LAST year, the small Bowen Basin town of Capella epitomised the resources boom - a sleepy rural community with a main street hosting an iconic inner-city Brisbane pub brand. Now, it is the face of the bust. Local business John Hallam - or Johno to the locals - has been here for almost 30 years and thought he had seen it all. “It virtually happened on Friday, April 9. The reason I can give a date is because it seemed as though the sun set that evening and it didn’t come up the next day,” he told the WINO. “It was bang! Like a shot gun went off.” The 500 people who had been driving or flying in to Capella each week didn’t turn up. The construction had finished on a nearby mine and it was over. “We went from a bustling, bundling town to - woah, who shut the gate?” Johno’s service station, which he has run since 1975, had been so busy he was getting fuel brought in every day. Now he is down to one refill a week. When the WINO was in Capella in March last year, it was a jarring sight to see a brand new motel that would not look out of place in a swanky Sydney suburb. In the evening, the town was inundated with men in high vis gear, the local pub was full to bursting and staff were flown in to keep up with the demand. But now, the pub is empty and the motel has closed its doors. The brand new Dooleys Pub, built last year, now has 80 vacant rooms and a dribble of patrons. STORY COURTESY SHIFT MINER Johno’s Bottlebrush Motel has downsized from nine staff to four and he is lucky to get four people a night in his 20 rooms. Next door, the Coach Inn has perhaps half a dozen people in its 70 rooms and its pub has shut down. “Locals’ heads are spinning. If you wanted a job before, you just had to snap your finger and you got one. Now, there are people everywhere looking for work and there is a lot of despair.”
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 04:26:22 +0000
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