by Cheryl Adam
Cousins said this had not happened and he was speaking out to the 7.30 Report221 to “increase the pressure” on Labor to make a decision and that he believed there was “some sort of resistance in his [Shorten’s] party to him leading on this issue.” But a spokesperson for Bill Shorten in response to the ABC’s 7.30 Report denied agreeing to ban the Adani coal mine if his party was elected. The spokesperson, declared Shorten was “deeply sceptical of the Adani coal mine,” but “Labor does not rip up contracts and we don’t create sovereign risk.”
Politicians, such as Matt Canavan, had been using the term ‘sovereign risk’ to suggest that the Australian Government could not allow the Carmichael mine to not go ahead as it would jeopardise future investment prospects. However, economist Saul Eslake, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald in May 2018,222 has since pointed out that the term has been misused. Its correct usage, Eslake suggests, is more about a Government defaulting on its debts, and that politicians had been ‘completely’ abusing the term. Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at the Australia Institute, also derided the way that ‘sovereign risk’ was being used especially by the mining industry to disallow the Labor party to revoke Adani’s license, should it be elected to Government. Denniss said that any Federal Government could withdraw approval for a project if a proponent failed to meet its obligations, or if that proponent relied on false, inaccurate or misleading information to gain that approval. Denniss pointed out that Bill Shorten was not “threatening to change the law but threatening to enforce it” by relaying some of the inaccuracies already put forward by Adani.223
Bill Shorten is nowhere to be seen at the protest in front of Parliament House. The audience is enthusiastic and some television cameras stop by to cover the protest. One TV reporter advises the organisers to put the activities back half an hour as there are a few things happening in the House.
I notice the rhetoric from other speakers, especially John Hepburn from the Sunrise Project, has subtly turned from saying ‘No’ to Adani to saying ‘No to coal’. I think of our driver Mason’s description of Gina Rinehart laughing at the airport in Proserpine. Maybe she was struck by the irony that the three coal mines she has invested in that are earmarked for the Galilee Basin will reportedly produce the same amount of coal as Adani. However, there are multiple media reports especially in the Indian media about her Indian partner, GVK Reddy and the level of debt the company now faces. Tim Buckley from IEEFA noted that in March 2016, the company reported a fourth consecutive annual loss with a net debt rising another US$435 million to US$3.5 billion such that he concludes the financial distress at GVK is clear and extreme.224 No one, it seems, at this time though, is paying the other Galilee mines much attention. Everyone is focusing on Adani. The Alpha mine also threatens to remove reportedly 176 billion litres of groundwater over 30 years according to Coast and Country, the community group that tackled the mine in the Queensland Land Court. This threat to the Great Artesian Basin was Bruce Currie’s constant focus when we were in India. There is so much at stake.
The crowd at the rally is upbeat and defiant. A folk singer who has written anti-Adani songs performs ballads. Everyone joins in the chorus.
June Norman is amongst the participants. Dressed in her colourful op shop hat made out of sacking which she picked up for $5, she is a ray of sunshine and hope. Her brightness is contagious. She is a formidable contributor to the Fight for the Reef. Now 77 years old and a great-grandmother, she has been an activist since 2005, 12 years before the Stop Adani movement started.
We set up on camp chairs outside her camper van (her home) at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in the lawns outside old Parliament House. One of Norman’s triumphs was walking all the way from Cairns to Gladstone “around 1400 kms of road – only half the reef I know,” she confesses. She and other campaigners ignited local communities along the way, but Norman was the only one to walk the entire way.
“We do the walk for $10 a day – that covers everything. We call into all of the communities in the towns along the way – “Please feed us … give us somewhere to stay, we’ve got our own tents. Sometimes in a space in people’s yards. We’d talk to people about the threat to the reef. This is big business. This is Government. What can we do?”
“It’s a big empowerment movement,” we tell them. “It’s only us who’s going to stop this … You didn’t know this was a threat? If you do nothing you are going to be part of the problem. You don’t have to do the walk. Donate money, join a conservation group, write a letter to your MP.”
