The Woman on the Mountain (21 page)

Many mineworkers live away from the polluted and coal-dependent towns, protecting their families and their property investment. Most admit they don’t like what the mines are doing to the areas, but the money’s good for their twelve-hour shifts: the ‘golden handcuff’. Mines last fifteen to twenty years, less if the price of coal drops. When they close so will the towns, just as my old coalmining village did a century ago. People won’t be able to move to find employment somewhere else, because they won’t be able to sell their houses.

The mines will have destroyed the environment and threatened the viability, if not ruined, many of the valuable rural industries like the vineyards and the horse studs, and the artificial hills and toxic voids they leave behind will have no appeal for tourists.

We need to be planning and initiating sustainable industries for employment
now,
to gradually wean areas like the Hunter off coal. We’re way behind the smart countries—little Sweden’s wind power industry alone provides 16,000 jobs. We could be clean, green and clever—instead of dirty, grey and greedy.

It would be nice if our local MPs took off their blinkers. But even if they did, the widest and worst damage from the HunterValley’s coal frenzy, the CO2 emissions, is invisible.

CarbonValley, we’re now called, the second biggest greenhouse gas producer in Australia, with our power stations and aluminium smelters. The next shire north is also a coalmining area, and home to two coal-fired power stations, belching far worse emissions into the atmosphere than what comes out of the squat towers beside the highway—‘STEAM’ the billboards explain, in case passers-by are suspicious. From the western end of my ridge, in the distance I can see the yellowish-brown lines of pollution from the other, taller chimneys—and there’s no billboard to reassure us about them. Nor about the CO2.

And they want to build a third station there. Burning coal. More CO2. Surely no government will agree to that? Knowing the damage it would do to the planet? Of course not—if we lived in a sane world.

For government can’t seem to say ‘No’ to coal, even while now saying, ‘Yes, yes, we must do something about climate change.’ Coal’s toxic effect on the world is proven; it is self-destructive to continue to facilitate its use. Yet our state government still won’t take the carbon cost of proposed new coalmines into account when assessing their environmental impact. How irresponsible is that?

People agree, but shake their heads, shrug their shoulders. ‘You can’t fight the big boys with the big bucks.’ Oh, but we have to try!

For it’s not only the Hunter being trashed for mining profits, nor only coal that the country is being trashed for.

Now my neighbouring mountain country, the very beautiful Gloucester, Barrington and Stroud areas, their scenic alpine-fed creeks, and even the fragile, famous sub-alpine swamps of the Barrington Tops, like Pol Blue, are under threat from various types of mining. So are the stunning sandstone cliffs and gorges and the groundwater resources of the Goulburn River, just to the west of me, near Mudgee. As with Anvil Hill, my mind boggles at why
exploration
applications are even considered in such places, let alone allowed to go further. Just because something worth money is under the ground doesn’t mean it
has
to be dug up—at any cost.

All over the country governments are considering ludicrously self-serving proposals by the profit-makers—at the expense of our dwindling resources and irreplaceable treasures.

Like Lake Cowal, the biggest inland lake in New South Wales, a National Estate-listed wetland, home to endangered migratory birds, sacred heartland of the Wiradjuri Nation, critical to the already terminal Murray–Darling Basin—threatened by a Canadian open-cut cyanide leach gold-mining operation on its very edge. In the last 100 years Australia has managed to ‘lose’ 89 per cent of its wetlands. How can those entrusted with the care of our land be so careless with the rest?

Or the 20,000-year-old rock art, or petroglyphs, on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia, some of the most ancient and comprehensive in the world—threatened by the gas, oil and iron ore industries. When the National Trust recently nominated these unique, internationally significant carvings for inclusion on the National Heritage list, there was a huge fuss—because it might put developers off. Stonehenge is only 4500 years old. Have our governments lost their senses—or just their integrity?

We’re in an unprecedented drought, with drier times ahead, and yet new coalmines, extremely high water users, are being blithely considered everywhere. The Moolarben proposal, which would be the third coalmine in the Mudgee Ulan area of New South Wales, would include three open-cuts and an underground mine and would waste 6.9 million litres of water a day to wash the coal. People mightn’t be allowed to wash their cars or their driveways but hey, King Coal, go for it!

Small groups of passionate ‘vocal locals’ and environmentalists are fighting the mining giants in all these areas. But it’s hard to believe in a fair go in the approval process, for locals or the environment, when we are beginning to discover how much money changes hands in advance.

For instance, instead of the old tendering process, BHP Billiton ‘gave’ the New South Wales government $100 million for the rights to explore the Caroona coal seam near Gunnedah. That’s $91 million more than they needed to. As if they don’t then expect a final goahead. As if the farmers’ worries about subsidence from long-wall mining under their delicately balanced, rich agricultural floodplains are going to be heard as clearly as $100 million. As if it’s not a
fait accompli
now the government has admitted that they had the Caroona coalfield in mind when planning a vast expansion of the coal-loading facilities at the port of Newcastle—but admit no responsibility for the consequent global expansion of greenhouse gases.

The New South Wales government assures us it’s all above board, but there’s something wrong with my telly—eyes slide sideways, forked tongues flicker.

As Edmund Burke said, ‘All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing’. Saving Tasmania’s historic Recherche Bay from logging is what happened recently when enough good ‘men’ did something, and wouldn’t let up.

