Road to Exploitation subtitled Political Capture by Mining in Queensland by Alec Lucke will be released at an invitational and public book launch party at the Gladstone Art Gallery Queensland at 2 pm on Friday 19 July 2013. Partly autobiographical, this historical account and social commentary on mining and industrialisation is a once in a lifetime publication.

The book authenticates not only landholders concerns about coal and CSG's unacceptable impacts upon their strategic cropping land and aquifers but also concerns about damage to Gladstone Harbour's ecology through examples of sweetheart deals entered into by Cabinet that bound the government's regulatory and administrative agencies to policies of minimum compliance, lack of regulatory enforcement, false benchmarking of the science and eventually, abandonment of co-existence with behind the scenes resignation of unavoidable impacts.

Produced in print and ebook versions, this human interest narrative quotes from 170 documents and provides electronic links to 74 otherwise publicly unavailable files.