Lillian’s Eden

by Cheryl Adam

  At the entrance to the white colourbond house with a small verandah is a big bold yellow sign with large red writing: ‘Camp Nudja Past Present Future. Know Understand Remember’. A turning circle runs around two slender trees and a collection of outhouses flanks the side of the property, which includes an outdoor kitchen. Plastic chairs form a makeshift dining room. It is the week before Christmas 2017. In the outhouses two men, one called ‘Sooty’, are building a Santa sleigh which will have a large Christmas wish: ‘Ho Ho Ho. Adani must go’ inscribed on it. There is a pervading sense of busyness. Daily agendas are set, tasks are allotted and activities planned.

  Inside the house, a young woman is at the computer designing a flyer with the ‘Twelve Gifts of Christmas’ from Adani, among them:

  Free unlimited depletion of Qld’s groundwater (rather than paying like locals do).

  An obsolete project in a declining global coal economy (instead of investment in the growing renewables sector).

  Disposable short-term FIFO workforces (instead of secure, long-term community employment).

  Increased likelihood of black lung disease (rather than creating healthy communities).

  Destruction of arable land (rather than support local agriculture).

  A project that’s consistently struggling to lock-in financial backing and taxpayer funds (rather than standing on its own two feet).

  A project whose contractors keep walking away (instead of long-term partnerships).

  A project consistently forced into legal battles (rather than adhere to environment legislation and social norms).

  Reef pollution through discharge of run-off (instead of ensuring a stable tourism industry).

  Extreme climate and weather events (instead of contributing to a more stable future for all).

  On the verandah, at a long table, a young woman with a green headband is drafting a media release. Today’s activities are planned to coincide with Adani’s welcome barbecue that will be held at the Lion’s Park in Collinsville. The purpose of the Adani barbecue is to engage the community and to discuss potential jobs on Mining Camp 3 – a construction camp in Collinsville to be used if the rail line between the proposed mine and Abbot Point goes ahead.

  Stop Adani and FLAC are preparing their own barbecue, also to be held at the Lion’s Park where the Twelve Gifts flyer will be distributed. Outside the earth bakes. One young protestor lies prone on the verandah zapped by the heat. Most of these protestors are from interstate attracted by the invitation to actively engage in what they believe in, to trade their urban landscapes and move bush. Many are students on a break from university. An article in Byron Bay’s Echo200 lists the occupations of a group of protestors who had recently returned from the Collinsville camp: a naturopath in her 40s; a filmmaker, a former builder and a former schoolteacher both in their 60s. Around $120,000 in fines and 95 arrests have already been incurred at the time of writing in various actions.

  The call to frontline action has seized the imagination of many disenchanted young people from major cities as far away as Hobart and Perth. Photographs on the group’s website portray them standing on top of trains brandishing fists or lying next to rail lines with posters declaring ‘Veto loan for Aurizon’ (Aurizon is the company that operates the Queensland coal freight network and, at the time, was applying for a NAIF loan to build the Adani railway line, but withdrew after Adani did not get the NAIF loan).

  Participants in frontline action are invited to pledge to take part “in dignified, peaceful civil disobedience to protect the climate, reef and everyone’s future by stopping the construction of Adani’s coal project in Queensland.” The group has been involved in many actions including locking themselves onto a barrel of concrete placed on the Aurizon railway line, thus blocking Aurizon coal trains for up to six hours. In January 2018, five FLAC campaigners shut down the Adani Abbot Point Coal Terminal by pulling the safety cord and locking themselves onto the conveyor belt which transports coal to a freighter ship. ‘Locking on’ means placing their forearms on to large metal cylinder and chaining their hands together inside. It is a technique known as ‘sleeping dragon’. Police response, according to one activist, reported in the media, was to deprive the activists of food and water until they agree to be unlocked. Another activist, a 20-year-old student from Sydney sat in a cot suspended from a tree with the only rope supporting her tied to the tracks 20 m below. The only crew qualified to bring her down safely had to be flown up from Brisbane.

