Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  In this atmosphere, any individual or organisation that contested Howard’s ascendancy was in for a ride on Bleak Street—and eighteen months into his government’s first term, that’s where I found myself.

  I had an early meeting with one of the friendlier senior Liberals, Robert Hill. He was an accomplished environment minister, who, despite the hard-line position of his colleagues, got a few things done, including introducing new environmental legislation that would swing the balance towards the national government taking more responsibility. Hill was bemused that I would consider taking on the position of ACF president a second time given, as he freely admitted, that the opportunities for a conservation agenda would be limited. And I’d already ‘done it’—true.

  I expected little ground to be made during Howard’s reign, but banging my head up against that wall—as opposed to a stack of speakers, as was the habit of some music fans—was going to be a fact of life as far as I could see.

  A broader civil-society coalition, including conservation and community groups (some of whom were pretty isolated), the academic sector, churches and other willing parties, was needed to counter the conservative offensive. In addition, Don Henry and I knew that forging stronger bonds with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would be crucial, as would bolstering relationships with those in the business and farming sectors who understood the importance of maintaining an environmental bottom line. And the agenda had grown: getting water back into the Snowy River, addressing widespread salinity, advancing new thinking in environmental economics and halting a series of dam proposals for WA’s Fitzroy River had been added to an already long list.

  By early 1998, a pressing issue had arisen concerning the fate of an existing uranium-mining lease called Jabiluka, which by an accident of history—along with the Ranger mine, and a lease at Koongarra—was located within the Kakadu World Heritage Area.

  One of the first decisions by the newly elected Howard government was to overthrow Labor’s three-mine policy, which restricted the number of uranium mines in Australia thus preventing any new mines. The new government instead gave the go-ahead for a second uranium mine—Jabiluka—in Kakadu, a clear message from the Coalition about their priorities and values, and the decision was immediately controversial. Following this, Robert Hill determined that a low-level environmental assessment of the project would be sufficient.

  The mining company, Energy Resources of Australia (ERA, now majority-owned by Rio Tinto), wasn’t prepared to pause and discuss the proposal with the Mirarr, the traditional owners of Jabiluka, who were opposed to the mine. Instead, they announced that site preparations would commence as soon as possible.

  For the traditional owners, many scientists and environment groups, and particularly the ACF, which had a long-standing interest in the region, Jabiluka was a make-or-break issue, given its location within Kakadu, our largest national park. The existing Ranger mine had gone ahead in 1976 with claims of coercion of Aboriginal traditional owners by the Northern Land Council. Both Ranger and Jabiluka were sited close to the Magellan wetlands and the protected environment of the park, which for some elders was seen as a transgression of their culture. Toby Gangale, the father of current traditional owner Yvonne Margarula, had at one stage opposed the Ranger mine, but he’d been a lone voice and the pressure on traditional owners had been intense—in the end they acquiesced.

  No amount of money can make up for the impact of the existing Ranger mine whose giant tailings pond, a cocktail of radioactive sludge, dominates the landscape in this part of Kakadu. Accidents have been a too-frequent occurrence at Ranger. In extreme wet conditions, which are common in the tropics and more likely in a force-fed climate future, the giant pool of slurry threatens to overflow, and on some occasions the unthinkable has happened, with radioactive water leaking into the surrounding wetlands.

  Locating another mine here was like putting a fast-food franchise in the chancery of a church—but, needless to say, the company didn’t see it like that. It was primed to go and, following the breakdown of meetings between Hill and conservation organisations, the minister signed off on the mine. The resources minister, Warwick Parer, subsequently watered down the conditions Hill had included to minimise the risk of polluting the surrounding environment, and with work on the new mine site due to start, the only remaining option for opponents—a blockade of the site—was quickly organised.

  Remote, blisteringly hot in the dry and tricky to access in the wet, Jabiluka was as difficult a place to campaign in as could be imagined. It was a four-hour drive from Darwin, with minimal services and, once the blockade was announced, a throng of people who needed access to water and toilet facilities began turning up in increasing numbers. Local groups and the two campaign coordinators—firebrand Jacqui Katona, who worked for the Mirarr, and ACF councillor Jayne Weepers—kept the blockade functioning while they conducted a media campaign from a demountable hut and Jabiluka fast became a household name. Yvonne Margarula, too, was steadfast in her opposition. Since the Oils had played in 1986 at the Jabiru township near the mine site, I’d been back a couple of times and had come to greatly respect Yvonne, who at that time was working as a housemaid at the Kakadu resort, and showed great resolve in calmly opposing a second mine.

  By the middle of 1998, with the blockade in full swing, there had been over a hundred arrests, with many activists refused bail. For these people and the growing number of supporters of direct action, it was simply the wrong mine, in the wrong place, with the wrong product.

  At a time when fatigue was starting to set in and sprits were running low, I paid a visit to Kakadu with Tom Uren—the former Labor minister and anti-war activist. At dusk, in a dry clearing in Kakadu, we were surrounded by about 300 people clustered in the savanna on blankets and sleeping bags. Young forest activists with braided hair and beads, white-haired grandparents . . . people from all backgrounds had made the trek. A handful of Mirarr sat at the back, listening carefully. The young protestors stared blankly as Tom, now in his eighties, stood to address the crowd. With a lifetime of speeches at public meetings, at the dispatch box in parliament and on the streets, balancing on the balls of his feet like the champion boxer he once was, Uren galvanised the assembled crowd as he exhorted them to stay strong.

