Ulan's rescue had 15 business days. A lender caveat arrived with one week left.

On 31 August, the creditors of Ulan Quarry Products Pty Ltd, ACN 629 397 726, met for the third time on the same question. The meeting had opened on 2 July and been adjourned twice.

This time they resolved that the company should execute a deed of company arrangement, or DOCA, giving the quarry a path out of administration. The Corporations Act then gave Ulan 15 business days to sign it.

On 10 September, with seven business days left, B61 Pty Limited lodged a caveat over Ulan's mining lease. The NSW mining titles register recorded it on 14 September, one week before the deadline.

It was not B61's first. It had lodged one in June and lodged another on 16 September. Both have expired. The one recorded on 14 September is still current.

B61 was no ordinary creditor. The administrators had admitted its claim at almost $3.5 million. It had financed the company's purchase of the quarry, claimed security over equipment and put forward its own rescue proposal.

The deed was not executed in time.

On 21 September, the period ran out. Under the Corporations Act, missing that deadline put Ulan into liquidation automatically. Liquidators Joshua Robb and Jason Porter were appointed the following day.

The ASIC notice published on 23 September records exactly that. The company is taken, because of paragraph 446A(1)(b), to have passed a special resolution to be wound up voluntarily. That paragraph applies when a company fails to sign a deed its creditors resolved it should execute, within the period section 444B of the Corporations Act allows: 15 business days after the meeting, unless a court extends it.

The notice does not say which proposed deed creditors chose, why it was not signed, or whether the caveat had anything to do with it.

A quarry with rock in the ground, customers in the region and a lease running into the next decade had run out of something less visible: the ability to hold all its parts together as one operating business.

Ulan Quarry sits on Crown land about 40 kilometres north of Mudgee in regional NSW.

Its product is not exotic. It extracts stone and crushes it into road base, sand and gravel for councils, contractors and landscapers. These are the materials underneath roads, subdivisions, drainage projects and public works.

Its mining lease, ML 1726, covers 76.38 hectares and does not expire until February 2037. According to the administrators, the ground holds material suitable for dimension stone, road base and decorative pebbles.

Its environment protection licence, number 20573, is a separate approval. The administrators report that it authorises crushing, grinding or separating between 30,000 and 100,000 tonnes of material a year, and mining up to 30,000 tonnes a year.

There was also a route to public-sector work. Mid-Western Regional Council appointed Ulan Quarry to its pre-qualified quarry-products panel in 2023. The council's contracts register shows that panel running until 31 October 2027, although a panel appointment does not guarantee any particular volume of purchases.

On paper, Ulan also had stock ready to move. The administrators' June report to creditors relays the director's estimate of about 20,000 tonnes of sand, road base and gravel at the site. The company's books valued its stock at $605,000. The administrators commissioned an independent valuation and withheld the result as commercially sensitive.

The lease was carried in the books at $341,659. Plant and equipment, including an excavator, water tanks and site sheds, had a book value of $114,469.

These are book values, not realisation values. But they make the central problem clearer.

Ulan did not enter liquidation because nothing was left.

It entered liquidation holding several things of potential value that did not necessarily belong together.

To a customer, Ulan Quarry looked like one supplier.

To a liquidator or financier, it was at least five separate things, each recorded, held or secured in a different place:

Beyond those sit the customer relationships and supply arrangements, which no register records at all.

Control one of those and you do not necessarily control the others.

A mining lease does not deliver the plant needed to crush the rock. Security over the crusher does not provide environmental approval. A council-panel appointment does not keep operating if the approved supplier cannot deliver. Stockpiles have limited value if there is no lawful or economical way to load and move them.

The proposed rescue plans exposed those fault lines.

B61's proposal included $60,413 for admitted unrelated unsecured creditors, $20,000 for deed-administration costs and continued supply of a crusher for quarry operations.

A competing proposal from Urban Resources offered 100 cents in the dollar for claims admitted for voting purposes, plus the administrators' costs. But it depended on several pieces falling into place, including a transfer of the shareholding, removal of B61's registered securities, removal of B61's caveats and delivery or availability of the equipment.

The proposals were not merely competing offers of money.

They were competing methods of reassembling the quarry.

That is why the September caveat matters. A caveat does not, by itself, prove B61's entitlement or decide its priority. It records a claimed interest, and it can hold up dealings with a mining title until the caveator's claim is addressed.

For any buyer or rescue proponent, it was one more part that had to be resolved, and it landed with a week to go.

Ulan Quarry Products had been incorporated in October 2018 as Hardy Equipment Holdings Pty Ltd. According to the administrators, B61 lent it $750,000 under a loan agreement dated 31 January 2022, to buy the quarry business from the liquidators of Ulan Stone Pty Ltd. Of that, $550,000 paid for the lease and business assets and $200,000 was intended as working capital. The lease transfer was registered in May 2022, and Ulan Stone has since been deregistered.

The loan carried interest at 5 per cent and was to be repaid over 30 months.

On 19 October 2023, the parties signed a Heads of Agreement recording $2,047,835 in further amounts that B61 says it spent on equipment and expenditure for the company. The same agreement put B61's sole director, Graham Holley, and Jackson Johnston on Ulan's board.