  Stop Adani has changed the face of Australian politics. Protest, by dictionary definition means “an expression or declaration of objection … often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid.” Up until Stop Adani, large-scale protests were something of the distant past – belonging in the 1970s and 1980s when there were protests for peace, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Indigenous rights and protests against the Franklin Dam and the US military base Pine Gap. Clive Hamilton, in his 2016 book What Do We Want! The Story of Protest in Australia, writes that 200,000 people marched against the Vietnam War at the 1970 Vietnam moratorium rallies around Australia.201 In 2003, when former Prime Minister, John Howard deployed troops to fight in Iraq, 600,000 people marched in protest, to no avail. “Despite the massive size,” writes Hamilton, “the protests were simply ignored.”

  The protests against the Franklin Dam remain the biggest and most significant environmental campaign in Australian history. The dam was proposed to be built on the Gordon River in Tasmania to generate hydro-electricity and in December 1982 the site was occupied by protestors. It was the same day that the UNESCO Committee in Paris was due to list the Tasmanian Wild Rivers as a World Heritage site. The Franklin campaign, as it came to be known, was said to have brought down the Liberal Coalition Government led by former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, because Bob Hawke, his Labor opponent, promised not to build the dam if elected to government. A landmark High Court ruling in 1983, following a battle between the Tasmanian and Federal Governments, voted in Labor Federal Government’s favour stating that they had the right under the constitution to stop the dam based on their international obligations under the World Heritage Convention.202

  The area had been declared a World Heritage site in 1982, coincidentally a similar time period to the Great Barrier Reef. The same issues surfaced decades ago about the Franklin as applied to the WHA listing of the Great Barrier Reef in 1981. The listing recognised its unique status but could not prevent the dam going ahead. To stop the dam needed an incorporation of the protected status to be written into Australian law. The World Heritage Properties Conservation Act was passed in 1983. Written at a time when climate change was barely on the drawing board as an issue, it seems to have had little effect on protecting the Reef.

  Throughout January 1983, a total of 1217 arrests including of celebrities, were made following blockades. Full-page colour advertisements featuring the wilderness photographer Peter Dombrovskis’ images ‘Morning Mist’ and ‘Rock Island Bend’ also helped draw attention to the cause.

  Arguably, now, one of the most potent weapons to help focus on issues and igniting the desire for people power is GetUp whose slogan is ‘Take Action Now’. The group embraced the fight to stop the Adani coal mine along with Stop Adani, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australian Marine Conservation Society, 350.org, a global grassroots climate movement and many other community environmental groups.

  As testimony to this new wave of political action, when 13 FLAC activists faced the Bowen Magistrate’s Court on 13 March 2018 after shutting down part of Adani’s North Queensland coal port, the Magistrate, Simon Young, struggled with what ABC reporter, Josh Robertson, described in his report as “the first known cases of an obscure charge – intentionally or recklessly interfering with a port’s operation.” No one, not the magistrate, defence or prosecution could find a relevant case law for the charge, reported Jessica Lamb in The Whitsunday Times on 14 March 2018.

  The proceedings marked a lega
l precedent, setting a benchmark for future cases heard under the legislation. Several rolling actions have since been carried out at Abbot Point. One group twice stopped operation of the Abbot Point coal terminal and halted two coal-carrying Aurizon trains. Ten anti-Adani protestors were arrested in September 2017 after blockading the road to Abbot Point. Workers were allowed to leave, but not to gain access to the port.

  The Santa sleigh is almost ready. Mason agrees to drive down to Collinsville to the Lion’s Park (or the Lion’s Den) and do a reconnaissance on the Adani barbecue before the cavalcade with the sleigh leave. I go with her. The town is full of police cars: patrol cars and paddy wagons. Other than that, there’s no one about. We drive through the main street past the swimming pool to the park. At the barbecue at the back of the Lion’s Park near a fence are the orange fluoro shirts of some workers and Adani banners. There are no more than a dozen people. Many seem to be Lion’s Park members. We park on the same side as the park to get a closer look. Mason then does a U-turn to head back to the camp and is immediately pulled over by a paddy wagon.

