STRONG HEART: the woman fighting for farmers
When her father committed suicide in 2015, Helen Bender became a voice for Australian farmers battling for their health, their rights and their peace of mind. Susan Chenery joins her in Quensland’s gas country.
The old white farmhouse sits on flat fertile country. Away to one side, wide paddocks are ploughed brown. On the other, russet rows of flowering sorghum stretch into a shimmering horizon. Further out, the white balls on dryland cotton plants puff against a vast sky. Trees and long grass around the homestead sway in a warm breeze.
This was a peaceful place once, before all the pain.
Helen Bender stands on the front steps, her auburn hair catching the morning sun. With her steadfast gaze, she surveys the land around her. Helen grew up here, with her four older brothers, carefree, running wild. “Driving cars before you went to primary school, perfecting doughnuts, pushbike no helmet. I went to school with bare feet.”
As a kid, Helen wanted to be a vet but knew she wouldn’t be able to make the hard calls with sick animals. A vibrant, impatient, highly intelligent woman, she studied engineering instead and worked in project management. Her “major” dream of starting her own company died the day her dad did. She wears his wedding ring on a chain around her neck.
Helen’s father, George, lived here all his life. He was of this place – part of the soil he tilled and crops he grew. His family had been here since the 1900s, six generations
in a line of continuity. His connection to this land on the Darling Downs, south-east of Chinchilla, was everything. Until October 14, 2015, when, embattled by coal seam gas companies, George Bender took his own life.
George used to whistle around the place. “And sing. He never stopped telling jokes,” says Helen, who at 40, inherited his determination to protect the land. George didn’t like to travel far from the property. “He was only a cranky old bastard when he wasn’t on the farm, if we went to Brisbane for something.” When she was a child, Helen pestered him to take her to the sea. “It was my first ever holiday. I’d never seen the ocean. We went to the Gold Coast and got to the crest of the hill and he said, ‘There’s the ocean. Alright, you’ve seen it, we can go home now.’ He wasn’t the same away from the farm.”
Everything changed in 2004 when George was approached by the Queensland Gas Company to put coal seam gas wells on one of the family’s three farms. Under the soil he had tended, where cattle grazed and food grew – some of the most productive agricultural land in the country – were vast deposits of coal seam gas. George quickly discovered landowners have few rights when it comes to mining corporations. In Australian law, farmers own their land but the state government owns the rights to minerals beneath it and can lease those rights to mining companies.
He contacted people in gasfields in the US and Canada. “We were warned,” says Helen, about health impacts and contaminated water. It was the water that worried George. The only way to get the gas out is to also get the groundwater out and, says Helen, “the mining companies had unlimited rights to groundwater”.
So began a decade-long battle. George Bender, who had never been to church and barely been to school, would stand alone against the might of mining companies, refusing to give them access to his land. “When Dad said no, he meant it,” says Helen. No wells were drilled on George’s farms, but he paid the ultimate price in the fight to stop them.
In a time of drought, the gas companies promised water. Other farmers signed up only to find that their water was going to be contaminated with heavy metals and salt. “We have had gas coming out of our water bores,” says Helen. “Don’t drink the water and don’t swim.” On the day The Weekly visits, there is a massive drill close to the house going deeper to find water that hasn’t been impacted by coal seam gas.
In the farmhouse she shows us a disintegrating copy of the Petroleum and Gas Production and Safety Act, 2004. Its pages are heavily underlined and loose, its spine nearly broken from the hours George spent poring over it.
“He was alone, lost, helpless, feeling like a failure.”
In a cupboard are 20 folders of letters, emails, submissions – the correspondence of a man under siege.
“There were over 8000 emails. He was dealing with pressure from Origin, Arrow, Queensland Gas Company and Linc. They were ruthless. “They were using standover tactics.” The timeline that Helen has drawn up clearly shows the emails escalating as the mining companies closed in.
By 2010, George’s pigs were sick and dying, and a toxic smell wafted over the property. It came from the Linc Energy gasification plant nearby. The plant made gas by burning coal at very high temperatures underground. In the process, they fractured the landscape and contaminated the soil and groundwater.
“Dad went public and tried to get the Queensland government out here to find out what was going on. The government ignored him. Linc threatened to take him to court for damage to their reputation.”
