‘I wish I had more middle fingers.’
—Rose McGowan
‘At the very least, we have to put up a good fight.’
—Bill McKibben
Students Liz Morley, twenty-one, and Breana Macpherson-Rice, twenty-three, are trying to explain the origins of their climate-change activism. Digging around for her earliest eco experience, Macpherson-Rice comes up with, ‘I was part of the compost team at school,’ then adds, ‘I didn’t start it,’ lest I give her credit where it’s not due.1 They are scrupulously honest; it’s a matter of principal, because those they oppose deal in half-truths and outright lies, like Trump’s tweets about cold snaps (‘It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!’).2
Macpherson-Rice answered McKibben’s call to join the divestment movement as soon as she heard it. She’s read all his books and volunteers for 350.org. The composting ‘was just something we did during lunch breaks. I’m not sure I can honestly tell you I cared deeply about it.’ The caring bit came later. She’d just arrived at university and was taking international studies. ‘I always thought I would grow up, get a great job and travel the world. That’s how I imagined my life playing out,’ she says. A lecture threw that dream into sharp relief by describing how our warmed world might look by the end of the century, with refugees rather than gap-year backpackers on the move, forced from their scorched homelands by desertification and sea level rise. ‘It was something in the way that the lecturer explained it,’ says Macpherson-Rice, ‘or maybe I was just ready to hear it, but it clicked: We’ve been lied to. Our future is not secure. It will most likely be characterised by climate disaster, worsening social problems and more extreme weather.’
She switched courses to study environmental humanities at the University of New South Wales, only to find the institution had investments tied up in the fossil-fuel industry. ‘It was during Orientation Week; I got chatting to these kids from Fossil Free UNSW. I was horrified.’ She signed up and was soon made campaign co-ordinator.
Elizabeth Morley was acutely aware of the environment as a child growing up during Australia’s Millennium Drought. The nightly news told of farmer suicides and reservoirs drying up. ‘I was obsessed with saving water,’ she says. ‘I worried that the country would run out and we’d all die.’3 She was still in primary school when she watched An Inconvenient Truth. ‘I was very upset by it. I thought the world was going to end, but in high school I kind of forgot. Everything around me seemed fine.’
As it does right now in Sydney’s leafy Glebe. Pop songs play on the radio; the weather has broken after a four-day hot spell, and there’s a pleasant breeze. Across the street, a handsome man walks a lolloping orange-haired dog. Next door, the bookstore brims with browsers. You’d never know to look at it that this is our dangerously warming world.
The teenaged Morley figured there was nothing to see here ‘around the time that the carbon tax was being introduced in Australia. I felt like the government was acting and scientists were being listened to; that they had this thing under control.’ But just as Jayna Zweiman did with feminism, Morley had a wake-up call. One minute you’re just a kid, happily trusting that the old people are acting responsibly; the next, you grow up. Fast.
Carbon pricing was introduced in 2011 with the Gillard Labor government’s Clean Energy Act, but repealed in 2014 by Tony Abbott (the Liberal–National Coalition accepted at least $1.8 million in direct donations from mining and energy companies that year). Australia did sign the Paris Agreement, committing ‘to taking strong domestic and international action on climate change’ and reducing emissions, but guess what happened the following year? Emissions rose.
I ask Morley if she was paying attention to politics again when the carbon tax was killed, and she says, ‘Of course,’ and I ask her how she felt, and she says, ‘Angry. The injustice really got to me. They knew it would lead to where we are today, the path was clearly set, but they decided to keep going because it made them richer.’ I ask her who she means by ‘they’ and she says, ‘Our politicians, on both sides, who do not act in our best interest, but profit at our expense; and the fossil-fuel industry, and everyone who gets paid by them.’
The year of the Paris Agreement was also the year Morley read This Changes Everything. She was in her second year at UNSW, majoring in Japanese. ‘Naomi Klein’s book was the big turning point for me in my adult life; like, god, our future is not secure. Our lives are not going to be like our parents’ lives were. I can’t have these assumptions that we’ll grow old in a world that’s safe and familiar to us, like previous generations did.’ She, too, switched courses (to environmental humanities and economics) and now talks about the urgent need ‘to dismantle the power dynamics that exist in perpetuating the use of fossil fuels’. All she needs is a beret. Don’t get the wrong impression; these women aren’t dangerous revolutionaries. They are mild-mannered, open, friendly and considered. Diligent students. When contemplating arrest as they planned their 36-hour occupation of UNSW’s council chamber in 2016, they were confident that their exemplary academic records would work in their favour should the police be called in. ‘We are the kids who get good grades,’ says Morley.
