Well
before dawn’s first gloamingI awoke, sprawled
with head and shoulders propped against the back seat of a little old hatchback,
torso and legs stretched out in the gap between the scissored front seats.
I
could hardly breathe, gasping for breath, a landed fish on a beach of dreams,
stranded amid bucket seat flotsam and road trip jetsam, twisted inside a scrum
of blankets deflecting the cold night air that poured down through the open
windows. The atmosphere seemed thin, devoid of oxygen, and not enough of it was
making it past my windpipe.
Such
things are scarcely surprising to an invalid. Sometimes, when the rainy season
has filled my rainforest home with off-the-chart humidity that induces phosphorescent
fungi to sprout abundantly and the air is translucent with rare, unclassified
moulds, breathing can become a conscious effort. But this was something else,
like the full-blown asthma attacks I’d often seen in others but never
experienced personally; like breathing underwater through a narrowing straw.
And I was far, far from the rainforest.
A
hideously noxious odour assailed my flaring nostrils and a cogent thought
emerged from the fading dreamscape of bravely desperate tenement dwellers on
the edge of a tumbledown town in far-off Argentina; Someone vomited in the car?
As
my eyes opened on nothing but darkness, astral images of steep narrow laneways
and cobbled together hovels drifted behind a tenuous membrane of forgetfulness.
The smell was so strong, so bad and intrusive it distracted me from my perilous
breathing. Who could have vomited in the
car?
While
I heaved air into my chest with tremendous effort, waking mind circled,
expanding in ripples that brought some kind of local reality into clearer
focus. The most likely source of this olfactory malaise seemed to be the young
son of my co-conspirator Alius. The boy is bright and wonderfully engaged with
the world, along for this ride through dry western country halfway to the fabled
Never Never - but the eight year old certainly wasn’t in the vehicle. He was
happily ensconced in a caravan with his father a hundred paces away. And still I
couldn’t breathe!
Maybe,
if I could get away from whatever was making this terrible smell, breath would
come more easily. I popped the rear door and leaned into the darkness, but the
flatulent, crapulent odour pursued me so I swung my legs into the back and onto
bare dusty ground, pulled up my jeans and gasped for air.
When
my body stepped away from the vehicle I felt dry dust well up between my toes
and recalled that the car was parked in a huge steel shed with an open side. No
wonder it was so dark! Yet the toxic,
vomitous, bilious smell was everywhere. It came from all around me, denying all
breath. I stepped out of the shed but the night was still black as the
proverbial cat in a coal mine and breath came no easier. The moon had set and a
sheet of clouds concealed the stars, a mist that descended to the flat dry
ground. And then I realised – the smell was coming from the mist. With the mist.
It
was a smell that belonged deep in the earth, far from the lungs of human beings
or any surface dweller on this good green planet. The terrible smell and the
lack of air were harbingers of the disaster unfolding all around us in the
darkness.
Now
I recognised that odour. I’d smelled it before, in disused basements, antiquated
fireplaces and school excursions to steel mills and ports as a child. It was
the same smell that pervaded the ruined old gasworks we’d climbed through
ripped fencing to play in as children, so long ago on the northerly shore of
Sydney Harbour. It was the smell of fossilised death.
This
was the stink of coal – or more precisely, a coal mine. Coal dust was pouring
down from the sky with the morning dew, seeping into and condensing onto
anything and everything, including my struggling lungs. Yet the mine was miles away!
Now
that I knew what the formaldehyde stink was, I felt far more calm. There was
nowhere to go to escape it, no easy way to flee. It was thoroughly pervasive. I
sat on the dirt in the starless void, ignored the smell and practiced
breathing, a primordial lungfish bent on survival in a hostile new world - opening
my airways with full, deep breaths drawn all the way from the base of my belly,
expanding my diaphragm and chest ’til my sternum popped. I practiced
life-saving yoga and awaited the coming dawn.
By
the time the Sun pinked the eastern sky with a pale pastel palette I could
breathe quite easily; almost normally. The smell had faded into the world, my
skin, my blood and tissues until I could hardly smell it at all. In a few days
I wouldn’t even notice it, consciously - just like the locals who live with it
every day for miles and miles all around, on every side of the forest that has
become a deep, dark pit in the once fertile land.