  She winds down her window.

  “What’s this all about?” she asks irritably. She tells me later she recognised the police officer, as he had already pulled her over.

  “Just doing a licence check.”

  “I can’t see you stopping anyone else?”

  Nevertheless she produces her licence. The young uniformed cop goes through the motions and then hands the card back. We drive off.

  As we head back towards the road to Bowen, the frontline camp car approaches looking for all the world like a refugee boat. Santa’s sleigh is strapped to the roof.

  Later, there are complaints in the local Bowen newspaper that there are not enough police to oversee local crime as police resources are being deployed to take care of Adani activists. Out of 27 officers at Bowen police station, more than $18,000 worth of overtime has been claimed since the protests began according to a story in The Whitsunday Times.203 With the heavy police presence in Bowen that day – no wonder.

  The presence of this camp and the activities of its occupants have stirred locals from Collinsville to Bowen. In the ensuing months, only days after a mass school shooting in the USA, George Christensen, the Federal National Party member and vocal Adani supporter posts a photo on social media of himself aiming a handgun which states: “You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, greenie punks?” And this from an elected member of Federal Parliament.

  The Townsville Bulletin204 in January 2018 reports shaken Adani protesters were confronted by a local Bowen man threatening that they may get hurt by their actions. Adani, meanwhile, has managed to have its name included in the Bowen Adani Offshore Superboat Carnival run in April 2018 as though naming rights permit it to become part of the community.

  So highly charged is the tension that in early January 2018, Mackay Superintendent, Bruce McNab, warns the local community not to take vigilante action against the protestors. Weeks after my visit, dead wallabies shot through the head are found in the driveway to the camp.

  Ken Peters-Dodd’s house is past the camp off the main road and down a dirt road that snakes through the dry bush. It is mid-afternoon when Mason and I arrive back from the Lion’s Park Adani barbecue. The peachy light softens the eucalypts and the ironbarks that surround the collection of buildings, home to Peters-Dodd and his wife Maria. He greets us at the front door wearing a bandana and a black polo shirt proclaiming Birriah people. I haven’t seen him since our trip to Canberra three months ago. Around his wrists are bracelets of shells and leather. Maria, who is clearly a source of strength for Ken, is a small woman with long dark hair. They have both been long outspoken about the proposed Adani mine and feel strongly that it ignores and disrespects the feelings of Indigenous people.

  While their land is around 70 kms from the proposed railway line, Peters-Dodd, an elder of the Birriah people, is quite articulate as to why the mine should be refused.

  His people, he reminds me, are from the fresh river country, one of several Aboriginal groups in the Bowen district. His coastal neighbours, the Ngaro people in the Whitsundays, are “the salt-water people.”

  “We’re the freshwater people. We’re the inland people, the Birri. Our country starts in the Clarke Ranges part of the Great Dividing Range near the Bogie River and out west to Belyando and then it crosses down near Midge Point and back up to Charters Towers up north.’’

  In the 1860s, Peters-Dodd’s land was carved up into cattle stations. White settlers arrived in force. The Aboriginal population began to decline dramatically in the Bowen district. Indigenous people were removed from their land to work on the cattle stations for white settlers or killed through conflict or disease. Peters-Dodd’s great-grandparents were part of ‘the great roundup’ that continued through the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. His grandfather was taken at the age of six in 1915 from his birthplace at Strathmore Station, a cattle station further west. His parents had witnessed the first clearing of the land for the cattle stations. Many of the Indigenous population were moved on to Christian missions as far as Coen in Cape York in the far north and Mission Beach on the Far North Queensland coast. Some of Peters-Dodd’s ancestors even ended up on Palm Island, an Aboriginal community which is the main island of the Greater Palm Group of islands 65 kms north west of Townsville.