Macpherson-Rice: ‘On most people’s inbuilt crim-scoping radar, I score a “more-likely-to-get-mugged-than-break-the-law”. Let’s be frank—I’m a bit of a nerd.’4
The sit-in was a last resort. They’d tried asking nicely. Their requests for meetings with the Vice Chancellor were repeatedly knocked back, even after they’d surveyed 1300 students and found that 78 per cent supported divestment. ‘We got nowhere,’ says Macpherson-Rice. ‘So we collected signatures for an open letter. We got staff and academics on board. We presented it to the Vice Chancellor, but within a couple of weeks he’d made his response.’ It was no. ‘We finally decided to take the route of the “hard” tactic,’ says Morley. ‘Direct action.’
The sit-in was part of a national day of student climate action. In Victoria, arts major Aoife Nicklason was one of nine students who clambered, naked, onto the roof of the University of Melbourne’s storied Old Quad building, with a message painted on their bums: ‘Drop your assets.’ They guessed right that ‘the internet’s obsession with butts (thanks for that one, Kimmy K)’ should guarantee news coverage.5 Most memorable headline? ‘Melbourne University students get high, naked.’ Nicklason wrote for a student news site, ‘For our voices to reach as many people as possible, our activism must be as diverse as possible. So write a letter to the editor, tweet about it, make a YouTube video, talk to your mum, do some performance art.’
Beware, though: mums don’t always understand. One Mother’s Day, Macpherson-Rice did not get home for lunch. Instead, she put her war paint on—a red cross on each cheek—climbed into a white hazmat suit and joined a blockade of the Sandgate Bridge on the Newcastle coal rail line. The protestors sang and ate hummus as the police removed them one by one, charging them with trespassing. That same day, a flotilla of several hundred activists in kayaks blockaded Newcastle harbour. The chant? ‘We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!’
I ask Macpherson-Rice if her parents were mad at her for getting arrested. ‘Mum was just really worried about my future,’ she says. ‘I get it, but … ’
‘This is more important?’
She shifts in her seat and moves her elbow onto the table, revealing the birthmark ‘355’ on her outer wrist. She sees me see it, and smiles. ‘We used data from Tasmania so it’s a bit different from other people’s.’
Parts per million recordings began in the southern hemisphere at Cape Grim on the north-western tip of Tasmania in 1976, the year I was born. If I were the tattoo type, my ink would read ‘329’. Measurements are always slightly lower here than in the northern hemisphere, because there is less land mass (hence less population and industrial activity), and the ocean—a carbon sink—covers a larger area. ‘The tattoo means a lot to me,’ says Macpherson-Rice. ‘It’s a reminder, a constant one, and also a conversation starter.’
‘I remember you saying you got it on that side of your arm so you’re not always having to look at it; otherwise you can’t escape it,’ says Morley.
‘Yeah but mostly it’s so other people see it. My cousin was like, “What that’s about?” and when I explained, he said, “What’s the ppm thing now?” So I told him, “Now it’s 403. Time is running out.”’
A few months on, as I put the finishing touches to this book, the levels have crept above 404. Take a look after you’ve read this. You can download the data from the Cape Grim CSIRO website. The trend, you will see, is clear: the only way is up.
‘Welcome to the O,’ says a bright kid in cut-off denims, a red T-shirt and Perspex ‘Stop Adani’ earrings. These slogan accessories are a hot trend—the designer was commissioned to make them by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC). I’ve seen eight pairs already today.
