There's a Nature Refuge in Central Queensland...
Its name might be familiar: Bimblebox.
I first wrote about it two years after coming to live in Australia (in 2010). I’d been told to watch the eponymous film if I was concerned about this nation’s ruination of its landscape. In the Tribal Theatre in Brisbane I met a Scottish lady who has since become a dear friend, and with whom and alongside others, eight years later, I am fighting to prevent the wanton destruction of remnant Desert Uplands woodland to make way for yet another vexatious coal mine.
Over the next few years I wrote measured updates from pertinent Land Court cases (for example here) or louder, angrier outcries (see here) about outdated, inadequate environmental law and a so-called Protected Area that was fast becoming a poster-child for everything wrong with Australia’s biodiversity conservation. The last time I wrote more than a passing mention of Bimblebox was in a piece entitled Drowning, in which I sound in need of either anger management therapy or antidepressants, or both.
In 2014, co-owner of Bimblebox Paola Cassoni asked some of the people who had previously offered to help her halt the mine, to join her in creating The Bimblebox Alliance (TBA). As well as preserving the natural values of Bimblebox, TBA promotes the conservation of the natural values of other Protected Areas, and encourages their expansion in Queensland.
Since I first watched the Bimblebox documentary, I’ve never forgotten Guy Pearse’s description of Australia’s ‘quarry vision’ of its future. ‘We assume that coal and cheap energy, fossil-fuel-based energy, is our competitive economic advantage. That’s just a bedrock assumption of Australian life. Every night on television, Australians are fed this assumption; whether it’s a union leader, or an economist, or a politician, reinforcing the perception that that is what we do; that’s what we do best.’
Pearse, formerly of the Global Institute at the University of Queensland, had expounded this theory in 2009 in a Quarterly Essay entitled Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom. To read this now, you wouldn’t think we were more than a decade on, such is the ongoing pervasive control these industries exercise over Australia's response to what is now a climate emergency.
Guy Pearse again: ‘Coal exports have become the perfect environmental crime, because they don’t count in your emissions column and, by and large, the customer is in a position to increase their emissions for the next few decades.’
And how many times have we heard, and continue to hear, during what feels like an endless succession of Coalition federal governments, Labour Oppositions and state governments with as big a mining addiction as Queensland, the drug dealer’s defence: if Australia doesn’t sell coal to hungry developing markets, somebody else surely will.
Bimblebox is threatened by one of Waratah’s two proposed mines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, in which lie vast deposits of coal. Originally nine ‘mega-mines’ were proposed, including Adani’s infamous Carmichael mine. Until recently I believed we were running in a race against time; that global markets would soon render any massive new coal mine economically unviable. Since last summer’s devastating bushfires, however, I realise that the Morrison government’s entrenchment is far, far bigger and blinder than I’d previously thought. To add to Australia’s woes, we have as prime minister a member of a religious cult that has taken an instruction in its favourite book rather too literally: to fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Scott Morrison’s particular sect allegedly looks forward to the end of the world, when those who have paid and prayed enough will somehow be spared the awful fiery fate the rest of us are heading for.
Woodland and heath on Bimblebox
TBA’s long battle is approaching its dénouement. At the end of 2019, Waratah Coal (owned by Clive Palmer) issued a Notice of Entry (to Bimblebox) to change the pegs delineating the proposed mine site in line with the soon-to-be-issued public notices of their applications for a Mining Lease (ML) and Environmental Authority (EA). In April this year, TBA lodged notices of objection to both these in the Queensland Land Court. We are represented by the Environmental Defenders Office in Brisbane.
We were always prepared for dirty tactics on Waratah’s part. They came in the form of an application to the Land Court to strike out a number of objections to their mine under Queensland’s Human Rights Act. This relatively new legislation would, if Waratah were successful, restrict the ability of organisations (‘incorporated entities’) to use Human Rights arguments in Court. You can read more information about TBA’s arguments on HR grounds here. Justice Fleur Kingham will hand down her judgement by the end of August, we hope.
The more Australia trashes its ecoystems, the fewer wonders of the natural world will be left for our daughters’ and sons’ children to discover and treasure; the more coal is dug out of the ground, no matter where it is burned, the more the planet’s atmosphere will heat up and the more intolerable will conditions become for any life on earth.
As I write there are two hurricanes forming simultaneously in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a first; and more than a million acres have already been destroyed by fire in California, earlier in the summer than usual. I can’t be the only person to have read with dread reports of the first bushfire alert last week, at Duranbah in New South Wales, two weeks before the end of winter.
A month ago, I attended a webinar about planetary boundaries. Climate scientist Professor Will Steffen, formerly of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University and advisor to the federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, calmly and straightforwardly informed us that we have a decade, tops, to reduce our carbon emissions significantly enough to prevent those tipping points we’ve heard so much about for years now but not taken seriously enough.
I leave you with footage of what will be lost if Bimblebox is sacrificed for the greed of the fossil fuel industry.