  The large number of people who had flocked to Jabiluka—a great proportion from Melbourne, over 3000 kilometres south—contradicted the idea that Australians were an apathetic lot when it came to the environment. Mass poster runs in the capital cities featuring the Jabiluka symbol had raised public awareness, and once people came to understand what was happening up there their verdict was clear. By the time the Oils returned to play a dawn concert with Regurgitator and Coloured Stone, and then march across the boundary of the mining lease in the pink morning light, we were thousands strong, and Jabiluka was squarely in the national spotlight.

  One of the great natural and cultural wonders of the world, the giant rock escarpments that surrounded us bore silent witness to the quick-burning fuse of spreading mass protest—a political backdown was on the cards.

  When it came, months later, it smelled of bad faith, and was only a conditional concession. The protests had succeeded to the extent that the company would not proceed with the Jabiluka mine without consent of the traditional owners, as should have been the case from the beginning. But in 2013 ERA stated that the Jabiluka deposit was ‘still under consideration to be developed to the benefit of all stakeholders’. Since then the ground has shifted a little. ERA has now said the Ranger mine cannot be expanded underground unless the mining lease is extended, while Rio Tinto, its majority shareholder, has indicated that the existing mine should not continue beyond its current time frame, thus reducing the likelihood of a second mine at Jabiluka. Notwithstanding this, the pressure on Yvonne Margarula and her family will continue until this question is settled and until Jabiluka is incorporated into Kakadu, but I’m certain they’ll stay strong.

  The Mirarr can take heart, too, f
rom the stance of Jeffrey Lee, the traditional owner of Koongarra, the other remaining lease in the area that could have been utilised for uranium mining.

  Situated adjacent to some of Kakadu’s most striking landforms, including Nourlangie Rock, Koongarra encompasses around 1600 hectares of country, and the case for it remaining undisturbed was strong. So long as it remained outside the boundary of the park it was a potential mine, although, as with Jabiluka, the consent of the traditional owner would be required.

  I’d run into Jeffrey, a softly spoken, gentle bloke who worked as a ranger at Kakadu, when I first visited the Jabiluka blockade. He was adamant that he had no interest in the money that would come from exploiting the uranium ore body at Koongarra. His wish was for the area to be protected forever.

  It wouldn’t be too long before there was a chance to help make that wish come true.

  22

  I SEE MOTION

  THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION of the world was accelerating in the mid- to late 90s—most notably the rise and rise of Apple and Microsoft, and the birth of Google—and the initial stirrings of China were a taste of things to come, but in popular music most of it was of little consequence. The dominance of dance music didn’t give way, as many observers—me included—had predicted would happen, and the grunge movement that had predominated in the early years of the decade had fragmented into subgenres overnight. Alternative music was swallowed by MTV, and easy access to free downloads over the internet would soon put a hole in the music business model. The only light on the horizon was hip-hop starting its rumble. The Oils couldn’t remake ourselves with a new image, as artists like Bowie constantly did, even if we wanted to—which we didn’t. Our headspace was too serious. We’d cast the die many times: choosing world music over grunge, the multicultural vibe in preference to Budweiser-sponsored teen rebellion by going with Peter Gabriel on the WOMAD tour instead of joining the increasingly popular Lollapalooza circuit.

  In addition, locking horns with Sony in New York had left all parties bruised. A band that had never capitulated to record company edicts, and had dug its heels in, could simply be ignored. So we were now stuck in a holding pattern. We could relax and go along for the ride. Or we could rebel and strike out for new pastures, which was my instinct.

  A warts-and-all move having been ruled out by different members at different times, instead we focused on doing the shortest possible tours in the most compressed periods. We were making it hard for ourselves. It was one thing to be reminded by loudspeaker when you landed at LAX—yet again—to stay ‘visually connected to your luggage’, another altogether to remain visually connected to your audience if you kept leaving town. When we were in Australia, Sydney was still the epicentre of our work, so I was constantly driving up the freeway from our home in Mittagong, to the city. No matter how late I’d worked, I always tried to make the run for home. To stay awake I’d wind the windows down, crank up both the air-conditioning and the radio, chiming in on ‘More Than a Feeling’ and creaming the high notes. Across the dial my friend—radio, the child of Thomas Edison—rarely let me down: I was learning something I otherwise would never have discovered on ABC Radio National, unearthing scintillating new songs on Triple J, swooning to Dvorak on the classical station, or back to Triple M or 2WS for a pump up with big rock.

  If I drew a blank I’d throw on Dragon’s greatest hits and revisit a favourite hymn like ‘Age of Reason’, or just dip into the big box of blues CDs I had stashed in the car. God knows what the Campbell-town koalas thought as I flashed past the corridors of scrabbly wattle shouting, ‘The blues had another baby and they named it rock and roll!’