There are more than a thousand of us here this morning. As the organisers round up stragglers, we get into formation, laughing and talking as we spell out the letters: S-T-O-P-A-D-A-N-I to make a human sign. The mood is good-natured and fun. Two guys have dressed up as Malcolm Turnbull and Gautam Adani carrying bags of money, but there are also folks in sea-creature costumes. One woman has come as a giant prawn. White foam laps yellow sand on the iconic Bondi Beach, as the ocean stretches beyond—it’s the perfect front-page picture. A drone buzzes overhead as we break into a chant, ‘Stop Adani! Stop, stop Adani.’
Over sixty community events are happening across Australia, including human signs on beaches at the Gold Coast, Noosa and Cottesloe. It’s all over social media. As May Boeve told me, the emphasis on visuals really works. ‘The other side is always going to have more money than us, but we have creativity and the human spirit,’ she said. ‘The way that you depict that visually is very significant.’
In Bondi, speeches begin, but there’s a problem with the sound system and half the crowd slips away, although not before I ask a couple of old-timers why they came. Turns out they’ve been involved with Greenpeace since forever. The Stop Adani Alliance unites thirty-seven organisations, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, 350.org, GetUp!, 1 Million Women and the AYCC. My new Greenpeace friends echo Bob Brown’s assertion that ‘in forty years’ time, people will be talking about the campaign to stop Adani like they now talk about the Franklin. “Where were you and what did you do?” they will ask.’6
The campaign to protect the Franklin River in south-west Tasmania made Bob Brown’s name. He was working as a GP in Launceston in the early ’70s when he fell in love with the state’s majestic landscapes, buying a bush property in the Liffey Valley. In 1976, he rafted the Franklin, dubbed the ‘last wild river’, and was smitten by its pristine beauty. That same year, he and some friends got together in his kitchen and formed the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. The membership fee was $2.7 Their first campaign was to try to stop a concrete bridge being built over another river, the Picton (they lost). When plans were announced to dam the Gordon River right below the Franklin, they were ropeable.
Australia was one of the first countries to sign the World Heritage Convention, and in 1981 World Heritage status was granted to the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and the Willandra Lakes Region. The Tasmanian Wilderness was now proposed, but powerful forces opposed adding this vast area of old-growth forests, ancient caves, rivers and gorges to the list—there was money to be made.
The state-owned Hydro-Electric Commission planned to dam the Gordon River for a power plant, which would have drowned 30 kilometres of the Franklin and surrounding temperate rainforests. The environmentalists had seen it all before when damming flooded Lake Pedder. Plenty of locals were up for this new scheme, persuaded by the promise of job creation, but the Wilderness Society argued that as one of the last remaining waterways ‘not marked by the hand of modern man’,8 the Franklin must be preserved. Recalls Brown: ‘It seemed hopeless. We had the three newspapers in Tasmania, the unions, except for the ETU [Electrical Trade Union], the business sector, both houses of Parliament, both political parties, all in the favour of the dam. We came to Canberra and the then Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser, said it was a state matter. We had one effort in the High Court, we tried to argue that the Commonwealth should not be lending money to Tasmania to damage a potential World Heritage area, [but] that … got short shrift.’9
Colour television helped push the issue into public consciousness across Australia (the campaign to save Lake Pedder had been waged in black and white). Footage of the area’s extraordinary beauty captured hearts and minds; what civilised society would willingly trash this? ‘Flooding the Franklin would be like putting a scratch across the Mona Lisa,’ said Brown. In June 1980, an estimated 10,000 protestors marched through Hobart. As if to prove this was no hippie rabble, Brown marched in a suit and tie.
Another founding Wilderness Society member, the caver Kevin Kiernan, had been busy rediscovering Aboriginal caves in the lower Franklin. In March 1981, wallaby bone fragments and Aboriginal butchering tools dating from the Pleistocene were found at the Kutikina Cave site. It made headline news. Members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community told a Senate inquiry that they and the river and the caves were one: ‘Their destruction represents a part destruction of us.’10 The dam issue became so divisive that the Tasmanian government called a referendum. On 12 December 1981, voters were given a choice of two different dam-scheme options, but no option to object outright. More than 30 per cent wrote ‘No Dams’ across their ballot papers, resulting in the toppling of the premier.
As far as I know, no one made earrings featuring the distinctive yellow triangle of the ‘No Dams’ logo, but there’s a sticker in the collection of the National Museum of Australia. Craftivists sewed banners with it. But while the debate raged, the bulldozers moved in. By the time UNESCO granted the Tasmanian Wilderness its World Heritage status, construction on the dam had already begun.
