The remit of the Latrobe Valley Mine Rehabilitation Commissioner (LVMRC) included providing assurances to the Latrobe Valley community that rehabilitation planning for the region’s three brown coal mines was progressing towards safe, stable and sustainable landforms. In order to achieve this, the Office of the LVMRC undertook an extensive community engagement program, including traditional engagement mechanisms, such as public forums, community group meetings, FAQs, newsletters, library information stands, and developed a website and Facebook page. The aim was not only to inform the community about rehabilitation planning, but also to teach the community about the inherent risks associated with the management of the region’s coal mines, how they can be mitigated through rehabilitation, and the long-term implications if they are not. These risks include spontaneous combustion and external ignition of coal and large-scale batter and floor failures from block sliding and floor heave.
The LVMRC found that these engagement activities generally reached the same demographic: highly engaged, but older, members of the community. The question became: how does the LVMRC reach a younger audience (our youth) and less engaged members of the community?
At the end of 2018, a Latrobe Valley arts organisation, The Big Picture Space, approached the LVMRC about the possibility of building a community art installation to engage and inform the community about mine rehabilitation, even though they themselves were ignorant of what rehabilitation comprises. Six months later, after workshopping the idea, ‘Coal Hole’ was born: not an art installation, but a community engagement program that employed local artists to provide free community art workshops that facilitated learning about the science behind brown coal mine rehabilitation. The program was targeted at people unlikely to turn up to a ‘town hall’ style event or ‘like’ our Facebook page and designed to develop a ‘collective’ that would work together to steward the program’s workshops and content.