Chapter 3 Australia now: the architecture of dispossession

The extractivist mode of production in Australia today

Capitalist ecology gives rise to the ecocide-genocide nexus for two fundamental, structural reasons:¹ firstly, the extra-economic processes of plunder, fraud or theft, from without the circuits of production and capital accumulation, that alienate social groups from their lands; secondly, the value-contradiction embedded within the various industrial (and financial) processes operating within the expanded reproduction of the circuits of capital – what I earlier referred to as a political economy of eco-genocide. These structures are particularly pertinent where settler-colonial contexts form the backdrop.

In the case studies below, we will see the first stage of primary accumulation in the repeated attempts to domicidally sever Indigenous people from their land and then secure mining rights to extract subsurface minerals to facilitate the process of capital accumulation (the second stage). This first stage will be facilitated through the modality of recognition politics and land rights as once again a form of ‘hybridisation’ (Lloyd, 2010, p. 33), in which state-sponsored land grabs facilitated by the modality of land rights that erect uneven fields of negotiation make the Indigenous societies ‘ready’ for fusion through the ‘cunning of recognition’ (Povinelli, 2007) with settler capitalist or market relations. This corresponds with Hartwig’s (1978, p. 129) first mode of articulation of the settler-colonial and Indigenous figuration, first discussed in Chapter 2, namely the extraction of commodities in different ways. In this case the commodity will be coal and gas.

The second key structure at the second stage is shaped by the law of value under capitalist production which from the beginning of settler colonisation in Australia, and as I have argued in Canada (Crook and Short, 2014), explains the ecologically destructive forces unleashed by capitalist extractive industries. For it blindsides capitalists, economic theorists and the various intellectuals that would seek to ‘rationalise’ the capitalist system to nature’s contribution to value production. Commodities, as exchange values, embody or measure the quantity of abstract socially necessary labour time expended in their production. Their qualitative differences, as objects in the material world with use values, are erased, so that they may be made commensurable. Money, as the general equivalent of value, as the measure of general wealth, is necessary, precisely because of the ‘contradiction between social generality and homogeneity of [exchange] value versus the material particularity and qualitative variety of commodity use values’ (Burkett, 2014, p. 84). Ecological connections and diversities are lost in the abstraction of exchange value. As I have argued elsewhere: ‘The formal abstraction under exchange value therefore tends towards the simplification and homogenisation of nature as well as its artificial divisibility or fragmentation into either elements of the natural conditions of production or as commodities themselves’ (Crook and Short, 2014, p. 302). In other words, value and money, not only abstract from the web of ecological interconnections and diversities but through the pricing of aspects or parts of nature, enable its fragmentation and carving up into discrete vendible articles for sale or as elements of the means of production. Marx (1973, p. 141) sharply observed, ‘as value, every commodity is equally divisible; in its natural existence this is not the case’.

Concretely, this means the extraction, processing and distribution of these elements or natural commodities, such as mineral resources, fossil fuels or produce, is conducted in a manner that disregards its relationship with the ecological whole and disembodies and dislocates these natural commodities. In essence, the narrow horizon of exchange value combined with the insatiable drive to accumulate capital, understood as an ecological process, requires more and more of what ecologists describe as ‘throughput of materials and energy’ (Burkett, 2014, p. 112) – a continual exchange necessary for the regeneration and continuation of the ecological life-sustaining web (Marx, 1976a, p. 290). As we saw on the Australian pastoral frontier and will see below at the sites of fossil fuel extraction, this places an ever-greater strain on the social metabolism of the capitalist system and therefore on nature and the biospheric web – eventually causing ‘metabolic rifts’ (Burkett, 2014; Foster, 2000, 2005; Stretesky et al., 2013).

Value analysis is perfectly capable of accounting for all forms of what have become known as ‘extreme energy’ as well, a form of extractivism which will feature in the case studies below, given its name due to the much higher levels of ecological destruction and energy consumption needed to extract the mineral resource in the first place, a term first coined first coined by Michael T. Klare (2013). Unfortunately, extreme energy has opened up a new and rapidly expanding front in the relations of genocide and Indigenous resistance in Australia today. What elsewhere I described as ‘a nadir of the anti-ecological dysfunction of exchange value’ (Crook and Short, 2014, p. 302), extreme energy is an umbrella term for particularly virulent forms of ecologically unsound industrial energy extraction. These include, for instance, mountain-top removal, deep-water drilling and hydraulic ‘fracking’ or CSG, as it is known in Australia. However, although describing them as simply more intensive and environmentally destructive forms of energy extraction is helpful, it still leaves unclear how extreme this form of energy needs to be in order to qualify under this umbrella term. Instead, Lloyd-Davies (2013) argues extreme energy should be understood as a process in which the energy resources easiest to extract are first targeted, such as those sources of oil or gas conveniently concentrated in larger pockets and relatively easy to drill down into and access, which largely characterised the ‘halcyon days’ of energy extraction in the early twentieth century. This is then followed by the resort to the extraction of increasingly difficult, complex and energy-intensive sources of mineral resources. Critically, the increase in effort is correlated with an increase in environmental degradation.