In response, the blockade kicked off in December 1982. According to the Wilderness Society, 6000 people registered to take part. About 1400 were arrested, and nearly 500 jailed. Brown was one of them. On his release from Risdon Prison in January, he was elected to the Tasmanian Parliament as the MP for Denison.
The federal election happened in March. In the run-up, the ‘National South-West Coalition including Tasmanian Wilderness Society and Australian Conservation Foundation’ took out a full-page ad in Fairfax newspapers. ‘Authorised by Dr Robert Brown, Parliament House, Hobart’, it featured Peter Dombrovskis’s photograph Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River with the caption, ‘Would you vote for a party that would destroy this?’ The answer was no. Bob Hawke’s incoming Labor government passed the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983, which along with amendments to the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1975, outlawed clearing and excavation in the area. The dam was finished.
‘Those who say the [Adani] mine can’t be stopped have forgotten the unbeatable power of the majority of people standing up for what they believe in,’ says Brown.11 Most Australians don’t support the Adani mine or public money being spent on it.12 The AYCC helped persuade Australia’s biggest four banks not to fund the project, with volunteers postering Westpac ATMs under cover of darkness with altered options. ‘Select an amount or enter another amount then press okay,’ became, ‘Fund Adani’s dangerous mine near the Great Barrier Reef? or Protect our climate and rule out the Adani coal mine?’
Inevitably some went further and, as Brown did in the ’80s, risked their liberty for the cause. In January 2018, five Frontline Action on Coal activists blockaded the Adani-owned Abbot Point Terminal, shutting it down for eight hours. A Queensland police chief spoke darkly of the possibility of a vigilante response.13 These protestors—city blow-ins, spoiled students—were threating the jobs of Aussie battlers. Was it 1464 or 10,000 jobs? No one knew. But as the tabloids beat up fears of unemployment among locals already suffering from the effects of a recent cyclone, the true story of Adani’s supposed job-creation plans emerged. They would use driverless trucks, and ‘everything will be autonomous [automated] from mine to port.’14 As Adani’s hand-picked economist Jerome Fahrer told the Queensland Land Court, ‘It’s not many jobs. We can agree on that.’15
The Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council represents the traditional owners of the Galilee Basin. They say the mine would ‘tear the heart out of the land’ and its scale 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’.16
Bleary-eyed at 6 a.m., I climb onto a bus to go camping with strangers. Among us are a couple of young activists, a beautiful French girl, a stand-offish filmmaker, two mums with grown-up kids and a corporate lawyer. An older couple is planning a posh cruise to Malta after this. Why did they come? They are worried about their grandchildren’s future, they tell me. ‘We want to see for ourselves what sort of state we’re leaving the place in.’ At the front of the bus sits a Knitting Nanna, proudly sporting her ‘Viva La Nannalution!’ T-shirt. She and her friend sing in an eco-choir, performing original songs with names like ‘Green Like Me’ and ‘Machines Are Closing In’.
We are taking Lock the Gate’s two-day ‘Hunter Valley vs Coal’ tour. Our destination is a picturesque winegrowing region of New South Wales, home of the romantic mini-break. Slick Sydney couples nip off here for dirty weekends, seduced by the promise of a deluxe spa-bath suite with views over ‘wonderfully verdant rolling countryside’. Providing they face the right direction.
What the tourism blurbs do not disclose is that Nature is under attack in these parts. Multinational mining corporations have transformed large tracts of it into a toxic dust bowl where nothing green grows. Once they’re done, in say twenty or thirty years, these companies can get away with leaving what they call the ‘final voids’, which can stretch several kilometres across and hundreds of metres down. There are forty-five of them approved or planned for New South Wales; added together, they have a bigger surface area than Sydney Harbour. In all the talk of the jobs mining may or may not create, there is little discussion of the long-term future—where will people work when all that’s left is these gaping wounds? Here? Not likely.