A few years ago, I felt driven to ‘do something’ larger than my tree-planting and more effective than getting sad and angry. From writing letters to editors, then to politicians, I have ended up an ‘electronic’ activist, with my bush email receiving, sorting and sending on environmental and social justice information to the wider concerned ‘greenish’ community in the Upper Hunter, a two-way street that keeps me informed as well. It has to remain a mostly non-physical form of activism, as I am simply too far away, and can’t afford the fuel, to travel to many meetings and protests. But I care fiercely. And I write.

In general I dislike and distrust politics—and politicians, apart from the few genuinely altruistic ones who dare to speak out, even against their party, as happened amongst the Liberals on immigration issues. Independents can often be what I’d call goodies, and I find a whole concentration of goodies in the Greens, like Bob Brown federally or Lee Rhiannon statewise, for example. Their names are known and respected because they continually stand up for people and principles, not power and profits and party politics.

I don’t know where people like them, in or out of politics, find the strength to keep on battling for so long against the indifference and ignorance, the greed and the accepted corruption – that is of course not called so. And then there’s the personal abuse and slander. Yet they don’t give up and, most extraordinary of all, they retain hope and optimism.

I remind myself of what such people do daily, on behalf of all of us, whenever I feel like I can’t spare the time to write another email to yet another MP whose office will fob me off with a policy statement, assuring me of their ‘strict environmental regulations’, and reminding me of the ‘benefits we derive from the ... relatively inexpensive ... energy produced in coal-fired power stations’.

Relative to
what
is a $26 million per annum handout to just one mine considered inexpensive?

The great news of the year is that the hole in the ozone layer has been halted and is slowly healing. That only happened because the world’s industry, government and science got together in the Montreal Protocol and set targets for phasing out products that emitted CFCs. You might have been vaguely aware of change in regard to fridges and aerosols, but it didn’t hurt, did it?

We need to do the same to halt global warming. It’s harder, because its fossil-fuel/energy causes are more deeply and broadly embedded in Progress. That’s why countries driven by Big Business are refusing to listen to science, muttering instead about returning to the caves if we can’t keep burning coal. Yet the writing on the wall is being read by some in Business, who see its connection with Profit: before investing, superannuation funds are now requesting carbon emission reduction plans from companies—for without them, they may have no future.

My granddaughter also gives me hope. She is observant about and interested in the natural world. Her father is a horticulturist and her grandfather is an entomologist; they also own a wildlife refuge. From them, and me, she not only learns to use the botanical names of plants and animals, but to look, to re-spect nature. At three, she would stop as we were walking and finger a part of a plant: ‘Is that a bud or a seed, Grandma?’ At four, she could play ‘Spotto’ on native plants as we drove through the national park in spring; we had chosen purple flowers, so we were yelling ‘Hardenbergia!’ ‘Indigophera!’ and giggling as our tongues tripped over our spottings.

The last time she was with me when I drove down the mountain to town, there’d been an almost gale-force southerly blowing the day before. As we reached the part of the descent where the view towards the Valley, usually with a very obvious pollution layer, becomes panoramic, she pointed down at it in astonishment. ‘Look, Grandma!’

She took a few seconds to work out why it was so different. ‘It’s not yucky!’

Look what they’ve done to her world. Pollution is normal.

Think what they’ve done to her future—unless we tell them to stop. I’m trying, as are many others, but the number of voices has to swell, until we are so clamorous that we are louder than money, so broad-based than we can’t be dismissed by politicians as green fanatics. Let’s all start yelling from our verandahs or balconies: ‘Put people and the planet before profit—give us back our future!’

On the wall by my desk, some years ago I’d pinned up a quote from writer Marcel Pagnol’s autobiography; it had deeply impressed me at the time because it rang true with my own thoughts:

I don’t feel like that anymore. The paper on which it was printed is yellowed and nibbled by silverfish, but I leave it there to remind me of how life can look, and be, so different at different stages of one’s own.

Despair is not a lasting option. My trees are growing, the frogs are croaking in the dam, joeys are leaping about the paddock, and a new grandchild is expected soon.

So I rejoice in the natural world around me, and write to make sense of life.

Oh, yes, and to try to save the world.

That’s all.

Just as I was finishing this book, I came back from a week away to find Jess dead in the shallows of my little dam in front of the house. She was old, we’d known it must happen one day, she looked peaceful—but I sobbed, from shock, from guilt that I was away when it did, and for the pain this news would bring to my seven months’ pregnant daughter.

She was heartbroken. Jess had been a part of her life, and of the mountain, for seventeen years. My daughter’s first horse—frustrating, friend, savvy, stubborn, but never bad-tempered.

This was not a job that I or my Suzi could handle. And this time nor could my daughter. True friends came to my rescue in this awful and urgent task. Because Jess was special, we protected her, wrapped her in a tarpaulin shroud before we towed her gently through the bush to a resting place. Farewell Jess. Thank you friends.

Nillumbik Shire and Parks Victoria, for the great gift of my three-months writers’ residency at Birrarung; Lynda Wilson, editor and publisher of
The Owner Builder
magazine, for the unfettered use of my OB articles; Fred Baker, for his encouragement to write this book; Penny Walton, illustrator, friend, ex-OB subject, for introducing me to Exisle Publishing; Exisle’s Anouska Jones, for her finely sympathetic editing, and the publishers, Benny and Gareth St John Thomas, for fostering my odd proposal and making it a reality.

Any technical, botanical or zoological facts in this book are correct to the best of my knowledge, as told to me over the years by people who ought to know, or as referenced from my own sources.