, sold their jetskis, new cars and all the other **** that you buy when you are 27 and earning $140,000 or more, and gone home to a labouring wage.?
It?s a vastly different Emerald that is showing its country face to new arrivals and travellers these days, from the flashy height of the coalmining boom two years ago.
Gone are the loud pubs overflowing with cashed-up workers in fluorescent mining garb; the shiny new black utes with chrome rollbars trawling the main drag; prostitutes lolling against motel walls; and hotels charging more than $300 a night.
As world coal prices have plummeted, planned new coalmines in central Queensland have been shelved and future explor*ation halted. So too has Emerald?s growth as a thriving mining hub come to a screeching halt.
Empty shops line the town?s main street.
The local council is owed nearly $10 million from homeowners unable to pay their rates.
Motel owners used to full occupancy and high rates are going broke by the week, with rooms only 30 per cent full at a lowly $89 a night.
Rents for a three-bedroom house have similarly slumped, from $800 a week to a pre-boom $250 per week. Many landlords are dangling offers of the first month?s rent free in the hope of enticing a rare new family to the town.
Graham?s family equipment business, which in its heyday supplied contract heavy mine machinery, drivers and service mechanics to some of the biggest coalmines, has shrunk from a workforce of more than 250 in 2013 back to a small Emerald-based team of nine.
Its work yard is filled with big yellow dump trucks and mine bulldozers with nowhere to go.
?When the coal price went down, contractors like us were the first ones to go; we?ve had to change our business to stay afloat and it hasn?t been easy,? says Graham.
?It?s the same for everyone in Emerald, back to reality in a way: the pubs and restaurants are struggling, you can get a park outside the post office any time, and all my age group has gone again. It?s pretty dead and slow on a Saturday night in town now.?
It?s not the first time Emerald has had such a boom. It first flourished from a small central Queensland railway town with an old station, a hospital and a few bush schools to a thriving farming town in the early 70s, when the Fairbairn Dam and Lake Maraboon were built and large-scale cotton and citrus irrigators moved in.
The water brought wealth and prosperity to the tough, dry, cattle and gem-mining district and, just five years later, led to the start of large-scale mining in the nearby Bowen Basin in 1977, home to the largest coal reserves in Australia.
The coal boom was to last 35 years, turning Emerald into a mining wonderland until the boom started crumbling two years ago.
It is in the new housing estates ? carved from Emerald?s bush fringe with their manicured lawns, grand display homes and pretentious names such as Maranda Heights, Mayfair Ridge and The Vines ? that the dashed aspirations of hundreds of mine-dependent families are most evident.
There are currently 477 vacant houses for rent in Emerald and more than 300 on the market. In a town of 12,000 ? down from a boom population of 15,000 in 2012 ? the bleeding shows.
New cul-de-sacs and silent courts are lined with For Sale signs. Some new homes have never been lived in, as local coalmines such as Rio Tinto?s Kestrel and BHP Billiton-Mitsubishi?s Blackwater have slashed worker numbers in the past 18 months, despite maintaining coal production levels.
Other empty houses are owned by absent city speculators, caught too in the boom-bust cycle.
Local valuation firm Taylor Byrne has tracked how house values in Emerald have fallen in concert with dropping world coal prices, now as low as $77 a tonne.
Modern new homes that were selling like hot cakes for $450,000 in 2012, when coal prices were just off their $142/tonne peak, can now not find a buyer at $250,000.
Banks in possession of dozens of houses, seized from out-of-work miners unable to maintain big mortgages, are offering deeper discounts.
Taylor Byrne valuer Annette Smith says it is not only the resident miners and their families who have left town. Gone too are the troops of fly-in, fly-out miners who used to arrive daily at the airport to live on remote mine sites; FIFO numbers have halved from their peak in 2012-13.
Dozens of service and supply companies that arrived in Emerald while the coal sector thrived have also vanished. ?But it means it?s affordable to live out here at Emerald again. We have to get that message out,? says Smith.
But Central Highlands shire Deputy Mayor Gail Nixon points out that the pain of the coal boom?s end has a positive flip side.
Emerald is regaining its old friendly rural feel.
Locals can get their children into childcare and call a plumber again. Camping grounds once bursting at the seams with cashed-up miners and loud utes are welcoming back grey-nomad pensioners with their caravans and sausages.
And farmers can finally find workers prepared to accept a mere $40,000 farmhand wage.
?But the (financial) hurt in Emerald is becoming more obvious too; it just depends if the other industries that we have ? like agriculture, with its cotton, citrus, cattle and new macadamias ? can get up and take mining?s place,? says Nixon.
?We sometimes forget farming was here before mining and will be here after all the coal has gone.
?I think we need to put a bit more faith and assistance into our farmers because, once the mining boom is over, agriculture is what towns like Emerald will always have left.?