It has been suggested that the voids might one day be turned into jolly tourist lakes,17 but that’s wishful thinking. In the case of the enormous Warkworth mine next to the embattled village of Bulga, the pit lake would take 800 years to reach equilibrium (when the water levels are stable).18 Other lakes should stabilise more quickly: in fifty years over at Liddell, and 300 years at Maules Creek on the Liverpool Plains, where more than 250 people have been arrested for trying to protect the surrounding Leard State Forest since the mine was approved. However long they take to form, pit lakes will be salty and laden with heavy metals. Around their shores, the mountains of dumped overburden make landslips likely. It’s hard to imagine how these places can fail to become dangerous no-go zones. How all this will affect the groundwater is unknown, but here’s something we can be sure of: the reason the mining giants are in no hurry to restore this land to the state in which they found it is money.
In the United States, mining companies have been required by law since the 1970s to backfill final voids, and this is factored into a mine’s initial approval. That is not the case in Australia. Here, mining companies routinely revise their plans after approval, and it is easier to argue that unforeseen costs make backfill untenable, or that they might come back and dig a bit more in the future.19 Marketing materials try to put a pleasant spin on it. One company even suggests we might look on these unholy holes as ‘benefits’—they could become wildlife conservation areas! It’s all bullshit except the bit about the impracticality of ‘significant cost implications’. When the easily accessible coal runs out, and a mine is no longer commercially viable, it’s standard practice not to fill the voids. If no one’s making you and this ain’t your backyard, why bother? Just pack up and go home.
I’ve read about open-cut coalmining, but up close, it’s chilling to witness so vast a killed field. Those who believe in good and evil might see the devil himself in these desolate expanses of wasteland, which were once green valleys, thriving communities and bushland. On windy days, dust turns the sky grey. The haze is easily mistaken for smoke, and on more than one occasion emergency services have been called out to a fire that doesn’t exist. In one month alone, there were seventy-two poor–air quality alerts for the Hunter Valley. Meanwhile, blast plumes from the mines contain toxic oxides of nitrogen, which give them an orange tinge. These plumes sometimes travel several kilometres before dispersing. Low-level exposure can cause eye and airway irritation, but breathing this stuff in at high levels can result in a build-up of fluid in the lungs, and even death.
The racket adds another dimension to the stress of living here. Former teacher AnneMaree McLaughlin lives in Bulga and wears ear plugs to bed to reduce the noise from the Warkworth mine next door, where bulldozers, dump trucks, draglines and excavators move rock and earth ‘all day [and] all night’.20 Recently, she joined a ‘protest orchestra’ outside the EPA’s Newcastle office. Her neighbour George Tlaskal brought his chainsaw (leaving the blade at home) while others rattled cowbells and yelled through megaphones to give the bureaucrats inside a taste of what it’s like to deal with an uncontrollable din.
Neighbourhood getting you down? Move. The mine owners would prefer it, and typically help some on their way by throwing money. In the beginning, the owners of strategically placed properties can clean up, providing they sign a gag clause. Life gets trickier for those who hold out, or live in properties the mine doesn’t desire.
Mark McAlpin’s family settled in Bulga in the 1840s. His ancestor’s picture is up on the wall of the Bulga community hall, our first stop on the bus tour. McAlpin loves where he lives, but it’s breaking his heart. ‘I can’t sell my property, not that I want to, because it’s worthless now,’ he tells me. ‘What can I do? We’re in a state of limbo, with everything decaying around us, including my mental health.’
AnneMaree McLaughlin smiles as she hands me a plate of plump scones, but the set of her shoulders speaks of a deep weariness. The mining company has bought the local pub and is trying to close a public road. Rumour has it they’re in talks to buy the service station. What’s up for sale next? The sky? I ask her about the stress, and she admits it gets to people, then visibly straightens and says, ‘Look, we’re not going to lie down and take it. You don’t just go gentle into the night; you’ve got to stand up, because it’s unjust.’
One by one, members of the community head to the front of the hall and tell their stories. ‘We had a ministerial deed of agreement which says this area [Saddle Ridge, which shields the village of Bulga from Warkworth] shall never be mined,’ explains John Krey, who heads up the Bulga Milbrodale Progress Association. ‘Well, the government set about, over a period of two years, changing all the rules.’