An
entire, ancient, irreplaceable living forest has been clear-felled - now, in
this enlightened New Millennium-bulldozed
and burnt and dug up and destroyed, root and branch, erasure way and beyond scorched
earth and salted soil, all gone, for a transient coal mine on what remains of
Australian soil. The critically endangered White box eucalypt habitat that once
existed here is endangered no more. It’s gone. The state government declared it
‘unendangered’ before bulldozing it. The koala colony that had somehow survived
in this island of forest surrounded by sunblasted scrub and dry scorched plains
was also bulldozed into the ground. Now there will probably be no koalas left
in the entire region.
That’s
progress, as many who profit from this ecocide still claim in the distant
warrens of toxic cities. ‘Coal is good for the planet’, our now disgraced
former Prime Monster assures us.
And
in defence of this obscenity our cherished freedoms have been erased overnight.
Anyone who seriously objects to their crimes is now officially an ecoterrorist.
Protest is illegal. Now we can be
jailed for years for trying to prevent this destruction. Suddenly, the police
have the ability to prevent anyone they deem unfit to avoid public places and
property. They can conduct warrantless searches and seizures of anything that may conceivably be used in
a protest. We now inhabit a full-blown Police State. In this State, here, now,
these laws have been passed specifically to forestall successful protests by Lock The Gate farmers and green
environmentalists against coal seam gas drilling – and coal mining – here in
the distant Pilliga.
We
should have known what was to come when the newly elected government abolished its Environment and Water
Resource departments on gaining office. The intrusion of well bribed plutocrats
has rendered the entirety of New South Wales a police state, and all of the filthy
coal is going to the biggest police state of all - China.
Once
upon a time democratic nations refused to trade with undemocratic totalitarian regimes.
Our grandparents knew better than to enrich and encourage bastards whose human
rights records are among the worst on the planet. Now we welcome their cash
with open wallets and become just like them in a rush to the trough and a race
to the bottom; the real meaning and result of ‘globalisation’.
Coal
is one of the main pollutants of land and sea. Burnt coal is the reason the
fish in our oceans are so full of mercury they’re unsafe to eat. It’s one of
the main causes for the incredible heat waves and climate instability that’s
slowly rendering our lives unliveable. It’s death incarnate, fossilised forests
dug up for outmoded, smelly, poisonous fuel by heartless, brainless fossil
fools.
And
the treadmill-bound urban Munchkins of Oz stay glued to screens in their toxic bunker
boxes, mantled in govcorp-bullshitted ignorance, uncaring as long as the circus
rolls on and the poisoned loaves and fishes don’t kill them outright. Worked to
exhaustion, indebted to the eyeballs, strung out on crippling mortgages, shrinking
superannuation and ruinous rents, what chance have they to think, much less protest?
But
I am free and footloose and fully informed, and my wife is away on the other
side of the globe. What excuses have I not
to act, to object, to protest? (A bevy of
incurable conditions that render me weak, feverish and barely functional, an
invalid pensioner, an ossified sack of skin and bones? Bah!) Onward!
This was Leard Forest (until now)
We
drove up from the Pacific coast, the better part of a thousand clicks by
roundabout roads to the Pilliga Scrub in the dry northwest of the state. When
we realised that this was the unlikely epicentre of the political earthquake
that had just demolished our freedoms it seemed the obvious thing to do.
We
wove a path up the Great Divide, the ancient worn mountain range that fringes
the entire east coast of the continent. Half the nation’s population inhabits
that green fertile eastern fringe, and most of the rest live in large cities
and towns strung out at great distances around the circumference of the
continent. Only a hardy relative few inhabit the inland beyond the Divide.
Coming
down the western side of the mountains is a much shorter drive than the route winding
up the tree-covered eastern ridges. Unlikely as it may seem, Australia is, on
average, the highest continent on Earth. High and dry. The Western Plains roll
off into the distance. Much of this unprepossessing pasture and cropland was
once well forested and inhabited by indigenous tribes, but the forests and
people were slaughtered to make way for cattle and sheep by brutish British
colonists over the last two centuries. Nowadays many inland graziers deny the
forests ever existed here, and they’ve ensured little evidence remains to
dispute the fallacious claim. But all around the wide flat pastoral acreages
their ancestors stole, remnants of forests still cover the hills they deign too
hard to clear, giving lie to their specious denials.