One of the central ecological contradictions of the capitalist system is that between the exponential increase in the throughput of materials and energy associated with the treadmill of accumulation and the natural limits of production (Crook and Short, 2014, p. 302). Given the disequilibrium between capital’s ferocious pace in the throughput of energy and materials and nature’s laws and temporal rhythms and metabolic cycles, eventually capital provokes ‘materials-supplies disturbances’ (Marx, 1968, p. 515). This results in an inevitable shortage of materials and an accumulation crisis.² The result, as dictated by the operation of the law of value, is that the price of the relevant raw material will go up as the amount of socially necessary labour time objectified in each individual product or use value rises in relative terms. Marx (1968, p. 515) analysed this phenomenon through the prism of an agricultural crisis:

A crisis can arise: 1. in the course of the reconversion [of money] into productive capital; 2. through changes in the value of the elements of productive capital, particularly of raw material, for example when there is a decrease in the quantity of cotton harvested. Its value will thus rise. [emphasis added]

This rise in the value of constant capital, as opposed to labour, could become so costly it starts to disrupt the process of the reproduction of capital, as the profit realised in the sale of a whole plethora of commodities, of which the various raw materials are a constituent part, no longer covers the costs of the elements of production. This process is exemplified by extreme energy as the supply of fossil fuels begins to run up against natural limits, thus raising the relative amount of objectified labour in a given quantity of fossil fuel leading, in the medium to long term, to a rise in the average price of fossil fuels. Indeed, within the process of extreme energy, where more complex and costly techniques are required for the extraction of ever-scarcer sources, the very same process unfolds. This is precisely a manifestation of materials-supply disturbances, or natural limits in modern parlance, as a form of accumulation crisis. Furthermore, the resulting rise in the price of raw materials engenders, under conditions of competitive accumulation, a number of competitive responses. These include increased production from suppliers (therefore accelerating and intensifying the metabolic strain on the environment and exacerbating the aforementioned contradiction) and the use of previously unused substitutes (Marx, 1991, pp. 118–19). Extreme energy ‘as a process’ is both an expression of material shortages engendered by the contradiction between ‘nature’s time’ and ‘capital’s time’ and a competitive response, through the operations of the market, to correct the imbalance through the extraction of ever more extreme substitutes. The net metabolic effect on the social metabolism is to put further pressure both on local ecosystems and the biosphere more generally. Even what is known as the ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) profile of forms of extreme such as CSG, where less net energy is acquired due to the more intense and complex forms of extraction required, can be explained by value analysis, since under a capitalist economy (and ecology), all other considerations, in particular ecological imperatives of sustainability, conservation and energy efficiency, are subordinated to exchange value. We will return to the wave of ecological fragmentation and dislocation wrought by extreme energy when I examine the case studies more closely. Suffice to say, with ‘peak oil’ having been passed most likely in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Murphy, 2010), it seems likely we will continue to occupy this stage of the process for the foreseeable future.

Although in the past, particularly in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, colonial capitalist development and state formation relied on both land and, to an admittedly lesser extent, Indigenous labour, where the mineocracy and extractivism are concerned, at the sites of extraction and its associated political economy, the colonial-relation is of greater weight than the capital-relation, when considering what Coulthard (2014, p. 11) described as the ‘subject position of the colonized vis-à-vis the effects of colonial dispossession’. To be clear, the capital relation is still constitutive in the sense that at the time of writing in Australia, over 40 percent of ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’ live in urban centres (Australian Bureau of Statistics, (ABS, 2024) and as many as 56 per cent of those in major cities are part of the labour force (AIHW, 2023) and thus will be exposed to the kinds of political influences and structural forces delineated in the previous chapter when discussing the rise of the new historical subject, the Indigenous proletariat. Moreover, under many Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUA), entered into between mining companies and Indigenous people (discussed in more detail below), there are requirements to employ Indigenous labour, on paper at least. However, in practice it doesn’t always materialise, either due to chronic underfunding of various Indigenous institutions provided for under legislation to represent Indigenous interests in negotiations with resource companies (O’Faircheallaigh, 2007, p. 31), or a general historical underinvestment in social and physical infrastructure for Indigenous communities, leaving them ill prepared to take advantage of potential employment opportunities (Howlett et al., 2011, p. 319).

Although the collective or cultural memory of the struggles that grew out of the intersection of the capital and colonial relation still endure to this day,³ nevertheless, in a more immediate or direct sense, the employment of Indigenous labour in the extractive industry today plays a far smaller role, given the relatively minor degree of Indigenous employment in the extractive industry. Despite the hollow promises offered by industry spokesman, Indigenous labour is not central to this process of accumulation by dispossession (Altman, 2018, p. 354). Therefore, in this current juncture, the colonial relation will figure more greatly in the determination of the case studies examined below. The case studies will exemplify the ‘nadir of exchange value’, which will take form as the extractivist mode of production controlled by the mineocracy, made possible by an unholy alliance between global corporate interests and resource or ‘extractivist states’ for the purpose of (re)territorialisation of Indigenous land for extractive purposes (Bebbington et al., 2008; Howlett et al., 2011; Lyons, 2018), just as the pastoral industry did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only this time through the governmentality and discourse of ‘recognition’.

Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Council versus the mineocracy

One case which exemplifies the mode of administrative genocide arguably more than any other in Australia, in the name of development and driven by an alliance between the extractivist state and resource developers, is the continuing struggle waged by the Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) Traditional Owners Council, manifest in their campaign ‘Adani, No Means No’. W&J are seeking to prevent Indian-based industrial conglomerate Adani Enterprises’ proposed Carmichael Mine, which, if developed, would be the world’s largest open-cut coal mine, covering 30,000 square kilometres in a region known as the Galilee Basin, Central Queensland. This is a region which possesses the largest untapped coal deposit in the country and is considered key by state and federal governments to be Australia’s future resource revenue prospects; this is Australia’s new coal frontier (Lyons, 2018, p. 2). The project, which also includes extensive air, rail and port infrastructure, crosses the homelands of four different Indigenous nations, including W&J ancestral homelands governed by W&J for ‘untold thousands of years’ (Burragubba, 2018, p. i). The potential environmental externalities of the project are considerable. They include: contributions to climate change, with an estimated generation of 4.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, which will be approximately 0.5 per cent of the entire remaining carbon budget for the country assuming we hold global temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (Taylor and Meinshausen, 2014); damage to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area; biodiversity loss; and the destruction of sacred cultural and spiritual sites for the W&J, including the Doongmabulla Springs Complex, all of which have been the subject of legal action in the Australian Courts (Environmental Law Australia, n.d.). Explaining the importance of the Doongmabulla Springs Complex, W&J Council spokesperson and Indigenous community leader Adrian Burragubba (W&J FC, 2019) said:

The mine would pollute and drain billions of litres of groundwater, and obliterate our ancient springs … The water is our life. It is our dreaming and our sovereignty. We cannot give that away … Water is central to our laws, our religion and our identity. It is the Mundunjudra, the water spirit, the rainbow serpent.

In a submission written to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, W&J Family Council members Adrian Burragubba and Murrawah Johnson (2015) made clear the genocidal implications. If the development of the Adani mine went ahead:

It would permanently destroy vast swathes of our traditional lands and waters, including a complex of springs that we hold sacred as the starting point of our life and through which our dreaming totem, the Mundunjudra (also known as the Rainbow Serpent) travelled to form the shape of the land. We exist as people of our land and waters, and all things on and in them – plants and animals – have special meaning to us and tell us who we are. Our land and waters are our culture and our identity. If they are destroyed, we will become nothing. [emphasis added]

This would qualify as the ninth genocidal technique defined in Chapter 2, an ecologically induced genocide. Nevertheless, Adani have almost too predictably framed the development of this coal mine in developmentalist language that promises to lift millions out of poverty in India by supporting electrification projects; their main home page is daubed with the Orwellian slogan ‘growth with goodness’ (Adani, n.d.).

Adani has reached agreement via ILUAs with Indigenous communities, but given the colonial structure of the NTA, which favours mining interests (Corbett and O’Faircheallaigh, 2006), and the colonial dilemma it poses, those same agreements have driven intercommunal conflicts, as they often have (Bebbington et al., 2008); a division emerges between those who are persuaded of the potential for employment and economic development, often out of desperation or due to economic marginalisation and exclusion, and those who seek to protect country and sacred cultural and spiritual sites, divisions I will return to when I examine the fates of the Githabul and Gomeroi. Given the various structural disadvantages of the NTA which skew the negotiating field in favour of the extractive companies and the resource state, including a threat to extinguish native title, compulsory acquisition of their land and denial of any compensation or royalties if they refuse to negotiate or choose to resist any ILUA, their sustained campaign is both rare and quite remarkable (Bebbington et al., 2008). Indeed, it is precisely due to these skewed and asymmetrical forms of negotiation under the present legal frameworks discussed above that a wedge is driven within communities between those who seek to defend country and protect the environments and those understandably drawn in by promises of economic development and employment opportunities. Sadly, those opportunities constitute arguably the worst deal offered in history for Indigenous peoples under ILUAs and their equivalents (Robertson, 2017).

The conflict between W&J and Adani revolves around the highly controversial ILUA agreed with the W&J. The ILUA is necessary to ‘surrender’ native title over a 2,750-hectare area necessary for the development of the mine and associated infrastructure. Despite numerous refusals of proposed ILUAs by the Native Title Claim Group dating back to 2012, Adani applied to the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT) for a determination under the NTA for a mining lease.⁴ In an interview with the W&J Council’s official advisor and long-time collaborator Anthony Esposito (author interview, 10/02/2017), he explained that the failure to reach initial agreements prior to the resort to arbitration under the NNTT was the inauspicious circumstances under which the W&J registered native title claimants (RNTC) were required to reach an agreement:

The native title act is designed to make sure the window shuts on ’em pretty quickly … they have a right to negotiate but if they don’t do it quickly enough it gets slammed on them anyway. Generally, people want ILUAs. At the end of the day, it’s a sensible path for most people to take and even though there are time limits, good proponents will actually spend time on building agreements, and good claimants [RNTCs] will spend time working back and forth with their community members and carrying on negotiations. And in the more positive circumstances you do end up with an agreement that could probably pass the free prior and informed consent test.

