Twiggy (22 page)

He is particularly keen to portray himself as a reluctant meddler in the dirty political process, as someone who stands above the shadowy world of party politics and backroom deals. Yet the innate deal-maker in Forrest had jumped at the chance to negotiate
a private mining-tax agreement with Rudd that would have served his interests more than anyone else’s. The truth is that politics is a natural fit for Forrest’s salesmanship and his impulse to change the world. It’s a calling he may one day be unable to resist.

The more you know Aboriginal people, the more you love them.

—ANDREW FORREST

As he worked feverishly to build a mining empire in 2005, Andrew Forrest began to develop a close interest in Yindjibarndi country, a vast swathe of the Pilbara centred on the gorges, waterfalls and palm-fringed rock pools of the spectacular Millstream-Chichester
National Park. That year, after a decade-long legal struggle, the Yindjibarndi people finally established non-exclusive native title rights over much of the region. Federal Court judge Robert Nicholson had earlier recognised the Yindjibarndi’s “remarkably strong sense of connection” to the land, which stretched back as long as 40,000 years.

Forrest had already acquired tenements to explore
for iron ore over about half of the 13,000 square kilometres of the native title area. But in 2005, his geologists at Fortescue hit paydirt when they unearthed a massive deposit of iron ore in the Hamersley Range, in the southernmost part of Yindjibarndi country. The deposit was christened Solomon, after the biblical king who made a fortune from mining.

To begin unlocking the riches hidden
in these spinifex hills, Forrest just needed to win over the Yindjibarndi people. But he hadn’t counted on Michael Woodley, an articulate and feisty leader of his people. Woodley, who is in his early forties, is a product of the original iron ore boom in the Pilbara. His father was a white fly-in fly-out mine worker and his mother a full-blooded indigenous woman who died as a result of alcohol
abuse. Woodley attended primary school in the Pilbara town of Roebourne until Year 6, when his grandfather, a traditional custodian of the land who had sworn off the grog, took him out of the troubled town and into the bush. It was there that Woodley learned the stories and the songs of his people. “My grandfather wanted me to realise who I was, and that’s a Yindjibarndi person,” Woodley says. “Once
I realised that, nothing else mattered anymore.”

Woodley married at age sixteen and had six children, but he remained illiterate well into his twenties. His wife, Lorraine, bought him a laptop computer and he slowly taught himself how to read and write, starting with simple stories about his childhood adventures with his grandfather. “The spell-check showed me when I got the words wrong,”
he smiles. Woodley ended up as chief executive of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (YAC), the registered native title body in Roebourne. He also runs a separate organisation, partly funded by money from mining deals, which is dedicated to recording the history and culture of his people. By any standard, Michael Woodley is a success story. He and Lorraine sent their children to two of Perth’s
best private schools, Guildford Grammar and Perth College, and two of them have so far gone on to university.

Despite the wealth generated by the mining boom in the Pilbara over the past decade, Roebourne is an enclave of Third World poverty and despair. It seems impossible that this ramshackle town is just forty kilometres from the booming centre of Karratha and the nearby port of Dampier,
from where iron ore worth tens of billions of dollars a year is shipped to Asian markets. In Karratha, upmarket high-rise apartments are being erected to house Pilbara mine workers who command salaries of at least $150,000 a year. But to enter Roebourne is akin to visiting a different country. Many of the town’s 750 Aborigines live in a slum known as “the village”, where alcoholism, child neglect
and domestic violence are endemic. Most of the indigenous people are Yindjibarndi and many live on welfare.

Alcohol consumption in the Roebourne shire is three times the state average, according to Western Australia’s Department of Indigenous Affairs. Attendance rates at the Roebourne school are 50 per cent for Year 1 students, dropping to 35 per cent by Year 8 and just 13 per cent in Year
12. In the 2008 NAPLAN test, only 20 per cent of Roebourne’s Year 7 students reached the agreed standard on spelling, compared to 89 per cent nationally. Many of the town’s Aborigines end up dying young or are sent to prison. A government report in 2009 found the town’s notorious jail housed 177 prisoners – despite having capacity for only 116 – and 84 per cent of them were Aboriginal.