But
there’s no point blaming the pioneers of the past – not when 3.2 MILLION
HECTARES of tree cover has been ‘lost’ on the Australian continent in the last
fifteen years alone. Not when one of the world’s richest, best edumacated
nations can’t seem to survive without practicing even worse slash and burn
aggrocultural techniques than those we ridicule the poor of the ‘Third World’
for enacting. Not when one state alone – Queensland – has felled and trashed so
many trees in one year alone that all the nation’s carbon abatement strategies
have come to naught.
Not
when we’re a nation of drunken jugheads ruled by a coterie of expensively tailored
boofheads. Not when it’s done on our
purblind watch.
We
watched for roadkill all the way, but it wasn’t until we arrived in the Pilliga
that we saw our first dead roo by the side of the track. Twenty years ago we’d
have passed dozens, scores, even hundreds of carcasses of kangaroos, possums, lizards,
birds, wombats and wallabies, cats, dogs, foxes and rabbits, but not anymore.
These days there are hardly any dead animals on or beside the road, and that
isn’t because they’ve learned to look before leaping. It isn’t because the
roads are swept and verges cleared more diligently. It’s because there’s hardly
any wildlife left. That simple. We’ve destroyed and poisoned so much habitat
there are hardly any canaries left in the global deforested coal mine.
There
are hardly even any insects smashing their lives out on the windscreen. But of
course, hardly anyone notices anything by its absence, and most people notice
nothing at all of substance. Their hearts and minds, ears and eyes are
thoroughly screened. We drove half the day and most of the night until we
arrived on the leading edge of the Ends of the Earth - drying scrub, dustbowl
farms, desiccated plains leading on and on to the full-blown deserts of central
Australia.
This
is the Liverpool Plains, a major food bowl for the entire nation and the world
beyond. Crops line up in monocultural plenty, stretching across laser-flat
fields to the distant scrub covered hills, drenched in biocides and nightly
baths of coal dust. Only precarious underground aquifers make farming a
realistic proposition out here. Only the subterranean bounty of the Great
Artesian Basin makes any agriculture or any sustainable ‘modern’ life possible
at all further west.
Now
avarice and thoughtless greed have slunk back into Gomerai country (home to
indigenous clans that somehow survived the onslaught of guns, money and desolation)
from far off lands to threaten it all, and we follow in its grimy tracks,
prisoners of our consciences.
Alius
has called ahead, to warn Cliff of our late arrival. Cliff Wallace doesn’t
usually encourage people to turn up on his place after ten at night, and we’re
arriving after three in the morning. But Alius is well acquainted with the tall
rugged farmer, who’s ready for us when our tiny urban commuter finally trundles
down the rough gravelled road that runs past his gate. We turn into the rustic
yard beside his classic wooden farmhouse. Man-high spiralling rolls of dry cut
grass stand sentinel alongside the dusty road.
In
ridgy-didge Aussie style everyone seems to refer to him as ‘Cliffie’, but that
affectionate diminutive can’t detract from the fact that this robust yet
elderly gent is indeed a towering cliff of a man. He greets us with a scarf
wrapped round his neck against the early morning chill, suspiciously eyes
another couple of passing vehicles on the remote stretch of road and invites us
into his kitchen, where an antique woodburner stove emits congenial warmth and
heats water for tea beneath a high tongue-in-groove wooden ceiling.
Cliff
has endured years of struggle to save his land from impending destruction. The
Leard Forest coal pit is only a few kilometres from his door and is slated to
expand all the way into the aquifer he uses to water his crops and stock in the
unforgiving terrain. He regales us with updates and anecdotes from the front
line of global destruction. He sadly shakes his head at the prospect of the
fine young people who’ve travelled so far to help being faced with lengthy jail
terms for their troubles – along with himself and his farming neighbours.
