If the Galilee Basin in central-west Queensland sounds biblical, the scale of the threat facing it is certainly of epic proportions. The coal underneath it has always been there, but cattle and drovers, not coal mines and drillers, have dominated the land.
If you’re listening to the Queensland Government or the mining industry they’d use words like wealth and opportunity, revenue and development, but they would agree with the scale. Some of the world’s largest coal mines are proposed for the region, and coal gas industries scramble to tap into the underground energy potential.
If the powers-that-be have their way, the Galilee Basin could provide enough coal to almost double Australia’s current thermal coal exports, especially to China, to be burnt in coal-fired power plants and contribute billions more tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. That’s the global reason why we should leave it in the ground, there or anywhere, but the rustle of prospective dollars drowns out that argument.
Yet there’s also a critical precedent here, a unique regional reason why we ought not allow the Galilee Basin to be degraded from an outback Eden to an industrial wasteland.
On top of the coal seam that Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal wants to dig up is Bimblebox Nature Refuge, 8000 peaceful hectares of biodiverse remnant woodland. If allowed to proceed, it would be one of the first protected areas, part of the Australian National Reserve System, to be lost to coal interests.
All of Bimblebox, as well as many surrounding properties, are under Waratah’s exploration permit. As current legislation stands, as long as the company receives the standard approvals from the state and federal governments – as we know they usually do – there is nothing to stop the innumerable living treasures, the plants and animals of Bimblebox, from becoming nothing more than dead overburden.
In 2000, when Queensland’s land clearing rates were amongst the highest in the world, several concerned people, aided by funding from the Australian National Reserve System program, bought the land and signed it up in 2003 as Bimblebox Nature Refuge Agreement with the Queensland government, to permanently protect the conservation values of the property.
Trish Duddy and Tommy and George Clift (front L to R, all hatted) have been at the blockade camp every single one of those 615 days, joined by other locals on a rolling roster for cups of tea, information swapping, resolve steeling — and symbolic trailblazing.
I had driven in to the Blockade that morning, looking south across the Plains to the polluted and dust-laden skies of the Hunter Valley, where the government has allowed every coal company to win every battle. Down there it is the wineries and thoroughbred horse studs now protesting that their industries cannot cope with any more coal mines.
The difference when I looked north, away from the coal-trashed Hunter, is obvious – clear blue skies as country skies should be, not murky brown. I admired the vast patchwork of ploughed land and crops, with the rusty red of sorghum seed-heads, the green of new crops, the cream of harvested stubble and the rich dark soil itself.
Later that day, heading towards the hills and home, I pass incredibly flat golden vistas of sunflower heads and their vibrant green plants and I am struck by its ‘livingness’ as I think of the appalling contrast I will meet back as I drive back into the Hunter.
Vistas of dirt and coal, an industrial hell, a dead landscape, seen through the veil made by one of the highest concentrations of fine dust particulates in Australia. I hope the Caroona farmers manage to stop this happening to their Plains — and after speaking to many of them I believe they will!
For three days in October, from Friday 9th—Sunday 11th, I’ll be camping in my little tent alongside hundreds of others at Climate Camp ’09 . 
Many farms, like the one below, have already been bought up for hard-to-resist prices; across other paddocks we could see dozens of test drill pipes under their white caps.
This region is watered by pristine rivers and creeks that rise in the nearby World Heritage sub-alpine Gloucester and Barrington Tops. And yet the mine wants to discharge its toxic waste water into these streams.
These gullies run into Mammy Johnsons River (below), which flows to the Karuah River and thence to the tourist and marine environment mecca of Port Stephens.
‘The Drip’ in Goulburn River National Park under threat from mining; get the scale of its grandeur from the two figures at its base.
In the months before the international climate conference in Copenhagen the dinosaurs of the coal industry are spending up big on lobbying to keep things the way they like them and helping the usual crew of Parliamentary dinosaurs to block the creation of hundreds of thousands of badly needed new clean energy jobs.