That additional debt was disputed. Director Matthew Hardy acknowledged the original $750,000 advance but disputed the Heads of Agreement.

After reviewing the loan agreement, variation deed, equipment records and security registrations, the administrators admitted B61's claim at $3,497,526.

B61's security position was complicated too. It held numerous registrations over equipment and motor vehicles. An all-assets security interest contemplated by the 2022 loan agreement was not registered until 12 December 2025, about three months before the administration began.

By then, the company's financial position had become hard to establish.

Ulan did not directly employ its quarry workforce when the administrators arrived.

Labour had been supplied through related Makekadi companies. Those companies entered liquidation, cutting the quarry off from the people needed to run it.

The liquidator of one of them, Makekadi Mining Services, lodged a claim of $573,315 against Ulan. At the same time, Ulan's own accounts recorded $280,121 in loans receivable from two Makekadi entities. The administrators put the likely recovery from both at nil.

The structure created a circular problem.

The quarry owed money to a failed related company. The failed related companies appeared to owe money back to the quarry. And they had supplied the labour the quarry needed to earn revenue.

When the administrators restarted operations on 7 May, they hired three casual staff: a quarry manager, a civil operator and a quarry labourer.

Between 23 March and 24 June, the administration recorded $118,814 in sales and work in progress. Before exceptional costs, that produced a trading profit of $61,122.

Then came the cost of preserving the business. Twenty-four-hour security cost $83,622. EPA administration fees cost $7,458. Valuations cost $20,075.

After those items, trading showed a loss of $50,032.

The quarry could sell rock. It could not cheaply hold its fractured asset structure together.

Even the appointment of Ulan's administrators had to be repaired.

The two directors who joined under the B61 agreement, Mr Holley and Mr Johnston, called a board meeting for 9.30am on Monday, 23 March. Notice went out at 3.43pm the previous Friday. The company's constitution required at least one business day's notice, which the court read as one clear business day in between.

On 1 April, Mr Hardy's solicitors disputed the appointment on that ground. The administrators went to court the same day.

The NSW Supreme Court found that the meeting had not been validly convened, so the appointment was not valid. On 22 April it validated the appointment anyway under section 447A of the Corporations Act, with effect from 23 March.

The court found that the evidence strongly suggested Ulan was insolvent on 23 March, that its books were inadequate and that employees and suppliers had gone unpaid in recent months. It was also unclear who would control the company if the administration ended.

The court's decision, In the matter of Ulan Quarry Products Pty Limited [2026] NSWSC 408, kept the rescue process alive.

It did not make the quarry easier to rescue.

The company's accounts suggested assets worth about $1.37 million.

The administrators warned that the figure could not be relied on as a recovery estimate.

They received multiple versions of the company's financial statements. No bank statements were ever provided. Production logs, weighbridge data, stockpile inventories, delivery dockets, customer contracts and purchase orders had not been provided for the full seven-year period, and critical regulatory records were missing too.

Then there was the contract. Mr Hardy and his advisers told the administrators of a contract that may be worth about $35 million. The administrators said they had been given no information supporting either its existence or its value.

That unsupported figure is a useful dividing line in this story.

Above it sat the imagined value of future work.

Below it sat what could be seen and counted: an estimated 20,000 tonnes of material, an excavator, site infrastructure, a mining title, an EPA licence and a place on a council procurement panel.

Even those visible assets came with qualifications.

On 23 September 2026, the NSW mining titles register showed rehabilitation security of $177,000 required against $155,000 held. The administrators' report also records a claim from the state resources department for the shortfall in that security deposit and the annual rent on the lease.

That security is not a fund for ordinary creditors. It exists to protect the state against the cost of rehabilitating the site.

The rock has value.

The right to extract it carries a future bill.

For equipment financiers, financing "a quarry" is not precise enough. Security must identify the actual crusher, vehicles and supporting plant, and it must be registered promptly. A financier may control critical equipment without controlling the mining title.

For property and asset managers, continued occupation does not mean continued authority to operate. The mining title, environmental licence, land arrangements and development approvals each need separate checking.

For councils, builders and freight operators, a supplier's quarry can stay physically intact while its delivery chain fails. The stock may still be there while labour, fuel, haulage, equipment access and purchase-order authority disappear independently.

For accountants and lawyers, Ulan shows what happens when group-company arrangements are informal and the records cannot explain who owns what, who employs whom or which entity paid for the equipment.

And for any buyer, the due-diligence question is not simply, "How much rock is left?"

It is whether the mining lease, licence, plant, stock, people, contracts, transport and rehabilitation funding can be put back under one commercially workable structure.

Ulan Quarry's lease still runs to 2037. The council panel runs into 2027. The stone has not disappeared.

What disappeared was the agreement capable of holding all those pieces together.

The quarry remains.

The business did not.

If you are owed money by Ulan Quarry Products and are unsure where a claim goes: They owe me money

We publish public-record information, not advice. The liquidators are the authoritative source on the liquidation, and nothing here is a statement about the validity, amount or priority of any party's claim.