The arrival of the mining industry in the 1960s helped create the cycle of hopelessness that has almost destroyed Roebourne’s indigenous people. As Karratha and Dampier were built to house thousands of mine workers, Roebourne was forgotten and most of its government offices were moved to the new regional centres. The influx of single white men brought more alcohol to the area, and Roebourne’s Aboriginal
women were often the only source of female companionship. Tragedy and heartache were commonplace. In 1983, a sixteen-year-old Yindjibarndi boy, John Pat, was bashed by police and later died at the Roebourne lockup from injuries that included a fractured skull, broken ribs and a torn aorta. An all-white jury in Karratha found the police officers not guilty of manslaughter.

At first glance,
Michael Woodley and Andrew Forrest should see eye to eye on the best way to solve the crisis in towns like Roebourne. Woodley appears at home in the contemporary world as he cradles an iPhone and sips on a caffe latte, yet he remains steeped in traditional law. Forrest grew up surrounded by Aboriginal people and came to firmly believe they can simultaneously hold on to ancient customs and be part
of the modern economy. Both men are proud sons of the Pilbara who retain strong historical connections to the land. But the day that the mining entrepreneur came knocking on Woodley’s door started a gut-wrenching tussle that has torn apart Yindjibarndi families and created a public relations nightmare for Forrest.

Fortescue initially offered the Yindjibarndi a capped cash payment of only
$1.5 million a year in exchange for their support for the Solomon mining hub, which will generate a staggering $8 billion worth of iron ore a year if prices remain strong. The $1.5 million offer, spread between 1000 people, amounted to an annual payment of just $1500 per person. Fortescue later increased its offer to $4 million a year, as well as $6.5 million worth of unspecified jobs, training and
housing benefits. But Woodley rejected the offer, arguing that it was insulting. Nobody disputed that the cash component of the offer was extremely low by mining industry standards. Rio Tinto, for example, pays an uncapped royalty of 0.5 per cent of revenue to other Pilbara indigenous groups; Fortescue’s offer to the Yindjibarndi worked out at a fraction of that.

But Forrest is adamant that
he will never throw big pots of money at impoverished Aboriginal communities as other companies have done, describing such payments as “mining welfare” that will do the same damage as government handouts have done. Providing jobs to indigenous people, he says, is the best way to break the cycle of hopelessness.

Forrest recalled the pride and dignity of the Aboriginal people he knew as a
boy at Minderoo, before welfare “destroyed” them by replacing the motivation for hard work with “sit-down money”. Almost all of his mates from that era have since died. The origins of this tragedy, Forrest argued, could be found in the Aboriginal equal wages case of 1965, which ultimately led to most indigenous station hands leaving the land, including at Minderoo, because pastoralists could no longer
afford to employ them. As a result of the High Court judgment, Aboriginal people across the north were forced into unemployment and off their country into virtual refugee camps on the outskirts of towns like Roebourne.

Forrest treads a fine moral line by appearing to defend the practice under which Aboriginal stockmen and servants provided mostly unpaid labour to Australia’s pastoral industry.
“Suddenly, you don’t have an economic model,” he said of the impact of the equal wages case. “All the Aboriginal people had to go, which was heartbreaking. I remember it at Minderoo … it was very, very upsetting. They all move into town, Canberra edicts that they now have not got the salary, so they must have full benefits and equal drinking rights. Bang! The stolen generation has got nothing
on this.”

Forrest, as usual, has an evangelical belief that he is right about how to end indigenous disadvantage. And he is primed for a fight. He has referred to a “welfare lobby” that is “powerful” and “nasty” and argued that the biggest problem he faces is “do-gooders” who want to throw more money at the problem. He told the
Australian
in 2008 that he seethes at “idiot, feelgood white
Australia, which has their beautiful but misguided equal rights program for everybody but they don’t leave Toorak or Darling Point. I don’t have to argue with anyone anymore; they know it simply hasn’t worked.”

Forrest’s attitude to indigenous Australia reached a crossroads a few years before he met Michael Woodley. During a trip to the Kimberley town of Halls Creek, in Western Australia’s
far north, he walked the streets at 3am with his friend Herb Elliott. The pair watched in horror as local Aboriginal men rolled around drunk or stoned, fighting among themselves and assaulting women. Scores of children were milling around the streets, even at that hour. Forrest claims some of the girls offered sex in exchange for a cigarette. “When you hear ‘smoke for a poke’, you know you are
dealing with the depths of depravity of a society which is completely broken,” he said. “I found it incredibly moving that the women would scream in a way that pierces the night … I still wake up cold and sweaty thinking about it.”

