Back then we would pass the last of the Hunter's open cut mines through Singleton and Muswellbrook, and take the dirt road through the Goulburn River National Park, a passage through a timeless landscape to Bylong and Wollar.

Today the village of Wollar has been devastated by the impact of the Wilpinjong coal mine. Another mine is proposed for the Bylong valley. The Independent Planning Commission, the consent authority for significant mining projects in NSW, will shortly deliver its decision on the application.

The Wollar Progress Association leaves no doubt what mining has done. In its submission to the IPC on the Bylong proposal, the association says Wollar has lost property owners, neighbours, the valley's social fabric. The people remaining, it says, are now socially isolated and economically disadvantaged. And this will be exacerbated, it says, by the hollowing out of the Bylong community when mining scours Wollar's adjoining valley. Yet damage to Bylong is underway.

In its submissions to the IPC, the Bylong Valley Protection Alliance says that its longstanding, productive and harmonious community has been fractured by aggressive land acquisitions by the company proposing to build the mine. The company is KEPCO. It is majority owned by the South Korean government. KEPCO's charter is the protection of energy security for the Korean people. If approved, KEPCO will ship around 100 million tonnes of coal from Bylong by train, down the old single line between Gulgong and Sandy Hollow, through the Port of Newcastle, for burning in Korean power stations.

KEPCO has been pressing for approval of the Bylong mine since 2015. In that time, as the Bylong people attest, it has bought out much of the valley. It now owns the local church, the general store, the school, and significant private landholdings including the historic Tarwyn Park, most recently owned by Peter Andrews whose conservation experiments were featured on the ABC's Australian Story.

The story of mining companies in third world communities dispossessing locals of their land to silence opposition is told over and again. Now the story echoes through one of our valleys.

In 1997 the NSW planning department released the Upper Hunter Cumulative Impact and Action Strategy. The report responded to concerns that coal mines in the Upper Hunter, in their entirety, were degrading liveability and the environment. Air and water quality, the community fabric, the viability of traditional land uses, were under stress. Each new mine made the next waking day in the Upper Hunter worse than the one before. Back then, the Hunter's new mines were in the Muswellbrook area, like Bengalla, Mt Arthur and Mt Pleasant. Today mining stretches a further 100 kilometres west, to Ulan and Wollar, and Bylong, maybe.

We now know what cumulative impact looks like. The Upper Hunter carries the burden of coal extraction, transportation and burning. Global climate change brings more frequent, more intense drought. Air quality is consistently worse than WHO standards. The quality of scarce water resources is threatened. Communities collapse as global miners outbid farmers for land and workers.

The last census shows disturbing signs that the Upper Hunter is de-populating. People are leaving. The cumulative impacts are too great.

When will it end? When will we see that this - a Bylong mine and ones that will inevitably follow - is not worth the price, the full price, the price that the Hunter has paid for coal since the late 19th century.

Coal has always been a struggle between workers, their communities, the environment and the mining companies, without a winner. Disease and death remain part and parcel of the job.

The right of mineworkers to join together as unionists to fight inhumane, unjust working conditions has never been fully won.

Now large investment funds face pressure from their members to withdraw from coal investments due to climate change concerns. The end gets nearer.

So where will Bylong sit on coal's timeline? When will our valley say it has had enough?