When asked why the negotiations did finally breakdown, he responded (author interview, 10/02/2017):

It didn’t pass the test because firstly, the offers on the table weren’t adequate. Secondly, the negotiating style was poor even down to the level of ‘look if you don’t agree we’ll go and get what we want anyway’ – so effectively coercion. It broke down because of insults. It broke down because of lack of resources to enable proper and meaningful consultation. The company provides information, and the traditional owner group is expected to get across ten technical reports, feasibility studies, complex legal documents to do with agreements, all in a period of time, so the odds are really stacked against them … they are trying to cover all this over with the veneer of consent. [emphasis added]

Indeed, under such onerous conditions, where (lack of) time, resources and technical knowledge create asymmetrical terrains of negotiation, it is understandable when some applicants within the RNTC agree to the ILUA – most notably perhaps of the seven, Patrick Malone and Irene White. In fact, until Adrian Burragubba was appointed as a member of the RNTC in August 2014, the dominant position within the claimant group accepted the mine on Indigenous land and was willing to negotiate on the condition that it would return long-term intergenerational benefits to traditional owners. Their withholding of consent was conditional on acquiring benefits that were satisfactory to the whole community. However, given the unequal power dynamic and onerous conditions present within the negotiations of the ILUA illuminated above, many within the former faction arguably acquiesced rather than willingly embraced the inevitability of the mine. As Patrick Malone conceded: ‘Even though some [Wangan and Jagalingou] people didn’t like the idea of the mine, most knew it would probably go ahead and it was best to take the opportunities for our people, to get jobs for the next generations’ (McKenna, 2015). In 2015, the NNTT concluded that despite the failure to reach agreement with the Indigenous community the mine could go ahead under what is called the ‘expedited procedure’ system,⁵ of the NTA. This was a system that now favoured resource or mining interests even more under the Howard government amendments to the NTA and his ‘Wik 10 Point Plan’.⁶

As Ritter (2002, p. 1) dryly observes to Indigenous people, ‘this colonial euphemism […] is merely a coded way of the Government saying “the resource interest does not have to talk to you about the grant of this tenement”’. Ritter (2002, p. 5) astutely argues that processes like the NNTT are bedevilled by bureaucratic pathologies in which a type of hyperactivity is manifested in the needless proliferation of rules and procedures which are ‘the opiate of the bureaucrat’ (Hogwood and Peters, 1989, p. 52). Needless to say, this procedural labyrinth is compounded when invariably both the NNTT and the Federal Court are funded to a greater extent than native title parties (Hogwood and Peters, 1989, p. 6). This further skews an already asymmetrical field of negotiation, which is concealed by an overgrowth of ‘bureaucratic ideology’ that claims to interpret the application of the expedited procedures in a rational and impartial manner, transforming what are political decisions into technical questions that can only be solved by bureaucrats. This amounts to an ‘imposition of colonial truth, in the guise of objectivity, upon the Indigenous populace’ (Hogwood and Peters, 1989).

An appeal against this decision brought by the W&J was dismissed,⁷ as was an appeal from that decision.⁸ This power to effectively annex the land by fiat demonstrates the colonial dilemma discussed above and the total evisceration of the three key rights under UNDRIP defined in Chapter 1. In April 2016, Adani, in collusion with the states Coordinator General, organised yet another meeting with Native title claimants wherein they secured agreement, with seven out of the twelve registered native title claimants (RNTC) agreeing to the mine. What W&J advisor Esposito (author interview, 10/02/2017) described as the ‘veneer of consent’ is still preferable to the appearance of forced annexation. Despite a further meeting in 2017 with Adani rejecting any agreement, this ILUA stands as the legal basis for the Carmichael Mine. However, according to W&J spokesperson Adrian Burragubba, the agreement was only secured during the April 2016 meeting after repeated rejections, through a concerted campaign of bullying by the Queensland Government and Adani (Lyons, 2018, p. 3).⁹

In essence, the W&J argue (Esposito W&J advisor, author interview, 10/02/2017), in a scenario repeated again and again with members of Indigenous nations across the country in my field interviews, that, in the meeting in question, some who attended were not actual members of the native title group nor ever identified as members of the W&J. Moreover, Adani stood accused of paying bribes to some of the native title claim group to vote in favour of the mine (Esposito W&J advisor, author interview, 10/02/2017; Robertson, 2017). These payments were ostensibly made through what was earlier described as the ‘industry mandate’ where resource developers are encouraged by the government to fund the ILUA negotiations. The exacerbation of the already existing uneven power dynamic this creates is demonstrated by this case study (Esposito W&J advisor, author interview, 10/02/2017; Burnside, 2008; O’Faircheallaigh, 2006, p. 5). It also resonates with Lemkin’s second genocidal technique: social, which recall, involves the annihilation of the national leadership and the imposition of the legal system of the occupant. Sadly, this technique will be evident in the case of the Githabul and the Gomeroi, examined below.

Despite the native title group being split almost down the middle, with one native title claimant who originally voted in favour in the April 2016 meeting switching sides, the ILUA was ruled valid by the full bench in an appeal hearing at the Federal Court, ‘notwithstanding any deficiencies which might have tainted the validity of the certification’, noted Justice Melissa Perry (Smee, 2019). But as Adrian Burragubba (Smee, 2019) pointed out in response:

The decision [hinged] only on the question of whether the certification and registration of the Adani ILUA were administered according to the legal requirements of the Native Title Act … It will not pull back the veil on the … process leading up to and after the authorisation meeting. Nor will it confirm whether in fact the people in attendance at the Adani meeting were entitled under the laws and customs of Wangan and Jagalingou people to make that decision to sign away W&J rights in land for monetary compensation.