In April this year, Linc Energy was found guilty in a Queensland District Court of wilfully and unlawfully causing environmental harm at its gasification plant near Chinchilla. The company was fined $4.5 million. “Dad would feel so vindicated – he was right and the government was wrong,” says Helen.
In 2012 a groundwater impact assessment showed George was about to lose water bores on his farm, Chinta. Those bores triggered negotiations with the gas companies under the Make Good Agreement legislation that requires them to compensate farmers for the loss of groundwater.
“That,” says Helen, “is when the games and intimidation were played. It should have taken 60 days to do a bore assessment and 40 days to do an agreement. It took 555 business days. They lied to him, they tried to take a water licence from him and they kept asking for extensions of time.” George was worried about legal costs.
In mid-2015, he received an offer from Origin to buy Chinta. He did not accept it. The normal process in such cases was that conduct and compensation negotiations would begin, and if no agreement was reached within 20 business days, either party could take the matter to the land court. Once the matter was lodged in the land court, the company could give notice and then enter the property without permission and begin drilling. It didn’t come to that.
“It was coming at him from all angles,” says Helen. His family was breaking down. He feared they were going to lose Chinta. One of his sons was thinking of getting out. He was being hounded and bullied and no one was listening to him. “He was alone, lost, helpless, feeling like a failure.”
On October 13, 2015, George Bender, aged 68, took his own life. He did not die instantly. “When I got to the hospital, the first thing he said was, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done it, my brain snapped’,” Helen recalls. She stayed with him through the night. “He said, ‘They just wouldn’t leave me alone. Why did I let them get to me?’” By morning his vital signs were improving but his kidneys were failing. He died that day.
The death of George Bender, a pioneer Australian coal seam gas campaigner, shocked the country. The Bender family found themselves in a media firestorm. It was left to his youngest child and only daughter to speak on behalf of her family. And Helen had a lot to say. In shock, trying not to break down, she read a five-page statement to the media. Two days after burying her father, she appeared on the ABC program, Q&A. “When,” she asked, “will farmers be given the right to say no to CSG companies coming onto their land?”
And so Helen became the accidental warrior. Fuelled by grief and a burning sense of the irreparable damage being done to this country, she has picked up her father’s legacy and carried it
forward. “It wasn’t a conscious decision, I was called to it,” she says.
We can feel the chemicals in the air as we drive into the gasfields near her home. Great swathes of trees have been cut down to make way for pipelines and gas well after gas well. The flares burn yellow on the stacks, burning methane and other elements into the atmosphere. You can taste the particle pollution that, according to Mariann Lloyd Smith of the National Toxics Network, “provides the delivery mechanism for many of those volatile compounds. They are breathed into the body and the small particles go directly into the lungs and bloodstream.”
“People in the city have got to realise that this may not be their backyard but everything that is produced out here ends up on their dinner plate,” says Helen. “The cattle breathing this air and eating this food are absorbing it into their bodies. Those toxins are stored in cells, they never go away.”
In a park in Chinchilla we meet Sandra Bamberry, who says her two young daughters get bleeding noses. “We took the kids away for 18 months and the blood noses stopped, the pale faces and black eyes went away.”
Out on the road we have a tailgate conversation with Brian Monk, whose son moved his seven children away to NSW. “The kids were having a bath when, all of a sudden, everything up to the waterline goes red,” he says. “My grandkids have been burnt. It looked like boiling water but the water was normal temperature. The gas inspectors only found a tiny little bit of gas but we could light it. We used to light up the water bore as a party trick.”
Queensland Health, says Helen, “only does a standard blood test. They don’t look for the chemicals of coal seam gas.” So there is no proof people’s health has been affected by chemical exposure. There has, however, been testing of local rainwater tanks. “Up the road from us is a family who can’t drink their rainwater because there is contamination on the roof. The rainwater tanks have polonium, lead and ridiculous amounts of heavy metals. That’s not normal for a rural setting. Polonium is a radioactive element.”
Many of the people Helen grew up with have moved away. “I feel completely isolated because there is this mindset that you can’t stop it. They want to put 40,000-plus wells in.” There are between 5000 and 7000 in the area now, more across Queensland.
Murray Cornish, communications director for the Gasfields Commission, says that this part of Queensland
“is now considered the most studied