When Forrest returned to the scene several hours later, he found one elderly man whose leg had been run over by a car. When he tried to help the man, he was threatened
with a broken bottle. Forrest then saw some other Aboriginal men he knew from the Pilbara who were headed to the bottle shop: “They bought the most powerful liquor which their money could buy, flagons of port, and I knew that the whole saga was going to repeat itself.”

Soon after this, Forrest had another watershed moment while attending the funeral in Karratha of his boyhood mate Ian Black,
the son of the legendary Minderoo head stockman Scotty Black. The pair, of similar age, attended primary school together at an indigenous hostel in Carnarvon, where Ian would help fight off the bigger kids who picked on the weedy Forrest because of his stutter. Forrest recalled: “Ian Black was the prized son, the son with all the get-up-and-go, the flashing bright eyes and white teeth and overt
personality and charm and intellect. His sisters and his aunties explained to me what had happened to Ian over the intervening period where I’d gone to university, got a job, stayed in touch with him a little bit but eventually lost touch. He just went the welfare cycle and eventually died a premature death. The ability for me to make a choice about what I’m doing was removed by this experience.
I now have no choice, I must do what I’m doing, which is to try and remove the disparity through opportunity and responsibility, because we’ll never do it with welfare for able-bodied and able-minded people. In fact, welfare will remove their able body and mind eventually.”

Forrest’s genuine concern for the plight of Aboriginal people drove him to personally champion the hiring of indigenous
workers at Fortescue. By mid 2013, more than 12 per cent of the company’s employees were indigenous and the company had announced plans to increase this to 15 per cent by 2015. It’s a strong record, even in the mining industry, which has been at the forefront of hiring Aboriginal people. But this is not simply corporate charity. The miners badly need workers and it’s good for the bottom line to
tap in to such a large pool of available labour, especially one living so close to the mines.

The mining industry’s radical change in attitude towards Aborigines stemmed from the High Court’s Mabo decision in 1992 and the subsequent passage of the Native Title Act. The law did not give indigenous groups the power of veto over mining projects, but they finally had a seat at the table and the
right to negotiate for economic and social benefits in exchange for access to their traditional lands. Until then, the mining companies had a shameful record of discriminating against, or simply ignoring, the Aboriginal people on whose country they operated.

While many mining companies have quietly gone about boosting indigenous job numbers, Forrest has been proudly shouting his own record
from the rooftops. This has particularly irked Rio Tinto, which realised its errors in the 1990s and has since become the largest private-sector employer of indigenous people in Australia. Fortescue’s promotional videos feature Aboriginal employees talking about the profound impact on their lives of having a job, often for the first time. Some had been in jail, others were hooked on drugs, and
most had never finished school. After graduating from Fortescue’s training course and being placed in a job, they now earn salaries of more than $100,000 a year. Every new Aboriginal recruit is handed a fishing rod as a symbol of Forrest’s much-repeated aphorism: give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime. To some, this seems patronising,
but to others it is clearly empowering.

Forrest was particularly touched by the story of Kris Dixon, a young Aboriginal man who joined Fortescue’s training centre in Port Hedland in 2011. Dixon had grown up in a violent home in the northern suburbs of Perth, and soon fell into a life of heroin addiction and burglary. He spent almost all of his twenties in jail and lost contact with his two
children. But after being released from prison and moving to the Pilbara to start a traineeship as a plant operator with Fortescue, he had firm plans to earn a good income, own his own house and reunite with his kids. “Working makes me feel like I’ve got structure in my life – it makes me feel good about myself,” Dixon said. “I’ve learned from my mistakes and I’m proud of myself because I don’t
think I will be that person again.”

Several months into his training program, however, Dixon, 32, went to Broome for Christmas and ended up in a drunken fight outside the town’s nightclub. He was stabbed in the chest, collapsed to the ground and was set upon by a group of men who repeatedly kicked him. Sometime after that he died. A French national was convicted of his murder in 2013. Forrest
had come to know Dixon well and was devastated by his death. In a video produced for Fortescue just before his death, Dixon had delivered a haunting message about how employment could help save indigenous people like him. “We don’t want to be left behind,” he said in a gentle voice. “We’ve probably been left behind too much. We’ll be the sleeping giants, us Aboriginal people.”