In a graphic demonstration of the power wielded by the mining lobby, the Queensland government moved to pass a series of policies and expedited approvals to mitigate any risk to the Carmichael mine and associated infrastructure. This included the ‘Galilee Basin Development Strategy’, a policy developed by the Queensland government in 2013 to expedite planning approvals and land acquisition and remove any requirements to pay government royalties (The Queensland Cabinet and Ministerial Directory, 2013). In 2016 the Adani development was designated as ‘critical infrastructure’, which again enabled the fast-tracking of approvals for the mine as well as the curtailing of community consultation, which clearly transgresses FPIC. Lyons (2018, pp. 6–7) argues the significance of these and other strategic and policy manoeuvres, including the granting of environmental approval, despite the aforementioned environmental impacts of the proposed mine and even the rewriting of the State Water Act (Environmental Law Australia, n.d.), was to provide a statutory mandate to hasten the compulsory acquisition of Indigenous land and extinguishment of native title. In the context of the history of Australian settler–Indigenous relations, encounters between extractive interests, the state and Indigenous peoples, and the history of Indigenous land rights in Australia, it is hard to disagree.

To underscore the nature of the genocide machine in the era of ‘recognition’ politics, the federal government would go on to force through amendments to the NTA, referred to mockingly as the ‘Adani amendment’ by the W&J Council (Stockwell, 2017), to overturn a key ‘McGlade’ High Court decision on 2 February 2017.¹⁰ This decision recognised traditional Indigenous collective decision-making structures which required unanimous support for an ILUA to go ahead. This threatened to invalidate Adani’s ILUA, given only seven of the twelve registered native title applicants signed. Within weeks the federal government would introduce an amendment to the NTA: Indigenous Land Use Agreements Bill, 2017. Whilst the bill was being expeditiously drafted and passed, the Attorney General intervened in the Federal Court to delay the McGlade order. As before, with the NTA and the Native Title Amendment Bill (1997) that followed it, the legislation retroactively validated any ILUAs considered under threat by McGlade, again fuelled by government and mining lobby claims that it jeopardised the future of the mining industry. In keeping with previous attempts at recognition and reconciliation (Short, 2007, 2008), the consultation process was severely curtailed with stakeholders and effected communities allowed only two weeks to make a submission to a Senate Inquiry, assuming they had the legal expertise to make sense of the complex legal amendments, again begging questions regarding meaningful FPIC. Ultimately, in August 2019, the Queensland government extinguished native title over 1,385 hectares of W&J country and granted Adani exclusive possession freehold title over large swathes of land, which included sacred cultural sites used for ceremonial purposes (Doherty, 2019). As we shall see when we turn to the Githabul and Gomeroi resisting CSG and extreme energy below, the manipulation of the ILUA process, buttressed by neoliberal assimilation and a historical legacy of dispossession and genocide discussed above, is sadly not uncommon and will be evident in the experience of the Githabul and Gomeroi faced with the advancing wave of extreme energy.

The Githabul and Gomeroi in gasland

Another front has opened in recent years in Australia’s ‘resource rush’ (Cleary, 2012). The rise and rapid expansion of CSG, a virulent form of extreme energy sometimes referred to as ‘unconventional energy’ (Trigger et al., 2014, p. 176), is like a tsunami sweeping over land rights, rights to self-determination and FPIC. Like a tsunami it scars the landscape, destroys animal habitats and washes away the original inhabitants of the land. Unlike conventional forms of extraction, CSG involves the development of technologies that enable access to previously inaccessible resources, particularly methane, which is trapped within coal seams. Unlike conventional gas, the pockets of gas are relatively small and diffuse, requiring a large number of wells spread across the landscape, driving an industrialisation of the countryside and giving it a large footprint. If we then consider the associated infrastructure above the surface of roads, pipelines, water treatment facilities, gas compression stations and the drill pads themselves, it’s not difficult to appreciate its transformative impact on land cover change alone. In Queensland there are approximately 40,000 square kilometres of land leased for the development of CSG wells (Trigger et al., 2014). Whereas conventional larger gas domes are found thousands of metres below, suitable coal seams are usually only a few hundred metres below and rarely thicker than a metre. The relatively lower levels of EROI that define extreme energy, due to the more intense and complex forms of extraction discussed above, are an attendant feature of CSG as well, since, in order to extract the gas, the balance in the coal structure must be changed by ‘dewatering’ and often, if not always, hydraulic fracturing. An inordinate amount of water must be extracted to facilitate this process. For instance, in the Surat basin 400,000 litres of water per day were extracted (Keogh, 2014). The coal seam will then be primed with potassium chloride and hydraulically fractured under a high-pressure pump of water, sand and a number of other abrasive chemicals. It is this forcing open of the coal seam that allows the gas to flow. In essence, as Short (2016, p. 147) pithily observes, ‘CSG production is a landscape altering phenomena of some magnitude’, leaving behind what Cleary (2012, loc. 268) wryly refers to as the ‘footprints of giants’.