This has long been mining country. The first coal was exported from the Hunter in 1799. What’s different in the era of extreme extraction is the scale. Warkworth and neighbouring Mount Thorley have been mined since the 1980s. They were merged into a single operation in 2004, when approvals were granted to Rio Tinto for a major expansion. Around the same time, the federal government announced a massive expansion of the Hunter Valley Coal Chain infrastructure.
George Tlaskal spent two decades working for mining companies as a research scientist, and he and his family moved to Bulga in 1987, but by the time he came to write a submission to the NSW Planning Assessment Commission (PAC) about yet another proposed expansion of Warkworth in 2014, things had gotten out of hand: ‘Until recently, we had coexisted with the mines reasonably well … In 2003 [the mine] was about 8 km away and we were protected from their noise and dust by the natural formations of the Saddle Ridge and by the Warkworth Sands Woodlands conservation area … in perpetuity.’21 So they believed. The rare woodland, which grows on ancient aeolian sands, is a wildlife corridor and refuge for migratory birds. Its stands of rough-barked apple and coastal banksia trees are listed as a critically endangered ecological community. But the law, as it turns out, can be sculpted and changed by those who apply enough pressure.
‘Five years ago world coal prices nearly quadrupled and Rio Tinto doubled the rate of production [at Mount Thorley Warkworth] to make the best of it,’ writes Tlaskal.22 ‘[An] area that was planned in 2003 to last to 2021 was mined almost entirely in half the time.’ So Rio Tinto applied to extend the mine to within 2.6 kilometres of Bulga. The PAC granted permission, but residents challenged the decision in the NSW Land and Environment Court, and won. The judge ruled that ‘The Project’s impacts would exacerbate the loss of sense of place, and materially and adversely change the sense of community, of the residents of Bulga and the surrounding countryside.’ Sorry. No mine extension.
Rio Tinto appealed in the Supreme Court, but there too the judge came down in favour of the Bulga community. There was no room to move until the government changed the law to make it a legal requirement for all approval authorities to prioritise development of ‘significant resources’ of coal over other considerations. Rio Tinto was permitted to extend the mine. Tlaskal had long suspected they were ‘trying to get out of coalmining in the Hunter since it is no longer profitable’ and that the expansions were ‘supposed to make the sale of the mine easier’.23 Sure enough, in June 2017, Rio Tinto flogged its subsidiary Coal & Allied, which controlled the Mount Thorley Warkworth mine, to the Chinese company Yancoal for US$2.69 billion. They didn’t even want it after all that.
The PAC has approved a new plan for the Warkworth Sands Woodlands. The mining companies are to be allowed to destroy bits of it, providing they attempt to restore them elsewhere. Most everyone agrees this very old, established woodland cannot be regenerated in a different place. So it’s goodbye to the speckled warblers and vulnerable squirrel gliders who call it home. It’s farewell to the critically endangered regent honeyeater. Things aren’t looking too good for the endangered swift parrot in these parts either. The large-eared pied bat, the brown treecreeper, the grey-crowned babbler? Might be time to move house. Perhaps time is also running out for the increasingly rare Bulga fighter. Tell me: in their position, would you not leave if you could?
In the community hall, Uncle Kevin Taggart, a Wonnarua elder who lives in nearby Broke, takes the stage. ‘In my opinion, it’s environmental terrorism,’ says the 67-year-old. He has lived in this area all his life. Eighteen months ago, he and his sister Pat Hansson, a gardener, were forcibly arrested for protesting the expansion of Warkworth. Were they threatening violence or damage to property, perhaps? Nope. They were sitting with a few old mates in fold-out chairs boiling billy tea on the side of a public road. A couple of mine managers turned up, told them they were in a ‘blast exclusion zone’ and asked the group to move along. When the tea-drinkers refused, the miners called the police. The white fellas were given a telling off, but five officers dragged Taggart up and cuffed him. Pat says she went into a fit from the stress of it. The siblings were charged with disobeying police direction and resisting arrest. In court, the magistrate acquitted them, saying it was ‘remarkable’ that police became involved.24 But was it? When you consider that Taggart has been outspoken against the mine for the past several years? It does not do to make a fuss, does it? Find yourself on some sort of list, I’ll wager. The mining giants know exactly which mosquitoes are irritating them.
