Lillian’s Eden

by Cheryl Adam

  The ACF has also requested a supporter feedback video from our visit to Canberra, telling compelling stories of self and change. This initiative, I am to find, is all important. It gives people who have committed their time and energy to stop Adani hope that all their hard work is worth it.

  Six months after returning from India, the Stop Adani movement is everything Geoff Cousins has said it will be. More than 2 million Australians belong to organisations that have signed up to the Stop Adani Alliance175 from small environment groups to national organisations leading campaigns against climate change.

  It has, quite simply, revolutionised Australian politics, woken up complacency, tumbled supporters out of their living rooms and into the streets and on to the beaches to form human protests photographed from the air and to conduct sit-in protests in banks. Volunteers are getting arrested after tying themselves to railway machinery in the Abbot Point coal terminal; parents are painting murals along school walls in inner city Melbourne.

  Crowd-funding sites have sprung up online. Even my octogenarian parents are contributing money from their pension to the fight to stop this coal mine and they have attended a protest in their hometown. The movement is billed by Stop Adani as ‘the fight of our times’. ‘People power unite’ adopted by Stop Adani and ACF is the catch-cry across suburban homes and public gatherings across Australia. The public slumbers no more. #StopAdani is clogging networks everywhere. The giant has awoken.

  After the launch, thousands had turned out across Australia to protest against the Carmichael mine on a national day of action in October 2017. Rallies at 40 different locations including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Port Douglas followed an investigative program on ABC-TV’s Four Corners highlighting Adani Group’s shonky financial and environmental history.176 There are Stop Adani human signs at various locations including beaches in Newcastle. A new ReachTel poll commissioned by the Stop Adani Alliance in October 2017 reports that the majority of Australians do not want the mine.

  Annastacia Palaszczuk rejects these protests claiming that the mine has “the toughest environmental conditions attached.”177 But the protestors appear not to believe her. Continuous public outcry and demonstrations have stopped Australian banks from funding Adani. There is a feeling of euphoria in the air, that if you have a will you can stop anything. Some of the older protestors have not had this feeling since the days of Woodstock and the Vietnam War.

  An ebook is released in March 2018 entitled hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani edited by Anne Elvey.178 Among the poems included in the anthology is Michelle Cahill’s poem from the future (p. 11):

  2030, ADANI, A RETROSPECTIVE

  Remember Gujarat? Tidal mangroves were blocked

  by bunds & embankments, Chinese MoU,

  revenues from aluminium, polysilicon, animal feeds.

  The Paris Climate, OECD delegates sipped their lattes,

  declaiming coal dust, wastewater choking the fish,

  bleached nuggets, burgeoning coral cemeteries.

  We, with our winning smiles, tweeting environmental

  charities, retweeting memes, protests, petitions, trending,

  bracketed clauses in the draft agreement, spineless

  politicians, Tourism Australia. Never mind Sir David

  or Obama—we needed Murrawah, Amelia, Xiuhtezcatl

  to sing the rewilding of grasslands, reefs, native title—

  Who knew that Subrata Maity and Claude Alvares

  defended the Mundra, or Mormugão Port in Goa from

  pollution violations? The permits were not revoked.

  When 10 per cent of robots lived in cities compliant

  with WHO air quality guidelines, when the black

  rhinoceros outnumbered the black-throated finch?

  Nevertheless we sweltered, with news analysis full

  blast, we dialled up air cons, we talked prophylactic

  gene editing, from monkey to pig to homo saps.

  We wrote dirges for the third world, prohibiting diesel

  & motorcycle distributors, reversing neo-colonialism

  with a corporate warrant to drill the Galilee basin.

  Everyone was abused; the state’s litigations, economic

  futures, First nations, mind & memory’s quaint algorithms,

  poems festering, composed in acid rain; volatile

  in smog.

  Gautam Adani has re-ignited the politics of protest in a country which all too often has accepted its fate and where political activity in the main translates into turning up to vote at the polling booth every few years.

  The following morning, in my Canberra motel room before visiting Parliament House, I wake to the incredible radio news that the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, wants to keep the aged (opened in the early 1970s) and closing coal-fired Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales – once the most powerful generating station in Australia – open.179 He has even personally phoned the energy giant AGL Energy’s chief, Andy Vesey, to make the request. AGL had announced it planned to close the power plant in 2022 and has spent money on a long-running advertising campaign saying things needed to change and “we are getting out of coal starting 2022 and ending 2050.” One of Turnbull’s acolytes, Josh Frydenberg, has joined in the discussions with AGL. Although Turnbull has stopped short of saying the Government will buy the power plant, his voice in the early morning bulletin sounds close to hysterical. How could this be the same man who spoke so passionately about “the moral issue of climate change” back in 2011?

  In early September 2017, our group meets for the first time at one of these strange Jetson-like bubbles they call a Canberra coffee shop on the ground floor of an office block close to Parliament House. It is the only commercial food place in the wide streets so empty of traffic, but it does respectable business.