Like other forms of extreme energy, CSG production produces a range of negative environmental externalities such as toxic water contamination, air pollution and methane migration driving increased carbon emissions and, as elucidated above, a vast industrialisation of the countryside. CSG specifically also drives a depletion of the water table and potentially subsidence, given the extraordinary quantities of water that must be extracted to facilitate the process. This in turn leads potentially to the contamination of freshwater aquifers and ground water by coal seams, if it is porous and they are connected. A paper commissioned by the Queensland government assessing the risk that CSG posed to the environment argued there was a risk of subsidence which could lead to the fracturing of aquifers and the altering of ‘hydraulic connectivity’ (Moran and Vink, 2010, p. 4). The potential for resulting contamination from either the dewatering process and resulting flow of gas, or the abrasive chemicals used is substantial, quite apart from the collapsing water table and its implications for farming and subsistence practices more generally. The scale of ecological destruction is clear and for those Indigenous people and the broader community living on or near the sites of extraction, the environmental and social impacts are grave.

In states like Queensland and NSW in the east, invariably these forms of extraction cross paths with prime farmland (Cleary, 2012, loc. 205), which, as we will see towards the end of this chapter, has played a crucial role in the forms of solidaristic resistance that it has given rise to. We will first explore these impacts as indicative of the environmental and social harms of CSG before fully attending to Indigenous peoples resisting this form of extraction. One farmer I interviewed named John Jenkyn who lives in Chinchilla QLD, part of the Western Downs region in the heart of the gas fields in the Surat basin, arguably the epicentre of CSG in Australia, described a rather typical experience, explaining to me a whole plethora of environmental and social impacts due to the imposition of drilling sites and wells on his farmland. He explained that due to the use of the local dam water, he, his wife and two children experience skin rashes, constant headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, hair loss, nose bleeds and sore eyes and depression and anxiety (author interview, 02/03/17). Much of rural Queensland is a water catchment area, so residents rely on collected rainwater, local wells and dams. He now believes that this is also being caused by air pollutants caused by both the contamination of ground water and air pollutants. The latter, he suspects, are caused by a combination of factors typical to CSG projects. Firstly, the dumping of the saline and most likely radioactive water by water trucks on roads adjacent to his property. This contaminated water will then, particularly on hot days (in Chinchilla QLD, in the summer it can reach upwards of 50 degrees Celsius) evaporate and come back down as precipitation on their land and in their water tanks. Indeed, he explained that in a matter of weeks they had lost eighteen cows due to providing water from the rainwater tanks. Add to this the huge ‘tailing ponds’ that collect the wastewater, which stretch for 700 acres near his land. They too will eventually gas off and come back down as rain. The other sources are fugitive gas emissions from nearby pipes and nearby gas flares, which leave a bright orange glow on the night-time sky.

To compound the air pollution levels, Jenkyn has to contend with local, giant water treatment facilities like the QGC’s Kenya Water Treatment Plant, the gas company responsible for the local gas fields and associated infrastructure, which is tasked with treating the contaminated water. These and other facilities involved in the conversion of coal-seam gas into liquefied natural gas (LNG) are responsible for emitting a whole array of what Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith, senior advisor to Australia’s National Toxics Network, described as a ‘toxic soup’ (author interview, 26/01/17), including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which can cause irritation to eyes, nose and throat and damage to the central nervous system, and other chemicals known to cause cancer, such as benzene, formaldehyde and nitrous oxides, which impact respiratory health and particulate matter. In fact, Jenkyn complained of a loss of sense of taste due to a constant ‘metallic taste in the mouth … which overpowers everything’. To add further to his family’s woes, he argued that, above all, his family suffers due to sleep deprivation and the constant noise from construction work, which he stated was ‘24 hours a day’. He averred that due to the cumulative environmental impacts all local wildlife has disappeared. This can only be described as ecocide. He now hangs a banner on the edge of his farm property emblazoned with the words he claims were used by QGC representatives in closed town meetings with local government officials and the local Chamber of Commerce to describe the areas impacted by their operations: sacrifice zone.

In an interview conducted with a local GP, Dr Geralyn McCarron (author interview, 09/03/17), who had studied the health impacts of CSG development for many years, her data underscores the sacrificial nature of this form of extreme energy. She explained to me that she had conducted interviews with 113 local residents of the Western Downs region, approximately 200 km west of Brisbane, a territory encompassing much of the land most impacted by the development of CSG wells and associated infrastructure in QLD, including local towns like Chinchilla, Tara and Condamie, she catalogued an alarming array of symptoms. CSG development first began approximately 2007 onwards in this region. The symptoms included, inter alia, ‘nose bleeds, eye irritation, coughs, skin irritation, joint pain, and muscle spasms’. Children reported ‘pins and needles, funny feelings in their hands, funny movements’ (author interview, 09/03/17). She added that over time people have begun to report ‘unusual cancers, and unusual patterns of cancers … there’s one area [sic] seems to observe pancreatic cancer’. As she explains, this is a relatively uncommon cancer with on average 11.6 in 100,000 developing this cancer (Loveday et al., 2019, p. 826). And yet in one area she explains with a 10 km radius, an area that is not a densely urbanised area, there were three people with pancreatic cancer. Dr Geralyn McCarron also spoke to residents of the Tara estate, an area known not only as a major site for CSG development in QLD but also for its high levels of social marginalisation and poverty where many of its residents known as ‘blockies’ suffer stigmatisation. The social and economic decline are due in part to its marginal agricultural success given the inauspicious climatic and environmental conditions (Makki, 2015, p. 124). In one family interviewed opposite this estate adjacent to a water tailing pond, two of the children had cancer, one had leukaemia and the other a rare form of tissue cancer known as sarcoma. In the family next door, one child also had leukaemia. As Dr McCarron put it frankly, ‘in terms of “hit rate” that’s not what you would expect at all’ (author interview, 09/03/17). The aforementioned practice of water trucks dumping wastewater on local roads in fact happened throughout the Tara state. As Dr McCarron explained to me (author interview, 09/03/17), in one lane in particular, out of six families, five of them have cases of cancer.

