Previous posts have dealt with uranium mining in Australia. In this post, I want to delve more deeply into the impact on and reaction of the Australian Aboriginals to the mining of uranium on Aboriginal land. All indigenous people in the world have a strong identification with their traditional lands. However, the relationship of the Australian Aboriginals to their ancestral lands goes far beyond the usual strong feelings of indigenous peoples. The Aboriginals see themselves as the custodians of the land and over untold generations they have maintained certain aspects of the landscape as a sacred duty.
When James Cook discovered Australia in 1770, it is estimated that there were about six hundred thousand Aboriginals. After two hundred and sixty years of imported diseases and racial attacks, the population of Aboriginals had dropped ninety percent to around sixty thousand. Murder of Aboriginals was seldom punished. A policy called terra nullius claimed that when Australia was discovered, the land was empty and belonged to no one. This allowed the colonial governments to displace Aboriginals at any time for any reason or no reason. After centuries of horrible treatment, ninety five percent of the Australian voters voted in 1967 for the Australian government to work to repair the damage to what was left of Aboriginal culture and to provide decent treatment for Aboriginals.
The government set up the Council of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs to study situation and to communication with the Aboriginal communities. However, other branches of the government were slow to adopt the new attitude. In 1971, a judge in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territories ruled that the British claim of sovereignty over Australia had canceled all Aboriginal land rights. In 1973, the Federal Labour Party established a Commission for Aboriginal Land Rights and a special Fund to collect and distribute money to Aboriginals to purchase land. In 1976, the Federal government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act that recognized Aboriginal rights to own land in the Northern Territories with certain restrictions. The land had to be unclaimed by anyone else and the Aboriginals had to prove their ancestral right to the land.
Kakadu National Park is a desolate nature preserve in a remote part of Australia’s Northern Territories. It is sacred to the Mirrar Aboriginal clan whose ancestors were there for thousands of years. It is one of the 20 sites recognized by UNESCO for its cultural and natural value. Uranium was discovered under Kakadu and the Fox inquiry was set up by the Australian government in 1975 to consider uranium mining in Kakadu. The inquiry considered the Mirrar attachment to the land and said that it had to be respected or set aside. The Fox inquiry recommended that the Aboriginal land rights be ignored and that mining be allowed. In 1978, the Australian government chose to override the provision in the Aboriginal Land Rights law that said that the Aboriginals had a right to veto mining on Aboriginal land. Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) was allowed to open the Ranger mine in the Kakadu Park in 1980.
To date, ERA has extracted twenty seven million tons of uranium ore from Ranger and has milled sixteen million tons of uranium. The tailings from the mine are highly toxic and will be radioactive for thousands of years. Animals and plants have been killed and higher levels of radiation have been detected in the land and water around the mine. There have been over 100 breaches of environmental regulations by the operators of Ranger.
Now ERA wants to open another mine in the same area and the Aboriginals are appealing to UNESCO for help. They wanted UNESCO to say that the mining was endangering the Kakadu preserve. UNESCO debated it but decided not to say that the preserve was in danger, partly because the Australian government said that it would ignore any such classification.
So here we are, three hundred and forty years since the British arrived in Australia and forty five years after the recognition of Aboriginal land rights. But the quest for uranium trumps respect for Aboriginal rights and, once again, their lands are open for exploitation by private corporations.
