Bitter divide over selling out songlines

Photo / Thinkstock

Fifty kilometres north of Broome, at the end of a corrugated dirt track, is James Price Point, where red cliffs tumble down to a milk-white beach lapped by turquoise waters.

A popular fishing and camping spot, the Point is also an important Aboriginal site where "songlines" cross. Embedded in rocks are 130 million-year-old dinosaur footprints.

Offshore, humpback whales calve and dolphins, turtles and dugong feed.

If the state Government in Western Australia and the nation's biggest oil and gas company, Woodside, get their way, a huge gas refinery will be built here.

While some locals welcome the A$30 billion ($39.5 billion) plant, which would process gas piped from an offshore field, others say it would destroy cultural and archaeological sites, industrialise a pristine coastline and transform sleepy, remote Broome into a mining town.

The project has bitterly divided the Goolarabooloo and Jabbir Jabbir people, who had a long-standing native title claim over the area.

This year, a majority of traditional owners voted to give up the claim, in exchange for a A$1.3 billion jobs and compensation package - the biggest ever negotiated with an indigenous group. But many Aboriginal people oppose the deal, which was agreed only after the Western Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, threatened to compulsorily acquire the land.

While the development has yet to be approved by the federal Environment Minister, Tony Burke, critics - both black and white - fear it could herald wider industrialisation of the largely untouched Kimberley, in Australia's far northwest. Barnett has said he expects the Kimberley to underpin the state's development over the next 50 years, just as the neighbouring Pilbara region - Australia's mining heartland - has underpinned it since the 1960s.

That prospect chills environmentalists, who know the vast, beautiful Kimberley is probably as resource-rich as the Pilbara, with copper, lead, nickel, zinc, bauxite and coal lying beneath its red dirt. At present, just five mines operate in the region. Last year, mining companies submitted 700 applications for exploration licences.

Barnett also alarmed townsfolk in Broome when he suggested the area "could learn something from" Dubai's success in attracting workers despite its harsh environment.

"There's no mistaking what his intentions are for Broome, and it's not what the local population wants," says Kandy Curran, a long-time resident, and co-ordinator of a coastal management group.

Known for its pearling history, its stunning sunsets over the Indian Ocean and its unique population mix of Europeans, Aborigines and Asians, Broome - a popular tourism destination - is home to 16,000 people. It has a leisurely pace and a laid-back vibe, and most locals want to keep it that way. They are concerned an influx of thousands of construction and mine workers would change the town's character and strain its social fabric.

At the turn-off to James Price Point, large posters proclaim "No Gas on the Kimberley Coast". Protesters have been camped out here for months, blocking the road to prevent Woodside workers and security staff from reaching the site. In July, on what Broome people call "Black Tuesday", 80 riot police were flown up from Perth to break up a blockade.

"This is my country, this is paradise," says Phillip Roe, one of the traditional owners opposed to the gas plant, as he stands on the dunes overlooking the Point.

"Now it's going to be wrecked, and our songlines will be broken. The people who have sold out don't care about law and culture." Songlines are described as paths across the land and sometimes the sky and sea which mark the route of "creator-beings" during the Dreaming.

Out to sea, a drilling rig is exploring the seabed. The plant and port facility will consume 50sq km offshore, while 30sq km of land will have to be bulldozed. Roe stoops and picks up a sliver of flint from the sand. "An old spearhead," he says. "This area is all old campsites and middens."

Nolan Hunter, chief executive of the Kimberley Land Council (KLC), agrees that the hand of traditional owners was forced by the compulsory acquisition threat. But he said those who voted to give up the land saw the benefits package as a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to improve the health, housing and employment situation of the region's indigenous inhabitants.

So high are feelings running about the gas plant that the KLC has received hate mail, and supporters of the project were dubbed "toxic coconuts ... black on the outside, white on the inside" in a newsletter.

High-profile opponents include the singer-songwriter Missy Higgins, who owns a property in Broome, and musicians John Butler and Rob Hirst. Of them - and other critics, many of whom live in urban Australia - Hunter says: "They've got their homes and their good jobs and everything they need for their creature comforts. They want the place to be pristine, even if the people here are living in poverty."

While the Pilbara coast contains Australia's busiest ports, the Kimberley coast is one of the few places on the planet - the only others being in the Arctic and Antarctica - where adverse human impact has been minimal, according to a scientific paper published in 2008.

"They're turning a wilderness into an industrial zone," says Martin Pritchard, executive director of the Environs Kimberley group.

Pritchard warns if the refinery is built, some of the world's largest ships will visit James Price Point to collect liquefied natural gas and transport it to Asia. "This is like putting a coal terminal on the Great Barrier Reef," he says. "If this was happening on the east coast, or was impacting on the communities there, there would be such an outcry that it would never be allowed to go ahead."

Burke is expected to hand down his decision within the next few months.

The federal Government recently placed a large chunk of the western Kimberley on the National Heritage register, but left out James Price Point, apart from the area containing the dinosaur footprints.