The Hard Grind Millionaires
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 4, 1995
Forget Vaucluse and Turramurra - an obscure outback town has been named one of the nation's most affluent spots. Reporter RICHARD GUILLIATT and photographer PALANI MOHAN paid a visit.
WITH his broken teeth, grimy blue shorts, battered thongs and leathery face burnished by more than six decades of outback sun, Frank Yet Foy - known locally as China - is no-one's picture of the typical multi-millionaire entrepreneur. But China lives in Dysart, a central Queensland town where appearances are almost always deceptive: this isolated coalmining community has only one pub, one restaurant and no cinema, but it also has the fourthhighest per capita income in Australia, according to figures issued last week by the Australian Taxation Office.
"Yeah, they're a pretty hungry lot out here, let me tell ya ... they're getting their $80,000 to $90,000 a year," says China, sitting in front of his two-storey, white weatherboard-and-brick house on a brain-frying 35degree windless afternoon. "Better money than you blokes get, eh?" The grin that creases his face reveals a mouth like a recently excavated bomb crater.
Appearences aside, China himself has done pretty well in Dysart. A second-generation Australian, he helped build the place 25 years ago and now owns the only restaurant, the bus service, the squash courts, the local excavating business and a 11-metre catamaran that is moored on the Sunshine Coast, where China also dabbles in a bit of property investment. Out the back of his house - past the pet ducks, dogs, cats, the abandoned buses, used restaurant fittings and innumerable vehicles - is his collection of $6 million to $8 million worth of earthmoving equipment.
"I own everything," he says cheerfully, patting a yellow Komatsu bulldozer the size of a small dinosaur. "I'm an entrepreneur. And that's a difficult word for me." He hands over his business card, which has "China's Golden Dragon Restaurant" on one side and "Yet Foy Pty Ltd Earthmoving Truck & Bus Contractors" on the other.
How Dysart attained a per capita income higher than Vaucluse or Bellevue Hill is a by-product of the peculiar economics of company-owned mining towns. The end result is a place of extreme and unlikely contradictions: a blue-collar town where wages of $90,000 are not uncommon; an outpost of middle-class affluence surrounded by endless barren plains; a place where the highest-paid workers in Australia live in ascetic isolation, with not much to spend their money on except beer and videos.
Dysart has a swimming pool, a nine-hole golf course, a lawn-bowls club and a footy oval, but even the town's most ardent supporters admit that luxurious appointments are not its strong point.
The nearest beach is 240 kilometres north-east at Mackay, which is also where the nearest cinemas, department stores and nightclubs are. The woman at the sandwich shop looks baffled when asked if she serves muffins. There's a fundraising drive to get airconditioners for the two schools so that kids will stop fainting in class during summer.
China's Golden Dragon Restaurant on Queen Elizabeth Drive advertises itself as "the only place to dine", which is not so much a boast as an almost literal truth. When the construction of a KFC fast-food outlet began 70 km north in Moranbah, it was an event of such culinary magnitude that the Miners Mid Week newspaper published the news on its front page.
"There's only one reason to be here, and it isn't the sunshine," says Darren Hyland, a 28-year-old miner standing in grimy overalls under a fierce midday sun as coal pours like a black waterfall from the Norwich Park production line behind him. Like everyone else at the mine, Hyland is here in pursuit of a working man's dream: enough money to buy a property on the Sunshine Coast and have another $50,000 or so to establish a business. He's doing it the hard way, living with 100 men at the "donga", the single men's quarters enclosed in a cluster of prefab air-conditioned huts next to the mine.
Those who live in town with their families inhabit a more bucolic environment of roomy weatherboard-and-fibro houses laid out on quiet streets that encircle the town in rows, with well-tended lawns, gum trees, jacarandas and pink-blooming oleanders all blossoming in the wet season. Yet there's something undeniably surreal about this egg-shaped enclave of suburbia seemingly dropped in the back of beyond.
"It's basically an artificially created town," says Gary Flower, the principal of Dysart Primary School and like most locals a staunch defender of the place. "It's frankly in the middle of the back paddock of somebody's property. Without coal, this place wouldn't exist."