  After nearly twenty years on the road, I’d do this run anytime, even from gigs as far away as Newcastle, four hours north, just to wake up in my idea of heaven: my own bed.

  Barely an hour or two later, half awake, I would faintly hear the girls getting ready for school, playing and chattering over breakfast as the early-morning sun poked through the oak tree in the front garden. I could easily forgo all the MTV Awards and platinum records—these snatched moments made my world go round.

  …

  By the middle of 1998, we’d finally finished recording Redneck Wonderland. We actually recorded it twice, at considerable expense, as we couldn’t agree on the final mixes of the first version. The lyrics on Redneck were a sharp rebuke to the rise of One Nation and the indifference to nature that seeped out of the pores of the establishment, and the music was scarifying in places, even if some people had stopped listening.

  We even ended up with two versions of the same song, ‘Cemetery in My Mind’, having failed to nail down a single that sat right. The ‘true believers’ version, like odd assortments of Oils’ work over the years, was eerily prophetic. It combined the original chorus with a spoken-word intro, ‘I’m on a barge without a river in a room without a door, there’s not much time for true believers to be seen’—indeed.

  I still didn’t know where I’d find myself a few years hence, although one could make a pretty fair guess. Looking back, the words paint as good a picture as any of the time I subsequently spent in the Labor Party.

  In 1998 Australia sweltered through the hottest year yet on record, as the ACF ramped up efforts to get water back into the Snowy River with the formation of the Snowy River Alliance, which included local farmers; the independent member for Gippsland East, Craig Ingram; and the New South Wales-based Total Environment Centre, led by highly experienced campaigner Jeff Angel.

  The Victorian Liberal government of Jeff Kennett had been swept from power, and Ingram’s win had been crucial in raising the stakes on the state of a river that occupied such a prominent place in Australian folklore. The alliance succeeded in getting the states to the table, although the federal Coalition environment minister, Robert Hill from South Australia, had derided the campaign to get water into the Snowy as a ‘romantic notion’.

  The truth was the Snowy desperately needed environmental flows just as much as the Murray River did, and we’d thrown everything at the campaign, with Tim Fisher from the ACF producing a comprehensive portfolio detailing our case and enlisting sympathetic media drawn to the iconic status of the river, and it worked. In 2002, during my second stint with ACF, I travelled to Jindabyne with New South Wales premier Bob Carr and Victorian premier Steve Bracks. We were there to commemorate an agreement between the two state governments to get at least 21 per cent more water back into the Snowy, which in some seasons was down to a mere 1 per cent of its original flow. This victory was one that the pundits typically predicted couldn’t happen, but the alliance never doubted the rightness of its cause, nor that it would prevail. Our ‘doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt’, Shakespeare wrote, and he was right.

  The Oils also lent a hand, via some benefit shows, to the East Timorese politician José Ramos-Horta as he argued the case for independence for the tiny country that had been there for Australian troops in World War II.

  Throughout, I was pushing for the establishment of what eventually became the Mittagong Forum: bringing together the established environmental movement—big national organisations and state-based conservation groups—to look at ways of working more effectively. It made sense for the groups to cooperate and even share resources when the situation demanded it, and there was a strategic opportunity to build on the recent growth of the movement—which could wax and wane—if there were strong joint campaigns.

  I got involved with the Jubilee Debt Campaign. This was a powerful initiative, bringing together aid organisations and churches, that had been championed by Bono and special adviser to the UN Secretary General, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, among others. It had a practical and a moral dimension: the practical was that, without some reduction in debt, poor countries were never likely to be able to lift their people out of poverty. The moral component spoke for itself and ultimately led to the forgiveness of big debts in very poor countries.

  If I was at home, the
days went by in a chaotic rush—ceaseless phone calls, a quick lunch, snatched conversations and a folder full of plans—as I ploughed through all the requests and activities that presented themselves. If we were away, then I’d be constantly looking over my shoulder to home.

  From a distance, one thing stood out sharply: the appetite for reconciliation was growing.

  At first blush, reconciliation appeared to be a tokenistic word, without any tangible goals. John Howard’s government played to this impression and instead supported what the prime minister termed ‘practical reconciliation’. But if you looked closely at what was intended by the expression ‘reconciliation’, it was nothing less than a wholesale reappraisal of relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the rest of us, through a public education campaign aimed at deepening understanding and enlarging our values. And hand in hand with reconciliation went a series of steps to address political recognition, social justice, land rights and, ultimately, some form of compact or treaty.

  I saw reconciliation as a stepping stone to righting past wrongs that were a fact of history, and now, as the movement grew stronger, the Oils wanted to be around to provide support. This meant connecting with Reconciliation Australia leaders like Pat Dodson and Shelley Reys and trying to fit in events with them where possible, and hooking up with old surfing colleagues like Rabbit Bartholomew and Mark Richards as they pushed the cause by staging the Billabong Indigenous Surf Festival.

  Ultimately this surge in public awareness reached a zenith with the bridge walks for reconciliation held in capital cities and towns throughout 2000. Hundreds of thousands of people participated—with the notable exception of most conservative politicians.