Environment

Victoria, here I come!

by

huntermurk.jpg

Next week I’ll be passing once more through the dust-laden skies of the poor old Hunter Valley. Looking north to Muswellbrook, you’d think it was Los Angeles smog, but no, just way too many coalmines.

I’ll be heading south, booktalking again, to Victoria. Having won two national short story awards given by Victorian Shires in the past, I’m happy to be returning.

On Monday November 12th I’ll be speaking at Lilydale Library’s Reading Café at 12.30.

On Tuesday afternoon the dynamic Ann Creber will be talking with me on her 3MDR radio show, ‘The Good Life’.

On Wednesday 14th at 7pm I’ll be speaking at the Eltham Library as part of their Red Chair series by artists.

Back in NSW, the following week I’m speaking at the State Library in Macquarie Street, Sydney, as part of their exhibition, ‘Impact: A Changing Land’.

This will be at 12 noon on Wednesday 21st and I’ll be doing a double act on the topic of ‘Choosing the good life’ with Adrienne Langman, author of ‘Choosing Eden: the real dirt on the coming energy crisis’.

Stopping coal from Newcastle

by

beach boy

The historic Nobby’s Lighthouse guards the entry to Newcastle Harbour, the world’s largest coal exporting port.

Last Saturday a whole bunch of dangerously concerned people took to the water in kayaks and canoes, rafts and rubber rings, to stop at least some of that coal leaving to further fuel climate chaos.

Ten coal ships were meant to leave that day, but only two did.

family protest

The police were out in force, on land and sea, to help protect Australia from such ill-intentioned folk. How dare they try to deflect the planet from destruction!

The long-haired organiser, Steve Phillips of Rising Tide, typified the kind of people involved: for all they knew he could have been concealing more than his son in that baby carrier.

When a coal ship actually approached, I headed out on the water with all the others, to be rounded up by police jet skis and rubber boats, so didn’t take photos of the extremely large black ship looming over the volunteer flotilla, nor of the big grey police boat that broke up the group.

police

And if that coal ship did pass, at least it was slowed up almost to a standstill. The people’s point was made.

Land use — alive or dead

by

rolling fields

Driving through the Upper Hunter Valley lately, I was struck with the beauty of the few productive farming valleys still operating. They were alive with a variety of textures and colours, and although man-made, they fitted in with the natural beauty of the mountains beyond.

They were complementary because they were all living. The soil was doing what it was supposed to — growing plants, be they trees, grass, weeds or hay. It felt like part of the cycle of life.

This was in depressing contrast to many other places in the Hunter, where the light splotches in the landscape are not from hay or wheat, but from the artificial mountains of coal overburden, like these at the Bengalla mine near Muswellbrook, which at their edges, loom incredibly close above the actual town.

coal dump

It was also in great contrast to where I’d been, just over the range in the Mudgee area, driving through other once-productive valleys condemned to mining, with the farms abandoned, houses, fences and sheds decaying, awaiting their fate — disembowelment.

The Wilpinjong mine near Wollar is only about 16 months old but it’s an ugly sight of dead country already. They’ve actually pumped dry the first set of bores they drilled, and are now drilling more and pumping from further afield. Very sustainable.

coal mine

coal dust

It is not near any main road or highway but is right beside the rural dirt roads along which people must still live. Pale dust from flying trucks and dumped overburdens, black coal dust from the working excavator, 24 hour noise — it was all gung-ho and who cares out there!

No doubt they would insist that ‘strict environmental guidelines’ are being complied with. The locals know better.

Meet Glenn Albrecht

by

I’ve added a new link to bring Glenn Albrecht’s blog healthearth to your notice. It’s a treat as he’s a lyrical eco-philosopher. On it he writes commentary, eco-poems and eco-song lyrics — with apologies where due to such as Peter Garrett and Bob Dylan.

Glenn is also Associate Professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Newcastle.

I first knew him as the inventor of the term ‘solastalgia’, which describes the homesickness you feel when you are still at home, as your once familiar, thought-to-be forever landscape is changed abruptly and beyond your power to control.

This has happened with the massive Hunter open cut coalmines, but applies to other disasters like hurricanes, that we once called ‘natural’.

With the increasing climate chaos caused by us, I no longer use that term.

In control

by

control1.jpg

Driving up the New England Highway to Muswellbrook, in the heart of coalmine country, I noticed that, as always, the air was clear and fresh. The mines are obviously doing what they’re supposed to, which is keep any effects within the site area.

Thus when I look towards that hidden distant mine void, the airborne dust I see is either an illusion, or it will turn around when it realises the wind is blowing it off site.

So reassuring that they are in control of their dust.

control2.jpg

The other comforting evidence that our masters keep their word and know what they’re talking about regards canola.

This is especially important because I understand they are considering removing the ban on GM canola crops in NSW. We are assured no GM crops would escape and infect other crops.

Funny though, how one good burst of rain has sent canola into frantic growth all up and down the roadsides and railway lines, over the paddocks and up the hillsides, if you can peer through the murk to see the hills.

Yellow, yellow everywhere, and none of it intentionally sown in this non-canola-growing area. I had to ask a local to check my disbelief, so dense and vast was the spread of canola in paddocks.

The fine seed was apparently in stockfeed mix used extensively here during the drought. Canola is the new feral here; it beats fireweed and capeweed as the Yellow Peril this season for sure. How much wider will it have spread next year?

But of course GM canola will be under control.