Built on a parcel of land the Utah Development Company bought from a Queensland grazier, Dysart began life as a collection of caravans parked in the desert in the early 1970s. Extremely generous wages were offered to coax miners to the site, where summer temperatures reach 45 degrees and local amenities initially consisted of a caravan called Bill's Boozer (which, in a heroic effort, dispensed 20,081 stubbies of beer during the first month of building). A series of hard-fought union battles added to the miners' generous pay packages in the succeeding decade.
With penalty rates, production bonuses and a seven-day roster system, top workers at Dysart now earn as much as $110,000 a year. According to last week's tax office statistics, the average taxable income here was $53,350 in 1993-94, a figure rivalled only by nearby Moranbah and those distant blueblood suburbs, Toorak and Edgecliff, thousands of kilometres to the south.
The statistics are misleading, of course. Dysart's figures are artificially inflated by the absence of retirees, while the urban rich of Sydney and Melbourne have ways of understating their incomes that may be unknown to the average coalminer.
But mining towns such as this are certainly the pinnacle for workers' wages in Australia. Even the cost of living here is lowered because BHP, which now runs the place, owns the miners' houses, pays all rates, carries out maintenance and charges the occupants only $8 to $15 a week in rent.
"Coming here should be like winning Lotto," says Bevan Cumming, the manager of the BHP town office. "If you're smart, you'll leave with enough to set yourself up."
Yet money is a prickly sort of subject in Dysart, a source of the wariness that often greets outsiders. On shopping expeditions to Mackay, miners often avoid mentioning their work to avoid paying artificially high prices. Every year when the tax office's income figures are released, Dysart is bombarded with telephone calls from investment advisers, tax-scheme spruikers and other telemarketing types calling from the distant cities.
The town has been wounded by previous media reports that have depicted it as a hotbed of consumerism where the miners squander their earnings on new-model Range Rovers, while their wives swan around in imported French gowns. In a one-company town of only 4,000, gossip helps generate such tales. The local joke is that Dysart stands for Did You Start A Rumour Today.
"You don't get too close to people out here," says Michael Barba, a 35-year-old crane operator who moved to Dysart almost 10 years ago with his wife, Janelle. "It just doesn't pay because they start minding your business rather than theirs."
Barba recalls how a close friend who lives on the coast pressured him into revealing his income one day. "When I told him, that was it - 'You bloody rich miners', etc, etc," recalls Barba. He hasn't spoken to the friend since.
Seemingly everyone in Dysart has a house on the coast to which they make the three-hour pilgrimage every few weeks (miners who work seven-day shifts get regular five-day breaks). The beach places are a refuge and also a tax-minimiser; just about everyone in this town can recite the benefits of negative gearing.
Yet the coastal property investment highlights one of the paradoxes of Dysart - it's a place where many people live without ever developing a sense of belonging. BHP's virtual ownership of the place, and the knowledge that the closure of the mines would extinguish the town's reason for existing, create a sense of impermanence and rootlessness. People can live here for 15 years ago without ever calling it home, waiting for an endlessly postponed moment when they will be financially secure enough to leave. Five years ago four locals, including miner Les Boal, shared a $1 million Lotto jackpot; they're still here, and two of them still work in the mines.
Anne Butcher, who ran the milk business in Dysart with her husband, Gary, from 1981 to 1990, recalls how scary it was to leave and return to the "real world". In 1993 she went back to Dysart to interview 12 women for an honours thesis, and she was struck by the fact that even women who had spent most of their adult lives there still talked wistfully of the day they would leave. Butcher called her thesis "Coalpit Women: Waiting To Go Home".
"For me it was difficult as a woman to live in that environment, and I had wondered what it was like for other women," she recalls. "There's a dearth of things to do if you aren't sport-inclined or involved in handicrafts ... After 10 or 15 years you might start thinking that it's time to leave, but it's hard to tear yourself away from that income."
Frank Yet Foy represents the atypical local who is not talking of leaving. His two sons now work at the mines; one makes $90,000 a year as an electrician. His daughters and wife help run the restaurant. The earth-moving equipment has been idle for two months and the downturn in the coal market has made his business more unpredictable, but he doesn't sound too perturbed. "I'm thinking about buying grazing property," he says. "That supplements the income better."
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald
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