Having once walked from London to Geneva, a distance of around 1600 kms to protest against nuclear power, she became convinced that taking this kind of action was “the best way to make a difference.”
“Not in my Backyard …,” she gives a mock astonishment expression. “The reef’s everyone’s backyard. We had trolleys with big wheels on the walk. I pushed one of those with all our food and water, clothes and tent. And we had a dog. We had to get up before 4 am and off the road by 10 am because of the heat. That’s what started it. I came back from that walk and people said: ‘Where have you been?’”
Norman represents the new wave of politics that empowers ordinary people. She challenges the notion that Australian politics is a stagnant swamp – and says that instead of doing nothing, we should do everything we can to influence Local, State and Federal Governments. She puts us all on notice that we can’t just fall back on the old adage: since we can do nothing, why bother? It’s hard to resist her simple take on what is wrong with the world, especially when you look at her successes.
The expansion of Abbot Point and the dumping of the dredge on the Great Barrier Reef revived her commitment to campaigning. She had already been arrested in 2005 with a three month good behaviour bond when she campaigned against the Talisman Sabre, a joint biennial military training activity between Australia and the USA off the coast at Shoalhaven Bay near Rockhampton in Queensland. Norman describes it as ‘War Games’ and says their exercises included dropping bombs on the precious ocean.
Back then she challenged the whole idea of war and those who ignored the people who had paid the ultimate sacrifice. Along with other activists, she made coffins with the Christian cross and the Muslim emblem to commemorate those killed in the Iraq war. The protest named more than 1000 people who had been killed which included American soldiers and civilians.
Norman was part of the community group Coast and Country Association of Queensland, who took on Gina Rinehart and the Indian conglomerate’s proposed coal mine in the Galilee. She tells me she is already committed to losing her family home to fight for the environment if costs are ever awarded against activists in her fight.
Norman’s walk from Cairns to Gladstone kick-started the Whitsunday Residents Against Dumping (WRAD), a small community group that in June 2017 took Adani to the Supreme Court challenging the Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection approval for the extension of the Abbot Point coal terminal. WRAD failed in the bid and had Adani’s costs awarded against it. WRAD is no longer active but Reef Action Whitsunday has taken up the challenge to save the reef.
Norman considers herself “lucky enough to be divorced” by the time she was 50, but admits she was initially “devastated” when her husband left her for another woman.
“I was engaged at 17. Married at 19. Brought up to believe you get married you have kids – that’s your role in life – to support a man who I thought, thought the same thing. We had five kids … I loved being a mother, it was absolutely amazing and then, after 31 years, he goes off with someone else. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a career. I had to start again.”
At the time, she had lived in Canberra for 24 years and had never seen the Tent Embassy, now one of her favourite stomping grounds and her ‘home’ when she comes to town. It was after she moved to East Timor that her passion for activism was stirred.
“It’s only people power that’s going to do it. If there’s enough of us, they have to
do what we want,” she says unwavering in her determination.
She is proud of her arrests, saying she was the first person arrested in Australia over the protests against coal seam gas extraction.
In June 2017, she was one of ten protestors arrested for sitting in the Commonwealth Bank protesting against the bank funding Adani. The bank has since ruled out lending any funds to Adani.
“We got inside – this other guy and I. We had hundreds of people outside the bank protesting. They put us in a police car, took us to the station and then had us unarrested. The bank didn’t want us arrested. So they let us go.”
Norman’s determination has sure had some wins.
While on a 500 km walk from Dalby to Gladstone in 2012 protesting against the Queensland Gas Company’s coal seam gas, LNG pipeline and the X-Strata coal corridor into Gladstone, she was contacted by someone from Parliament House in Canberra. They told her she had been invited to talk to the UNESCO representatives in Gladstone who had come to investigate the issues facing the reef. When she arrived at the meeting, the host introduced her by saying that some people had got to the meeting by boat, some had flown, others had driven “but we have someone who has walked. She’s walked 500 kms to be at this meeting.”