Home is where the dirt is

by

mine1.jpg

Flying back we passed over the Hunter. I knew the scars of the giant opencut mines were visible from space, and I’d seen aerial pics, but nothing prepared me for their scale and quantity in such close proximity, compared to any other manmade marks on the landscape over the whole trip from Cairns.

Chains of gaping holes and dust mountains. No wonder the air over Singleton and Muswellbrook is one of the worst concentrations of fine dust particulates in Australia, with 50,000 tonnes a year, compared to Scone, where, with no mines, it’s less than 1 tonne a year.

Mr Sartor’s approval of the 2000-hectare Anvil Hill opencut will ensure it is the absolute worst.

mine2.jpg

The Hunter is choking on coal. That’s why the air there is brownish grey and that’s why this pollution layer marks our entry into Hunter skies.

And now he wants the Mudgee area to go the way of the Hunter. To add to the sufferings of the people near Ulan and Wollar with their existing mines, he’s approved Moolarben, insanely close to the Goulburn River: two open cuts and a long-wall, using over 6 million litres of water a day to wash the coal.

But hey, who needs water — or rivers? Or fresh air?

March against Coal

by

parade.jpg

On Tuesday 31st July I got all dressed up to join a street march organised by Rising Tide, a Newcastle-based grassroots climate change action group.

While they constantly use their considerable pool of brains to campaign aginst any new coal mines or increased coal exports in the Hunter in conventional ways like submissions, they equally win my admiration with such creative and energetic actions as this march.

Headed by giant puppets of Peter Garrett and Kevin Rudd, chained to Coal as they are, with a troupe of ashen skeletons in floating funeral raiment carrying coal to local MPs, the parade stopped traffic and chanted ‘No New Coal’ until it was hoarse.

Grannies like me and a phalanx of stroller-pushing mums joined the dreadlocked young in a parade of around 200 people protesting the insanity of increasing coal mining and coal exports.

Given that the giant Pasha Bulka carrier had been washed up on the local Nobbys Beach by just such an ‘extreme weather event’ as is predicted from increasing climate chaos, how can the Iemma government claim to be dealing with climate change when they have approved the huge Anvil Hill mine and the expansion of the Newcastle coal loader?

bikini.jpg

I reckoned it was worth donning a bikini years after I swore I never would again. Pretty fetching, eh? At least I was ready for any weather event.

After the fires

by

Five years after our last bad fire, the eucalypt forest has recovered. On the rough and furrowed trunks of the stringybark trees, bunches of dead stems fan out like whiskers, or bony-fingered hands.

When all their normal mop heads of gum leaves were burnt, these emergency feeder leaves sprouted straight out of the blackened trunks, all the way up to the top and along the branches. The forest became an alien one of upraised claws, presenting an increasingly furry silhouette as the suckers emerge.

It was a transitional landscape, for now the mop heads are back and doing their job. The interim sucker leaves are dead and fallen, and eventually their dry stems will break off too.  The blackened bark will remain so.

After fire

In the more rainforest areas, where the trees do not have this special survival tactic, normality is far slower to return — if ever.

But there are a few protected pockets where isolated offspring of the fallen are growing strongly. In the lee of one dead wattle, as its bark cracks and peels off, a Native Bleeding Heart tree (Omalanthus populifolius) and a Giant Stinging Tree (Dendrocnide excelsa) reach for the sky.

In fact, both have heart-shaped leaves. My mind leapfrogs to connections, connotations — to Richard the Lionheart, Braveheart, to ‘coeur’ — courage, to courage under fire — and after fire?

After fire2

Salvation Sunday at Anvil Hill

by

Several hundred people from all over NSW had made their way to the property near Anvil Hill by Saturday’s nightfall. Faces by firelight, beanie-topped, scarf-swathed, hard to recognise. Wood smoke and cooking smells – the Hare Krishnas’ curry competing with the steak sandwiches.

Music and talk with passionate folk from Canberra to Byron Bay: the mood is optimistic. We CAN save Anvil Hill!

anvil1.jpg

Next morning is foggy, the hundreds of small dome tents like brightly coloured fungi emerging from the grey ground cover of sticks and bark, where the vicious tiger pear leaves await the unwary. Some try to migrate, hitch a ride on my tyres.

anvil2.jpg

As the fog lifts and the sun warms our bodies, hundreds more people arrive, in vans and cars and buses big and small. Their blue-clad numbers warm our hearts.

Read more

High Noon at Anvil Hill

by

Don’t let them turn this

anvil.jpg

into this

crater.jpg

Next weekend, June 2 and 3, I’ll be heading to Anvil Hill near Wybong in the Upper Hunter Valley.

Centennial Coal wants to turn it into a monster open cut coal mine, 2000 hectares of it, destroying precious remnant valley floor woodlands.

I’ve seen it, and still can’t believe anyone would contemplate approving a mine in a place called ‘The Ark of the Hunter’ because of its rich biodiversity. But, having postponed his decision until after the election, NSW Minister for Planning, Frank Sartor, will be delivering it soon.

Local winemakers and horsebreeders don’t want this mine any more than the farmers or the environmentalists do. Lots of people from all over the state will be there this weekend too, to draw a metaphoric line in the sand and say to Mr Sartor, ‘No new coalmines’.

Check out the Anvil Hill Alliance for details like directions, special buses from Sydney and Newcastle on the Sunday, and bookings.

Coal is proven to be toxic for the planet: how insane is it to be helping fuel global warming, to the tune of around 25 million tonnes of C02 per annum??!!

Read more