In an interview conducted with one Tara Estate resident, Dianne Glenda Parker, who lives only 500 metres from the nearest CSG well, who was also an Indigenous women stolen from her parents in what was earlier referred to as the ‘stolen generations’, she described (author interview, 03/03/17) how shortly after moving to Tara, in 2014, her husband was diagnosed with ‘micro bacterial disease’, dying shortly after in 2015. She suspected it was partly due to potential toxins collecting in her rainwater tank. She also explained that many residents suffered from runny and sore eyes, constant headaches, bloody noses and tiredness 24/7. Rainfall, called ‘black rain’ by a local reporter, would strip paint from her car. She added that the reporter who filled the report regarding the ‘black rain’ lost her job and the story disappeared off the internet. She added:

The smell that’s in the air sometimes will make you wanna vomit and you’re just sick all the time … When it is 50 degrees outside in the heat, you can’t go outside because it stinks – it gets to smell like rotten eggs. And then you get this metallic taste in your mouth. So, you get in your car and go somewhere you can breathe. It’s terrible.

Some nights she has to wear a face mask to filter the air so she can sleep. She described moreover that she can’t drink any of the water from her three rain tanks because they are contaminated. The water is so bad she told me that the local government would fine her for releasing the water on her front yard. The local CSG company supplies them with bottled water instead. She added, with sobering frankness, ‘I’m just existing.’ She later explained that if it were not for her friend, our interlocutor, she would have killed herself.

In Dr McCarron’s investigations, including information she personally received from the Darling Downs Hospital and Health Services, the region of Queensland which encompasses Western Downs, she informed me that between the years 2007, just on the cusp of the beginning of CSG development, and 2012, the population grew by 7 per cent. However, acute hospital admissions for respiratory conditions increased by 124 per cent, hospitalisation for heart problems rose by 114 per cent, diagnosis of invasive cancer by 14 per cent and rates of admission for attempted suicide rose by 50 per cent. Of course, this is just correlation and not conclusive proof of a causal connection, but it does at the very least demand further investigation. Arguably, the anti-ecological impacts of CSG on their sacrifice zones are genocidal not just potentially for Indigenous people but for all communities within its ecological ‘blast radius’.

To return to our besieged Jenkyn family in the heart of the gas fields, in experiences that would mirror those of many other farmers and pastoralists across the country (see Cleary, 2012, loc. 131), the Jenkyn family had little choice but to accept the wells on their farmland. In a manner reminiscent of the asymmetric fields of negotiation constructed by the NTA and other Indigenous land rights legislation described above, state laws in NSW and QLD empower gas companies to acquire access to farmlands in as little as ten business days with an ‘Entry Notice’ to pursue exploratory ‘preliminary activities’ (Department of Resources, 2021, p. 9). This cannot be refused by the landowner. In twenty business days, the minimum negotiation period, the resource company can acquire permission to conduct ‘advanced activities’ such as drilling (Department of Resources, 2021, p. 20). If no ‘Conduct and Compensation Agreement’ is reached, by a total of fifty days, the resource company can turn to the local Land Court, which has the legal authority to overrule the landowner and order land access to develop production wells (Department of Resources, 2021, p. 21). This facilitates the swift speed at which the CSG projects are spreading across Australia’s rural areas. When one considers that recent enabling legislation where, for example, QLD is concerned, such as the Mines Legislation (Streamlining) Amendment Bill, 2012, was passed with minimal consultation, in only six days, three of which were over a weekend during the Olympics, a bill that concerned at least sixteen other pieces of relevant statues, the average community resident would hardly have the time to consider it properly.

Jenkyn (author interview, 02/03/17) also spoke of what he felt was a breakdown in local community solidarity, with those in the local community who felt the CSG industry would bring much sought after prosperity to a region long suffering social and economic decline, showing hostility to him and those like him who opposed the CSG industry. Indeed, in research conducted by Luke et al. (2018) on the intersection between historically rooted place identity and the propensity to resist forms of resource extraction, although many farmers in the Western Downs felt that gas extraction was incompatible with historically rooted understandings of land productivity given the threats it posed to the land identified above, some farmers expressed a position that unconventional gas was not necessarily incompatible with farming, as long as it didn’t interfere with how they connected to their place. In other words, many felt that the Western Downs was already an industrialised landscape and so unconventional gas could coexist with agriculture (Luke et al., 2018, p. 8). Intriguingly, some farmers embraced the changes wrought by unconventional gas, due to associations with more prosperous times in the past (Luke et al., 2018). Indeed, some farmers considered it a way to escape current economic hardships brought on by many years of drought and declining productivity and fertility of land (Luke et al., 2018). This again has echoes of the ‘colonial dilemma’ imposed on besieged Indigenous communities described above.