  Sharon France is a graphic designer who woke up to environmental consciousness in her 50s, after studying sustainability at university. She works as a volunteer for ACF. One night she had a dream. It was about a giant cheque book. She decided to design such a cheque book asking people to fill in the blank dotted lines with how they would like to see $1 billion spent of taxpayers’ money, the amount being considered by NAIF to give to Adani for the proposed rail line. Awaken the Australian public to what the government might be doing with their money, was her idea.

  The idea became a reality. The cheque book was stamped: The People’s Bank of Better Ideas. It had collected 1500 signatures. Sharon France was like many women I met along this journey attracted to the Stop Adani movement who candidly admitted they had never been involved in radical action. Yet, this cause united them. Woke them up. Gave them an identity and purpose in lives where ageing and comfortable monotony threatened. Suddenly they had a new purpose.

  Kenny Peters-Dodd, another person in our group, is a Birriah-Widi elder – a ‘River man’ – “the freshwater people,” he tells me, whose lands lie in from the coast in the arid country inland 25 kms from the coastal town of Bowen. His eyes are the colour of green waterholes. He fixes them upon you with a strong no nonsense gaze. He has German forebears but carries a strong Indigenous presence. The proposed Adani rail line will cut through his ancestral lands, waters, ecosystem and cultural heritage.

  “To actually stand on country and fight for your country and have that affiliation and spiritual connection to protect your country and advocate for the rights of your country and fight for that – that lineage is broken, you know,” Peters-Dodd wistfully tells me later. “With Native Title today we have people signing agreements on country – but they’re not considering duty of care or the rights or interests to protect their country – I mean both culturally and environmentally … These Indigenous people – to me – they are just seeing the opportunity – that these mines may bring jobs and changes to their lifestyle – but they are not standing up as a traditional person, they are not standing up as Birriah people to protect their country. That should be th
eir first interest.”

  The third member of our party is Clare Johnston, a shy, single mother who loves op shopping and wears colourful skirts and blouses. When in full stride, she belts out her prose like a professional. She is here to tell the politicians the counter-narrative to living in a boom and bust town. She benefits from ‘the bust’, in her hometown of Mackay on the Queensland coast, she tells them, not the boom, the usual commercial narrative. During the bust she can finally afford to pay the rent pushed up by the miners during the boom, and she has more money to spend on household income to support her son. She is gutsy and passionate, but over the course of the next few days, her eyes regularly fill with tears when she relays her story overcome that people appear to be listening – even politicians. She is a casualty of the lop-sided economy we have created of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. The politicians are mostly stunned into silence as she describes her plight. Dr Anne Hoggett, Director of the Research Centre at Lizard Island is one of the last members of our team to join us. She lived through the massive bleaching event on Lizard Island in 2016.

  Thomas Kinsman and Basha Stasak from ACF are youthful employees who shepherd us around, providing us with briefs, meeting schedules and enthusiasm. We are here specifically to target the Labor Party that continues to sit on the fence on the Adani debate under the anaemic leadership of Bill Shorten who has been Opposition Leader since 2013.

  Shorten, once a waterside worker and union official and former National Secretary for the Australian Worker’s Union (AWU), has predictably chosen to back the Adani mine all in the name of ‘jobs’. His favourite garb is a hard hat and ‘fluoros’ (fluorescent working clothes), to be donned for media opportunities – perhaps a reminder for some of how he was catapulted on to the Australian political stage as National Secretary of the AWU with a self-appointed role of relaying the fate of trapped miners in the Beaconsfield mine collapse in Tasmania in 2006. Shorten is walking the tightrope backing regional jobs in Labor’s marginal seats, in cities like Townsville, while at the same time pretending to care about the environment. As Anna Krien wryly points out in her 2017 Quarterly Essay (p. 90): “as if the average punter won’t be able to put their finger on the dissonance that is a political party ready to fight climate change and happy to open up a new coal seam.”180

  Predictably, though, Bill Shorten stopped short of opposing the Carmichael mine. Making statements about not allowing taxpayers’ money to be spent on the rail line meant he could sit on the fence. A critical by-election in the seat of Batman in Victoria favoured a win by the Greens, according to the pre-election polls, that would mean ousting Labor. Labor later did win the seat. After that, Shorten’s rhetoric promoting the environment and making disparaging comments about Adani predictably tailed off.

  During my first visit to Federal Parliament in March 2016, the Australian Marine Conversation Society delegation had suggested to Bill Shorten’s policy advisers that Shorten might consider visiting the Great Barrier Reef where he could launch strong environmental policies, take the opportunity to spruik clean energy, and embrace a strong environmental stance to distinguish Labor from the Liberal/National Party Coalition. He did not take up the invitation. His staffers appeared to be surprised when the idea was broached. But the Australian Labor Party is not radical or left-wing in its views. It has also supported the Government’s changes to the Native Title Act, further diluting the rights of Traditional Owners. No wonder there is general agreement that there is little difference between the Government and the Opposition.