Norman said Fanny Dupré from UNESCO immediately jumped up to welcome her, telling Norman she had heard of her exploits “before I got on the plane in Paris.”
At the National Museum in Canberra, I am lying flat on my back on a communal couch in a semi-circle shared with around 20 other visitors. The rally is over. On the six-metre dome above us is a starry sky. Not the kind Don McLean wrote about in his world renowned Starry, Starry Night commemorating Vincent Van Gogh. This sky is an Indigenous sky. Midnight blue and black with a myriad of stars morphing into an apricot dawn. Eucalypts appear around the circular periphery. A bird begins to sing and the comforting throb of the didgeridoo pervades the dome. It’s like looking through the eye of the birth canal and seeing the birth of the first dawn. Crackling fire and the sky above creates a sensory experience as the slowly lightening darkness fills the space. An Indigenous voice speaks.
Transported from the busyness of twenty-first century life to another realm, we see the dawning of the new day. We see it as Indigenous people have witnessed it for tens of thousands of years long before electricity and the industrial revolution, before greenhouse gases began to destroy our planet, when the Great Barrier Reef was pristine and bountiful, when time was suspended.
Billed by the museum as an exhibition “of pursuit and escape, desire and magic and the power of family bonds,” the story is the experience and the story of the Seven Sisters. It is called Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. Cave Hill – the inspiration for the dome – is a real location, which is called Travelling Kungkangkalpa. The Walinynga (Cave Hill) Experience. The cave is in the Anangu, Pitjatjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of remote northwest South Australia.
The Songlines exhibition includes paintings, sculptures and other works by more than 100 artists from the Martu, Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands of Australia’s Central and Western deserts. The cave’s artwork had never been visited by white people until the National Museum undertook an archaeological exploration. The exhibition was seven years in the making and curated by Aboriginal women.
Akin to astral travelling, we are transported as the Seven Sisters are transformed into boulders and new sisters are born. Songlines are part of the knowledge system of Indigenous Australians. Songs and dances connect people to the land, to knowledge of past changes in climate, to seasonal knowledge and to the stars in the sky as they shift through the seasons. Noel Pearson, the Aboriginal lawyer, academic, land rights activist calls them ‘Australia’s Book of Genesis’: a dreaming track that can be on the land or in the sky. Songlines entered the popular lexicon after Bruce Chatwin’s book of the same name was published in 1987.
Singing keeps the land alive and it was singing that was used in Aboriginal Creation myths to bring all the beings into existence. Kenny Peters-Dodd told me about the songlines that brought him back to his ancestral land. Adrian Burragubba describes it as his people’s spiritual connection to the land which has evolved through songs and dancing. “Our law comes back to the time immemorial. In the beginning when the Great Spirit made the sun … the sun shone through the water and the Rainbow Serpent Mundunjudra carved up the mountains.” His people paint themselves with white ochre to represent water and spirit and they sing “and that’s the rhythm of the land – It’s in that time when we sing it, we know we’re connected. This is a place of our dreaming. The spirits remain there indefinitely.”
If the Carmichael mine goes ahead, however, it would, according to Burragubba’s words written on the W&J website,225 “… tear the heart out of the land. The scale of this mine means it would have devastating impacts on our native title, ancestral lands and waters, our totemic plants and animals, and our environmental and cultural heritage. It would pollute and drain billions of litres of groundwater, and obliterate important springs systems. It would potentially wipe out threatened and endangered species. It would literally leave a huge black hole, monumental in proportions, where there were once our homelands. These effects are irreversible. Our land will be ‘disappeared’.”
Burragubba told the Queensland Supreme Court in an affidavit that the Adani mine will “prevent me from keeping my songlines alive” and that “the land around the mine would be both culturally and physically barren.”