The
entire eastern half of Australia is now a fully functional police state. All
the eastern states have enacted anti-protest laws which are unacceptable in any
democracy. By definition, fascism is government by corporations, thinly veiled
or otherwise, and that is what’s happened to this country over the past few months
and years. Democracy is gasping for breath like a canary in a Chinese coal
mine, along with freedoms of speech, assembly, protest, personal privacy,
sovereignty and, well, me.
The
oldest and most populous state, New South Wales, is run by a COALition of two
parties. Put simply, the ‘Liberal’ Party is a party that serves the interests
of bosses large and small and the well-to-do, and its lesser partner the
‘National’ Party (previously the Country Party of the nation’s vanishing
smallhold farmers) effectively works solely for Big Aggroculture and huge
transnational resource extractors and ‘developers’ – loggers, oil giants,
chemical corpses and miners who dig up resources and ship them off on a
gargantuan scale.
The
Opposition Labor Party has been up against these two affiliated right wing parties
for most of its existence and yet somehow still manages to occasionally take
the reins for a while when the COALition becomes too egregious even for the
tastes of its rusted-on supporters. Yet the once mighty party of the workers
has almost as little time for environmental causes as the other two miscreant parties
that have ganged up on it so successfully for so long.
Both
sides scream ‘JOBS!’ as though work absolves all sins, as though temporary throwaway
jobs can be balanced against the destruction of irreplaceable natural wonders
and national resources. Both cite ‘the economy’ as the ultimate arbiter of
truth, but neither can tell you how to follow this fictive entity’s apparent
dictates without trashing everything that makes life worthwhile. They all think
they live on a throwaway planet.
And
for decades now the biggest corporations have effectively paid NO tax. Every
few years someone trots out the stats, but no-one does anything and they’re
soon forgotten. The truth is that ludicrously corpulent corporations steal
everything they can get away with, leaving the rest of us to pay for and pick
up after them – and they can get away with anything and everything they like,
because they own our ‘governments’ and everyone in them, lock stock and barrel,
offering our elected ‘representatives’ the choice of taking the money or
getting the gun; being bribed or having their sins exposed.
Almost
every man Jack and woman Jill of our representatives in government are bribed,
blackmailed or otherwise coerced by big corporations, and/or so thoroughly
corrupted by power they can’t remember what they’re actually supposed to do or be
any more. They bury whatever vestiges of conscience remain, forget representing
the people who voted for them and follow the party line to hell if necessary.
Hardly
any of them could come up with a real solution to save their lives – or yours. They
allow the population to be drenched with poisons and scammed by mobsters in
clubs and casinos. They jail half the indigenous men in the country and keep
stealing what remains of their land, laughing all the way to the bank with
lifetime pensions and golden handshakes paid for by witless taxpayers. They
allow property developers to get away with murder as they sell out the nation. And
they take bribe after bribe from corporations huge and small without ever being
caught or brought to book by a hopeless, corrupt judiciary.
Politicians
are almost all zombies, half-dead lawyer people with little actual life
experience stumbling through a sleepwalking daze and sleepless nights, and the
few that are still alive and vital won’t last long amidst their ranks. Those
who join to change the system are invariable changed or destroyed by it.
To
quote our sometimes friend the great Benny Zable, famed for wearing his slogans
on a black death grim reaper costume from Times Square to the Pilliga, silently
peering through full-face gas mask on podiums around the world - a living
Masque of the Red Death before the banquet tables of the elite - “There are no jobs on a dead planet”.
Out
here, out of sight, this mine is even allowed to leave the gaping pit where the
Leard Forest once stood wide open – a blot and scar on the landscape forever
after. The government doesn’t even bother to lie about ‘mine remediation’ here.
All the vast expansive expensive mess will be left for taxpayers to clean up –
or more likely not.
Farmers
like Cliff now have nowhere to turn politically, except to the Greens of all
people (ironically, the erstwhile nemesis of the nation’s farmers has become
their only ally). He fills us in on latest developments before we all grab some
shut-eye – and a lungful of coal dust.
So
here we are, at the ends of the Earth, trying to turn back the tide with brave
thoughts, words and deeds as the bedrock of our freedoms crumbles beneath our
feet.