We are seeing extraordinary new laws being introduced in Australia that erode our civil rights to object to injustice. In 2014 Tasmania criminalised peaceful protest that might hinder access to business or disrupt commercial operations. When Bob Brown fell foul of the new laws, he challenged them in the High Court and won, but while that decision was pending, New South Wales introduced its own new measures. In 2016 Mike Baird’s government jacked up the fines protestors could incur by trespassing on mine sites, while reducing what those mining companies must pay for operational misconduct: their ceiling used to be $1.1 million; now it’s five grand—less than the upper limit for fines incurred by individual protestors. The bill expands the definition of ‘a mine’ to include gas and gas-exploration sites. Its potential impacts on Lock the Gate are clear. If the government sells a licence to explore on your land in New South Wales, and you don’t welcome the cur in for a cuppa, you could face up to seven years in jail. Baird’s message was clear: your democratic right to disagree with him was subject to conditions. At the time of writing, his successor Gladys Berejiklian has done nothing to suggest she feels differently.
‘Me and Pat were brought up the Aboriginal way, to look after the land, to respect it,’ says Uncle Kevin Taggart. ‘And look what’s happened, just look what’s happened.’ The carp are gone from Cockfighter Creek,25 the air is polluted, the woodlands and road are threatened. Before he passed away, Taggart’s father asked his kids to look after the land the way their ancestors did. ‘We’ve all got to get together and speak out,’ says Taggart. ‘I wouldn’t be up here speaking [if I had a choice]; I’m nervous, but I’m trying my best for this country.’
When Hansson takes the mic, she is composed and delivers a practised speech. ‘What we are experiencing in this area is very confronting, heartbreaking … I believe I have a spirit sickness. Our once beautiful country as I knew it growing up has been destroyed by coalmining.’ Doing nothing, she says, ‘is not an option.’
The Lock the Gate Alliance is a grass roots Australian organisation linking local groups that are fighting ‘inappropriate’ mining projects in their communities. It includes the Hunter Valley Protection Alliance, Friends of the Earth and loads of Knitting Nannas chapters, as well as local conservation societies, environment centres and even slow-food and farmers’ market groups. Founded in 2010 to fight coal seam gas in Queensland and the ‘super mines’ in New South Wales, it is also active in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, where fracking is the enemy.
Lock the Gate brings together the sorts of people who don’t normally share a beer: farmers, tree-changers, country shopkeepers and Indigenous elders are working with career conservationists, greenies, inner-city activists and even the talkback-radio menace Alan Jones. The latter might think climate change is ‘a hoax’ and have opposed the carbon tax, but he grew up on a Queensland dairy farm and bristles against this ‘mining invasion’ of his home turf.26
The man behind Lock the Gate was Drew Hutton, a seasoned campaigner who, over a fifty-year career, ‘sat on a thousand picket lines, handed out probably a couple of million leaflets and knocked on tens of thousands of doors.’27 Although he retired in 2017, the organisation still bears his distinctive signature.
Hutton’s activism was forged in ultra-conservative Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen era, starting with the anti–Vietnam War protests—the biggest march in Brisbane happened in 1967 when 4000 students marched from the University of Queensland into the city without a permit, prompting a crackdown. Long-haired layabouts making trouble were just the excuse the Premier needed to introduce draconian measures designed to boost his image as a strongman.
In 1971 there were protests against racism in Sydney and Melbourne when the all-white South African rugby team toured, which led to the first real organising contact between the young, white Left and Aboriginal activists. With the Springboks due in Brisbane, Joh Bjelke-Petersen over-reacted big-time. He introduced a state of emergency, busing in 450 extra police officers from rural areas. Some of these country coppers went on a rampage, chasing, pushing and kicking protesters under cover of darkness in scenes you have to see to believe. (And see them you can: check out the footage on YouTube; it’s hard to believe this is Australia not some fascist dictatorship.) Bjelke-Petersen said it was ‘great fun’ and ‘put him on the map’. Hutton, then a 24-year-old teacher, was appalled. He joined a revolutionary organisation called the Self-Management Group (SMG) and set about trying to design a more socially just society. The SMG was obscure. No one much was listening, although Hutton did once chain himself to a tree in the Queen Street Mall to protest Bjelke-Petersen’s lack of respect for free speech.