  After the displacement of Aboriginal people from mainland Queensland, the island became a home for many Indigenous groups and attracted the focus of powerful Australian literature. Thea Astley in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow205 wrote a novel based on true events about a psychotic superintendent, a Kurtz-like figure who tried 90 years ago to kill the white staff on the island.

  Ken Peters-Dodd was born in Rockhampton, 520 kms south from the land of his forebears.

  Unbelievably, it was not until April 2016 that the Federal Court finally recognised the Birriah people as Traditional Owners of 9845 square kilometres of land between Mackay and Townsville in North Queensland. The Birriah people signed an ILUA with Adani in 2014.

  Almost 100 years since his ancestors were forcibly taken off their land, Peters-Dodd made the decision to ‘return to country’: the land his people come from. About 20 years ago, after living in Sydney where Ken was an artist and a performance artist of traditional song and dance, he and Maria returned.

  “It was a calling. It was right to come back to country. Spiritually, it’s a calling for our people. We come home because we know it’s right. We’re guided by our ancestors to protect the rest of our country. It was time to go home and reconnect with our lands … through our bloodlines. We need to come back – the importance of country for our own spirit and bloodline … There was a big pull to sit on country and protect country.”

  Peters-Dodd takes me to the old railway station house that he now uses as his artist retreat. The traditional weatherboard was once the homestead of the railway master. The train line is only around five kilometres away at the back of the house. This railway line, Peters-Dodd tells me, will link with the proposed Adani railway line.

  The afternoon light spreads into the old railway house highlighting the artwork – stencils of hands against the beige weatherboard; waterholes, serpents and totems in paintings of all shapes and sizes. Massive turtles with patterned backs and totem poles are on canvasses around the walls. A dominating canvas of a solitary Indigenous man with a mobile phone. An empty yoghurt pot acts as a water container. The walls are rainbow-coloured, a complete departure, I imagine, in this transported place that once housed the railway station master. By the window are stands containing jewellery made from ironbark and porcupine quills gathered from the property. The porcupine quill206 is Peters-Dodd’s totem from his ancestors. His children come and go up the ramp to the gallery. Meting out a gruff but affectionate discipline to his daughter, Ruby, it is clear they respect him.

  The proposed rail line will first cross the land belonging to the Juru people, whose cultural heritage includes th
e ocean north of Bowen to the Burdekin River near the present day township of Home Hill and then through Birri country across rivers like the Bowen and Bogie. Peters-Dodd says the Birriahs share boundaries with the Yanggas, their neighbouring skin group. The proposed Carmichael mine will be built on Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) people’s country in the south-west in central-western Queensland.

  About six months ago, Peters-Dodd’s house was the FLAC and Stop Adani headquarters before the property was bought nearby. ‘Camp Nudja’, which the new camp was named after its original namesake, he tells me, means “to know, understand and remember past present and future.”

  “This place here,” his arms circle out to embrace his home and the land. “It was significant to buy this place as a healing place. It’s a place of cultural knowledge – a place where environmental people have come and scientists and researchers.”

  When Ken and Maria moved back to country, there was no Adani, but there were other environmental threats – mostly related to the precious commodity of water. Even though it has been two generations since his family had lived on country, Peters-Dodd knew where his traditional land was along the Bogie River.

  “Our land has been impacted massively since white settlement,” he explains. “Now they’re starting to encroach into the lowest environmental eco-system waterways and mining in areas where they shouldn’t be. It is of great concern for us that this country has survived for thousands of generations. We are witnessing our lands being destroyed and there will be no sustainability in the practices that they are doing. Our people have walked here for years.”

  He once met the Australian writer, Alex Miller, when Miller was researching his novel Journey to the Stone Country that was published in 2002 and subsequently won the Miles Franklin award.207 The novel is about a white university lecturer from Melbourne whose parents were cattle farmers. He reconnects with an old childhood friend who happens to be the grandson of a Murri Aboriginal woman. Presciently, they become romantically entwined after being sent on a mission to survey cultural artefacts in a country that has been earmarked for coal mining.