Your family farms it for 100 years. The state keeps the underneath bit.
There is a certain kind of Australian magic trick where a family can work land for generations, fence it, water it, graze it, pay rates on it, bury memories in it, then find out the really interesting bit was never quite theirs.
That is the bit under the ground.
At Junction View in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley, fourth-generation farmer Daniel Storey is staring down a proposed sandstone quarry on part of the family farm. His mum’s side has had the place since the 1920s. It is not a lifestyle block with a mood board. It is a working farm, running cattle across hill country and growing feed when the season lets them.
Rosehill Sandstone has applied for a mining lease over 62.2 hectares. The proposed lease includes 21.6 hectares of the Storey family’s 100-hectare property. The company reckons there is about one million cubic metres of sandstone sitting there, which is handy if you are in the sandstone business and less handy if that sandstone happens to be under the family farm.
The polite word is access
The proposal is for an initial 15-year lease, with mining potentially running for up to 50 years. Fifty years is a long time in anyone’s book. It is especially long if your plan for the place involved cows, fences, feed and the next generation, not excavators with rock saws working Monday to Saturday.
And here is the cooked bit. In Queensland, landholders cannot simply say no to mining because the state owns the minerals under private land. The farmer owns the paddock. The state owns the stuff underneath it. If a mining company wants in, the landholder is pushed into negotiation, compensation talks, or the Land Court.
Nothing says “private property” like finding out the private bit stops right where the useful rock starts.
The company version
Rosehill says the quarry would create 12 to 15 jobs and inject about $3 million into the local economy. The company says there would be no chemicals, no blasting and no drilling. The separate environmental authority application describes groundwater and waterway impacts as negligible, and air quality and noise impacts as minor.
That is the tidy version. The sort of language that makes a quarry sound like a bloke quietly doing paperwork in the corner.
But farms are not spreadsheets. Take a bite out of a working property and the effect does not stay inside the line on the map. Daniel Storey told the ABC the quarry would separate them from the back end of the farm and likely reduce the carrying capacity of the country. In plain English: less useful land, more disruption, and a family business forced to work around someone else’s hole in the ground.
The farmer version
This is not just about one lease. It is about the weird Australian bargain where ordinary people are told to work hard, buy land, build something, keep it going, and then discover the fine print when a bigger interest turns up.
The Lockyer Valley is not empty dirt waiting for a “productive use”. Local councillor Lindsay Pickering called it Queensland’s salad bowl and made the obvious point about farmland: once it is carved up, it does not just bounce back because someone wrote “rehabilitation” in a document.
That is the bit the brochure never quite captures. You can count jobs. You can estimate tonnes. You can model dust and noise. You can write “minor” in a table. But you cannot spreadsheet the feeling of waking up on a place your family has worked for a century and wondering if the back paddock is about to become someone else’s industrial zone.
Yeh nah
Australia loves talking about farmers until a company needs the ground under them.
Then the language changes. It becomes access, compensation, approvals, economic injection, negligible impact, minor impact, stakeholder engagement. Very tidy. Very official. Very easy to say when it is not your gate, your cattle, your family history, or your bloody back paddock.
The Storey family plans to object. Fair enough too.
Because if owning a family farm does not let you say “yeh nah” to a quarry on it, then maybe we should stop pretending this is a simple story about private property.
It is a story about who gets listened to when there is money under the dirt.
Standard issue bullshit.
Source: ABC News, “Queensland farmers oppose proposed sandstone quarry on family farm”, 1 July 2026.