The
main protest camp for defenders of Leard Forest is a few kilometres
down the road from Cliff’s place, but all the activists are away at the coal
mine today. We’re slated to rendezvous with others at another critical location
a hundred miles away – the main camp of the Lock
The Gate movement in the Pilliga, where another resource giant intends to
pump gigalitres of water out of the Great Artesian Basin and frack the fragile
region for coal seam gas.
Lock
The Gate has had huge success further east in the state, where a giant gas
corporation foolishly attempted to frack prime agricultural land in the hippie
heartland of the lush Northern Rivers. The Bentley blockade of farmers and
greens stopped them in their tracks, but this great win for sanity and the
environment put the wind up the desperate dim-witted state government. Now
another foolish giant has the unquestioning backing of the state’s premier
buffoon and all his gormless ministers.
The
drive to the main Pilliga camp passes through amazingly flat sun-blasted
country that may seem dubiously marginal to untrained eyes, but underground
water supplies make it extraordinarily rich in crops and livestock. A few weeks
back a savage bushfire caused the evacuation of the protest camp, and as we
approach we pass through completely black trees, scrub and shrubs. Green shoots
of rebirth cover almost all the vegetation, creating a livid contrast to the
blackened wood and deep red soil. The bush out here is extraordinarily
resilient.
The
fire stopped only a few hundred metres from the campsite. It’s an
extraordinarily well-run operation, redolent of a thoroughly organised army bivouac.
The site is hosted by concerned local landholders, replete with a huge camp
kitchen, stage, media hut, meeting area and sundry other spaces, public and
private, all covered with expansive tarpaulins, powered by solar panels and
surrounded by a small tent city that stretches out beneath scrubby trees. A
staunch core of seasoned protesters and Lock The Gaters keeps everything
together for the larger groups of supporters and protesters that sporadically
arrive for specific protests at the nearby site of corporate destruction.
Sanitation
is carefully observed by everyone – even the independent ‘pirate camp’ of
ferals a short distance upslope. Toddlers play in the shade of the trees,
enjoying the bush, swinging rope, sandpit and other amenities. A true child of
protesters, Alius’ patient, longhaired young son is in his element, right at
home.
The
camp can easily accommodate hundreds, but only a score or so are here when we
arrive. They await reinforcements who’ll arrive the next day for a dawn action
at nearby toxic water holding ponds, where an illegal processing facility is
about to be constructed without as much as an environmental impact statement by
the truculent gas corporation. Acutely aware of the incoming laws, the
protesters are nonetheless ready to be arrested – just like the brave souls who
climb atop a coal train at Leard Forest today, holding up the extraction
process even as we arrive at the Pilliga camp a few horizons distant. (I decide
not to shoot the arrests with my little HD camera; under the current
circumstances there’s no point supplying ammunition that may be used against
the defenders of Gaia in court.)
The
staunch core is always in danger of burning out – not merely being burnt out by
suspicious bushfires, but the even more common burnout factor which applies to
pretty much everyone who has tried to maintain the rage against the machine for
any extended length of time. All remote protest camps are always in dire need
of reinforcements. Your planet needs YOU! If you’re genuinely unable to make it
to a place where activists are putting their lives and freedom on the line for
everyone else, you can always take advantage of crowd funding opportunities –
but make sure the funding goes directly to the camps on the ground and beneath
the canopies, not to distant ‘environmental organisations’ who already have
enough money to pay their CEOs six figure sums.
We
returned to Leard the next day, to witness the (hopefully temporary) closing of
the protest camp there. Unlike the expansive Lock The Gate protest site, the hardy few camped near Leard have
virtually no support at all after Greenpeace pulled out and declared the action
to save the forest ‘over’. Cliff and the handful of other locals become even
more isolated in their endeavours, even as the film ‘Black Hole’ – which tells
their story – does the rounds of cinemas and meeting halls to inform farflung
handfuls of interested Australians. Maybe you’ll get to see it on Youtube soon,
before the forest is utterly annihilated instead of merely totally decimated
(in the modern sense).
Another
thousand kilometre trek home to the eastern foothills– taking a different scenic
route to give a lift to Aquitaine, one of the dreadlocked feral protesters. We
wind down the eastern face of the Great Divide, much of it along slow, twisting
forest roads through monoculture tree plantations that have replaced the real
native forest with elegant but now commercially useless Flooded gums – another
legacy of past govern-mental stupidity. The truckie in front of us throws piles
of litter and garbage from the driver’s window. It bounces straight into the
forest and ‘disappears’.
