Power, Poison and Hope in the Border Country.

Richard Martin 

Indigenous people are often thought to be anti-mining. This arises from the very commonly-held view that Indigenous people have a special relationship with nature, and may in fact hold the key to creating a more sustainable way of being in the world. This idea finds expression in Indigenous rights advocacy, as well as popular representations of Indigenous people on tv shows and films like Avatar, in books, and even on tea-towels reminding people that they cannot eat money. This is harmless in most instances and may even be helpful in the context of particular Indigenous people’s struggles against particular developments, including unwanted mines. But it tells us very little about how Indigenous people actually think about mining.

In 2007, at the very beginning of fieldwork for my PhD about the remote Gulf Country of northern Australia, I was employed by an Aboriginal Land Council to undertake a cultural heritage survey about a prospective uranium mine development. It was only my second trip to the Gulf Country, and I was as green as a new shoot of grass. Driving into Burketown for the first time, I almost got lost on the featureless plain – empty of landmarks apart from the odd cruciform shapes of Parkinsonia and mesquite trees in the yellowed grasslands.

My first job in Burketown was to find Danny Wollogorang, a senior Garawa man from the Northern Territory who had travelled across the Gulf with another man to meet me. The other man, his cousin (or ‘cousin-brother’), would come to adopt me as a brother before he died (and so he is here unnamed). These men were to accompany me back to the border, where the grasslands of northwest Queensland give way to the forested hills and gorges of the Territory. A mining company was proposing to drill a series of holes amongst the gorges in its search for uranium, and Queensland’s cultural heritage legislation required the company to consult with Aboriginal people to prevent damage to their sacred places, so Garawa and Gangalidda people had organised a team of senior men to survey the area with me, an anthropologist, as well as a representative from the mine.

Danny, and the man I called brother, knew the country between Burketown and the border, and as we drove west they explained it to me. There are Dreamings in the landscape, they said: kangaroo, ‘left-hand’ wallaby, black-headed snake, bushfire. What does that mean?, I asked, as I imagined a bushfire bursting into life out of the ground with black-headed snakes fleeing before it. I can’t recall the answer I received; I came to understand that the Dreaming just was, and is, like the land and the sky.

At an isolated homestead named Hells Gate near the border, we were joined by other Garawa men who had travelled from the Territory and some Ganggalida men from Burketown who arrived before us. We drove through the bush to a camp-site away from the homestead, amongst the hills. They showed me ancestors imprinted on the rockface in ochre and spit, and we spoke more about the Dreaming. We also spoke a little about mining, and I explained the company’s proposal to drill. Later, after a dinner of barramundi roasted on coals, I fell asleep in my swag while the old men from the Territory swapped stories with the younger blokes from Queensland. Occasionally they broke into song.

In the morning, a helicopter arrived with a mining engineer and we flew around the tenement where they were looking for uranium. I wrote down what I was told and passed it on to the Land Council. The places where they wished to drill were replete with many sacred sites which the company, in due course, promised to avoid. 

Over the following months, as I began my fieldwork in earnest, I heard much talk about this mine, and the uranium being sought. Uranium, some believed, was a white rock under the earth that could be ‘sung’ and used for sorcery. Without this song, it was just white rock, but people had heard stories and they knew that it was dangerous. For some, this meant the company should not mine. But for most, the danger posed by this rock had to be balanced against the potential benefits of mining. ‘We need this mine’, a young man whom I called son told me: he told me they would build a hospital with the money from the mine and buy a dialysis machine to bring the old people back from the city and look after them in the bush where they belong. ‘Aunty, in Darwin, we’re going to bring her home’. ‘We are not going to waste this opportunity’. Older people were generally more circumspect about the mine, but they worried about the young people and were mindful of their views.

Years later, there is no mine, and the border country remains much as it was when I saw it in 2007. The young man who dreamt of building a hospital tragically died too young, around my age. Perhaps his life could have been saved by a hospital, or just by a job at the mine. But the uranium price is too low, so the deposit remains under the ground, buried amongst the Dreamings, waiting for the song to spark it to life.

Of Earth For Earth (2020)

RICHARD MARTIN BIOGRAPHY

Dr Richard Martin is an anthropologist at The University of Queensland. He has undertaken anthropological research in Australia and the United States. His research focuses on Indigenous and settler histories in post-colonial settings. He has published a range of scholarly articles about Indigenous people and culture, and is the author of The Gulf Country: The story of people and place in outback Queensland (Allen & Unwin, 2019). He has also authored numerous expert reports about Indigenous land negotiations, and given evidence in the Federal Court of Australia on behalf of Aboriginal people claiming rights in land and waters.

r.martin3@uq.edu.au