Tony Lonergan was a farm kid. He has vivid memories of growing up in the grazing country of NSW’s Upper Hunter Valley in the 1950s. “My neighbour, Gavin Casey, and I would ride our horses for hours over the rolling hills, along the ridge line, beside creeks and dams, across paddocks dotted with sheep.”
He remembers helping to harvest fields of golden wheat and walking through wide, open paddocks to his grandparents’ farmhouse. There, he’d cross the garden where his grandfather grew 100 varieties of rose, climb the back steps and run into the cool kitchen. “Then I’d sit in the kitchen, chatting to my grandmother over a pot of tea and a slice of homemade lemon cake.”
Tony’s family farm was named ‘Athlone’ after the picturesque town on the River Shannon in Ireland. The Lonergans hailed from Ireland but have been farming in the Upper Hunter since the 1890s, and further down the valley before that. Much of Athlone is now in the path of the Mount Pleasant coalmine.
In 1998 Tony’s father signed a sale option agreement with Rio Tinto, which later sold its Mount Pleasant mining rights on to an Indonesian-owned company, MACH Energy. Tony’s dad wasn’t the only farmer who sold up, and since then much of the valley has been reshaped by open-cut coalmines.
Then, in 2022, MACH Energy presented the NSW government with a proposal to create one of the state’s largest open-cut coalmines by doubling Mount Pleasant’s