And
yet, as we pass through a stretch of wide, tall trees in a nature reserve
ringed by plantation Flooded gums, a strange creature scuttles across the road
directly in front of us. Aquitaine and I have both done quite a bit of fauna
survey work in remote forests, but neither of us recognises the strange
marsupial that prances through our headlights. It looks very like a
Brush-tailed possum, or its recently classified Northern Short-eared cousin,
except for the fact it’s completely black and seemingly a little more robust; a
black, nocturnal marsupial that’s probably never been officially classified in
these rich unique forests that are felled, destroyed and replaced without so
much as a fauna or flora survey beforehand…
I’ve
been doing this for a long time now. You can blame my family. My
father – who was handed a life sentence in Siberia by Stalin’s goons when he
was fifteen years old (because his
father had written articles critical of Tsar Nicholas a generation earlier) - -
took me along to my first protest in the 1960s. It was an apartheid protest
when the South African Springboks sports team toured the country. They were
holed up in a motel at the top of our street in Bondi Junction.
My
father took my brother and I to the protests against LBJ when that US president
toured Sydney in 1968 amid full-blown riots against the Vietnam war. The local New
South Wales state premiere had scowled at the crowds and told his driver to
“run the bastards down”. Anarchists poured bags of marbles onto the street while
police horses charged into the crowd. My father dragged his young sons into the
nearest doorway to avoid the rioting. It was one of those long-gone ornate
cinemas, a movie palace for the people near Sydney’s Town Hall, and as the
staff locked the doors we entered to watch How
To Steal A Million (starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole)while the
battle went on outside.
Perhaps
little has changed after all.
My
grandfather, who ultimately escaped two life sentences in Siberia to finally
make it all the way to Australia with his wife (who’d been jailed in another
concentration camp in30-below ice and snow) thanks to his hard working son, was
very proud of his political activities.
How
can I explain to my father – a man now in his nineties – that the totalitarian
police state he managed to escape has finally pursued him here, to this once
free country at the farthest ends of the Earth?
If
only we had a Bill of Rights, many of these struggles would be over before they
began. Australia is the only Western nation that hasn’t bothered to write one.
While everyone here bleats about ‘constitutional reform’, rewritten preambles,
republicanism and symbolic heads of state, the most important element of a
modern constitution is completely missing in action, its absence almost
thoroughly unremarked. What a bunch of gormless dorks we are!
None
of our rights or freedoms have ever been given willingly by our self-styled,
self-important political or economic ‘masters’. Today’s ‘rights’ enjoyed by
Western women, workers, the poor, indigenous people and segments of the natural
world have been dearly bought with the sacrifices of undistinguished and
largely unremembered individuals. Our ancestors fought tooth and nail for every
tiny advance, every little step towards a fair and just society. It’s never
been easy, and it’s almost always depended on a few brave, foolish prisoners of
conscience who eternally fight to keep the bastards honest – or at least
accountable.
Be
one of us. Please.
Now
I sit here in my little handmade hardwood cabin, typing on my laptop, carefully
husbanding my limited solar power supply to keep writing this little screed. I
eat feijoas – pineapple guavas – and cherry guavas straight off the trees I
planted years ago, just outside the door. Soon I’ll jump in the river filled
with fish and turtles that still flows through this land – because twenty years
ago dozens of strangers came to this remote forest to help me save the creek’s
headwaters from logging destruction.
“What
did you do in the war against our planet, daddy and mummy?” Little wonder there
are so few remnants of Paradise on Earth remaining – but a few survive amidst
the desolation wrought by mining, logging and ranching, tucked out of sight of
human ‘progress’. We’ve saved a few – for now. We’ve saved a lot for our
children to save, when their time comes to stand against the machine.
If
we stand up for Mother Nature we have a chance. If we don’t, no-one does. Please
go out and see the world while it’s still there. It’s really a very beautiful
place, far more lovely than anything indoors or in cities. You may even decide
to save some of it for later.
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