  The strategy for this visit to Canberra, articulated by the ACF representatives, was based on the reasoning that there was little point convincing Labor to go against the mine as the approvals were already in place. Instead, the strategy was to lobby against the $1 billion proposed NAIF tax loan – yet to be granted. Shorten had already said he would not support it. We were to visit as many Labor MPs as possible.

  We begin again with enthusiasm, but soon encounter the same kind of door-shutting tactics I’d experienced during the earlier visit. The ALP MPs are like cattle in the abattoir yard, crowded together with one voice coerced into homogeneity. A small handful seem genuinely interested: Mark Butler, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, a key figure in the Labor left faction in spite of union roots, is one such person. He has gone further than Shorten stating on the public record in an exclusive interview with The Guardian: “I have a very clear view that the economics of Adani don’t stack up, and it would not be a positive thing for Australia for the Adani mine to go ahead.”181

  He also said that financial institutions had signalled there was no appetite to build new coal-fired power and that governments would need to indemnify new builds against the risk of a carbon price and against a regulatory risk which would leave taxpayers open “for a massive expense.” He said a clean energy target which allowed coal in the mix “was not a clean energy target in anything other than name” and described “‘ultra super critical coal’ as something out of a Marvel comic, but even awesomely ultra super critical coal is still, by any stretch of the imagination, high polluting electricity.”

  Two female Labor politicians also stand out. Senator Lisa Singh, on ABC Radio in Hobart in October 2017, described the Carmichael mine as “a huge mistake for this country.” Singh had already broken ranks with her own colleagues in her public condemnation of the Adani project. Reportedly, in return for her views, the ALP power brokers had bumped her down to what they presumed was the unwinnable sixth spot on the Tasmanian Senate ticket for the 2016 Federal election.182 Our aim is to convince her to make a parliamentary statement opposing the Adani rail line project. The other female ALP politician is Terri Butler who has said she doesn’t support taxpayers’ money being spent on the mine. In October 2017, she is to make a passionate speech to parliament about the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef.

  I quiz Terri Butler about how Annastacia Palaszczuk can be so wildly enthusiastic about the Adani project. Her response is enlightening. She says Palaszczuk has been single-minded in her pursuit of the mine and that the rest of the party has gone along with her. There is a grudging admiration for Palaszczuk in the party because of that.

  Anne Hoggett is a warm ray of sunshine in our group. Her wealth of knowledge as a scientist, down-to-earth manner and professionalism exudes confidence. She presents some heart-wrenching photographs from the destruction of the coral in the 2016 bleaching event on Lizard Island to the Labor caucus who assemble one afternoon for tea and cakes. Hoggett has lived on the island and has been a joint director of the Lizard Island Research Station with her husband, Lyle Vail, also a scientist, since August 1990. She first visited Lizard Island in 1982 to collect specimens for the Australian Museum where she worked. She gained her PhD on the brittle star family Ophiotrichidae in 1991 at the University of Queensland. They home schooled their son Alex on Lizard Island until he was 14 years old.

  At the time of the bleaching event, Hoggett hosted a film crew who made the emotionally heart-wrenching, brilliant documentary Chasing Coral.183 The documentary achieved much to engage a world audience with why we should care about the reef beyond just being a tourism destination. A team of divers, scientists and photographers filmed the coral at Lizard Island in its death throes in 2016 shooting more than 500 hours of underwater footage. It won the Audience Award in the USA at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

  Initially, the documentary team had set up time-lapse cameras off Dunk Island (further south, near Mission Beach), where they had been told bleaching might occur. They had struggled with similar technology in the Caribbean and Hawaii. After days setting up the cameras off Dunk they discovered from NASA that bleaching was in fact occurring further north, off Lizard Island. Abandoning the idea of the time-lapse cameras, they instead marked particular spots on the ocean floor off Lizard Island and headed out each day with handheld cameras to the same spot to record the momentous bleaching event. In the end, young Zach Rago, a self-proclaimed coral
nerd, cries on camera as he describes how he witnessed firsthand the same corals he had photographed for three months slowly perishing in front of him. It was like losing old friends, he said.

  Lizard Island was visited by many scientists after the bleaching. Justin Marshall, who starred in Chasing Coral, a neuro-ecologist from the University of Queensland who had been visiting Lizard Island for 30 years, said he cried underwater after witnessing the coral’s demise on the island’s Loomis Reef, 270 kms north of Cairns. Writing in The Huffington Post in April 2016, Marshall commented that whichever way you looked at the figures, 800 km of deeply distressed and dying reef is “an environmental disaster.”

  It was Marshall’s tears when speaking to journalists on television after the catastrophic bleaching event at Lizard Island that made me take notice. The signs were all there. Professor Terry Hughes admitted after he showed the results of his aerial surveys exposing the amount of damage to the reef, that he had shared the results with his students: “And then we wept.”