Didgeridoo and tin drums throb and fill the dome. Disoriented, many of us strangers lie on the communal couch, united by our decision to attend this exhibition. We are captive to the dome above seeking signifiers to understand what we are watching guided by the voice of the narrator. A series of Indigenous artworks fill the dome as the sisters battle with Wati Nyiru the snake, a carpet python who is an ancestral being, a shape shifter and a man who wants to possess and hurt them. Singing, they throw the snake up to the sky. Then the sisters dig a hole to catch the snake. They cook and eat it. It makes them sick for three days. They fly over the spinifex country. Then they morph into the circle, and, still chased by Wati Nyiru, escape into the sky to become stars. The story continues in the night sky as the dome darkens again – turning midnight blue and darker still. The sisters reappear as a sparkling cluster of stars. The ancient Greeks called these stars Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus. Dazzling aeons away is their pursuer who has become Orion.
I wander through the rest of the exhibition in a daze struck by how Governments can ignore the rights of Indigenous people to land they have owned for tens of thousands of years. How can Australia, particularly its Governments who are not accountable and the world (through bodies such as UNESCO who still has not declared the Great Barrier Reef as endangered) stand by and allow a mine like Adani’s Carmichael mine to proceed? A mine, that along with other proposed mines for the Galilee Basin, will undoubtedly contribute through global warming to escalating the destruction of the only living organism to be seen from outer space as well as so many other reefs around the world, all because of our continued dependency on fossil fuels?
As I am nearing completion of this book, James Bradley, in a book review in The Weekend Australian (May 19–20, 2018), writes that, “We inhabit a moment of profound planetary crisis … Meanwhile our demands on the planet continue to escalate.” Commenting on recent figures that the five hottest years on record have all occurred in the past decade, he states, “… we have somehow willed ourselves into ignoring the scale of the disaster that is bearing down on us. Like addicts on the world’s biggest bender, we are burning through our children’s and our children’s children’s inheritances so fast it should make our heads spin, yet nobody talks about it.”
Those who aided and abetted the approval of these massive coal mines in Australia will find no comfort by re-stating they are looking after a handful of jobs for those alive today. Their actions will live forever in the disappearing beauty of what
our current generation may be the last to see.
On the ABC news – ironically on the eve of the first anniversary of Cyclone Debbie, 28 March 2018 – the television screen is filled with powerful images. Thousands of young people, some who saw 17 classmates killed in a shooting at a Florida high school are taking to the streets and marching on Washington in a protest they call ‘March For Our Lives’ to reclaim the safety of their classrooms. In Sydney, horses with Stop Adani on their saddles take part in the Time2Choose rally demanding clean air, energy and water for New South Wales stating that the combined impacts of 11 new and expanded coal mine projects in New South Wales is bigger than Adani’s mine in Queensland. Thousands have gathered from around the state to choose protection for people, culture, farmland and water resources over the damage of coal seam gas.
On 25 March 2018, The Guardian online newspaper226 publishes figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA, set up in 1974 in the wake of the oil crisis with the aim of ensuring reliable, affordable, renewable energy) which shows that global emissions from energy (the total amount of energy used by human civilisation) have jumped back to an historic high with global energy largely driven by Asia growing by 2.1%, more than double the rate of 2016. More than 70% of the growth comes from fossil fuels. Coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel, having experienced two years of declining usage (2015–16) is up by 1% in 2017 as coal burning in China, India and South Korea has grown. Australia’s contribution is sobering. Earlier, an Australian Associated Press (AAP) account on 15 February, also reprinted in The Guardian, points out that while Australia has cut the emissions intensity of its electricity sector by 15% since 2005, it has still the highest emissions of any IEA member country and double the average of any other member country. In spite of pledging to cut emissions under the Paris climate agreement, citing the four-yearly review of IEA countries’ energy policies, the IEA found that Australia had “not yet come forward with durable climate change policies after 2020,” nor had we named a long-term goal.