In 1984 Hutton formed the Brisbane Greens from the ashes of the SMG, and eight years later joined Bob Brown and others in co-founding the national Australian Greens. Hutton stood for state government many times but never won a seat. Queensland wasn’t ready for him. Until it was.
Tenacious, absurdly thick-skinned and driven by conviction, Hutton was just the guy to drum up support for Lock the Gate by knocking on doors, many of which, initially, were slammed in his face. ‘Most farmers are patriotic, law-abiding, polite; they’re respectable, everything I’m not,’ he told Australian Story. ‘They blamed me for the tree-clearing laws, [and] in terms of being a greenie, I was number one.’28 But there’s nothing like a common enemy to unite people.
Bev Smiles, sixty-three, enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the first people to be prosecuted under Baird’s anti-protest laws. Worst-case scenario, she’ll be seventy when she gets out of jail for attempting to protect her village from total annihilation by big coal. But Smiles, with her story-book name and kindly country nanna’s face, is a sophisticated operator. ‘I’m the radical ratbag they all suspected me of being. This is a test case on this draconian new law.’29
At 5 a.m. on a cool April morning in 2017, Smiles, Bruce Hughes and Stephanie Luce approached the Wilpinjong mine entrance. They’d brought their banners—‘Enough is enough’, ‘Save Wollar’—and it was turnover time; the workers employed by the mine’s owner, American giant Peabody Energy, would be swapping shifts.
The Missouri-based company controls nine mines in Australia, and in 2016 sold 187.8 million tons of coal, raking in US$4.7 billion—despite having filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States that year. Its website displays pictures of happy women on serene green backgrounds, and claims that Peabody is a ‘leading voice in advocating for sustainable mining’. Happy women are a good sell. Angry Bev, not so much.
A former state Greens candidate, Smiles campaigned against the expansion of the Yancoal-owned Ashton mine at nearby Camberwell. When Peabody applied to extend Wilpinjong to within 1.5 kilometres of her home in Wollar, she was indignant. She’d had enough of watching her neighbours bullied into moving away, or left with stranded assets and no compensation. When the PAC approved the extension, she got arrested on purpose. ‘My message is: “You can put me in jail. Do what you want.” I’m prepared to go to jail over this because what else is there left for me to do? Facts and evidence mean nothing in the way these things are dealt with. I’m happy to be a martyr to the cause.’
I wake at the crack with a stiff neck from a night spent on the floor of the Wollar Memorial Hall. I creep out leaving the few other tent-less campers to their slumbers. Outside, the air is crisp and the sun slants through the gums, turning their leaves golden. At the end of the road, the police are waiting. Doubtless, I fit their profile of a threat: like Bev Smiles, I am a woman. And I’m carrying dangerously hot opinions and coffee. Their vehicle blocks the road as I approach.
‘Lovely morning!’ I call. ‘Isn’t it?’
One of them looks sheepish as he mumbles, ‘G’day.’ The other stares me down, mute. I turn into Armstrong Street, where there’s no one home. An eerie silence hangs over the empty houses and school. It’s a ghost town. Of the 115-odd homes here, four remain occupied. The police follow me for a bit, then seem to give up and head off in the other direction. A yellow road sign reads, ‘Expect the unexpected.’
Looping back around towards our camp ground, I see the police again. They turn into the road to meet me, and we edge slowly closer together. I give them a wave. I still haven’t seen another human soul. I pass more sad, boarded-up houses, then I hear a radio—there’s someone here after all. Colin Faulkner sits in his front yard reading a novel. Sometimes, of a morning, he hears rocks being dropped into the dump trucks, but today is Sunday and it’s peaceful. The cops inch past us and we smile conspiratorially. A soft breeze nudges the sign on Faulkner’s gate post back and forth. It reads, ‘This is mine, not the mine’s.’
On 5 June 2018, the case against Smiles was dismissed on technicalities. ‘Justice prevailed for us today,’ she said, but the magistrate told the court he did not need to consider the protest rights issue in making his decision. It remains untested.