Moreover, as John Jenkyn explained to me, the process whereby environmental impacts are measured is invariably done by the resource companies themselves, as is common across Australia (Cleary, 2012, loc. 179). These tests, which monitor levels of various heavy metals, toxins and dust in the environment, are taken when weather conditions like direction of wind or rain are most favourable to the resource companies (Cleary, 2012). This is precisely the experience Jenkyn relayed to me. Jenkyn described incidences where test samples and results were tampered with, sabotaged or the results simply disappeared. For instance, Jenkyn explained that the autopsy results taken from his dead cows sent off by the local veterinarian to a government approved laboratory in Toowoomba, QLD, were ‘inconclusive’. When he asked to see a copy of the report, the laboratory claimed it had disappeared. In another incident, when Jenkyn organised a toxic report for his rainwater tank, once the laboratory discovered where the samples had come from, Jenkyn argued they refused to proceed. He explained that this laboratory worked closely with the CSG industry and did not want to sour relations with its biggest market. He informed me that associates of his who knew employees working for said laboratory firm explained it was common practice to ‘leave the lid off water samples or even dilute them to get the desired result’. In a moment of exasperation, Jenkyn, referring to an institutional environment that frustrated and stymied his attempts to empirically ascertain the environmental hazards produced by CSG in his farm, said sardonically, ‘do I have to become a scientist to live in my own home?’

This type of malpractice and corruption conditioned by a political economic environment dominated by the mineocracy is far from unique in Australia gas and coal country (Cleary, 2012, loc. 179). Further, with such a legal and political economic matrix conditioned by the hegemony of the mineocracy, able to force the submission of the white settler population, many of whom are the descendants of pastoralists and farmers, whose cattle once formed the ‘shock troops of empire’ (Russell, 2005, p. 77), the ability of the mineocracy to continue to colonise Indigenous land and suppress Indigenous alterity shocks but does not surprise.

Among the countless examples that exemplify such a phenomenon is the story of the Githabul nation, who in 2007 successfully secured a consent determination recognising them as native title holders over 1,120 square kilometres in nine national parks and thirteen state forests in northern New South Wales (NNTT, 2007). Five years later they had to contend with the arrival of CSG on their land when the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC) put in an application for CSG prospecting in the Tweed and Byron Shires (Farrrow-Smith, 2012). When asked what risks CSG posed to their communities, one Githabul elder responded (no. 4, author interview, 23/01/2017):

It’s killing our spirituality. Our connection to country is spiritual … each one of us when we were born were given our piece of water. And we had to learn how to sing to that water and that water called for us. This is our law. Our ancestors lay in the landscapes according to our law.

Githabul elder no. 2 pointed out, ‘we still get our bush tucker from the water. If they bloody well come in with the mining and the gas, we’ve got nothing! Our culture’s gone, it’s finished, it’s over.’ The impact on water due to CSG production and potential for contamination was clearly seen as a major existential threat.

Turning to the land rights and native title system, one leading Githabul elder explained in an interview (no. 1, author interview, 23/01/2017) that he and many other rightful native title holders and elders were not consulted and their traditional decision-making structures of tribal council or eldership were marginalised or ignored entirely. In fact, the New South Wales Land Council, a statutory body legally empowered to assist traditional owners in negotiations with resource developers (Altman, 2012, p. 53), had actually arranged the deal with the CSG company, bringing into question how these bodies are unduly influenced by the power of mining interests, resource states and the political, legal and economic reality of asymmetric colonial terrains of negotiation.

Indeed, the Githabul elder explained (no. 1, author interview, 23/01/2017) that the broader socio-legal terrain of NTA and the preceding civil and political reforms discussed in Chapter 2 are designed to reproduce colonial relations. After stating that the NSW state was trying to force them into an ILUA over a CSG development with Metgasco on their ancestral land, he added:

We have been basically at loggerheads with the Native Title Tribunal … this process of Native Title is ethnically cleansing us … the recognising us into the constitution (after the 1967 referendum) was a reverse psychology issue. It wasn’t about them recognising us, it was getting us to recognise their laws and governance over us. And to recognise is to say you accept.

This notion of reverse psychology is one that chimes with the arguments elucidated at the beginning of this chapter and would be very familiar to Fanon (1967, p. 84) and his argument that colonialism operates at both the level of the objective and the subjective and indeed Althusser’s (1994, p. 129) arguments pertaining to the interpellation of individuals via the recognition function of ideology.

Referring to the NTA and the way in which the various pressures and financial enticement drives wedges in the communities, another Githabul elder argued (no. 2, author interview, 23/01/2017), ‘it is so damaging, it destroys relationships between families, it divides. That’s what the government is all about: divide and conquer’. Alluding to both the inherent ecological dangers posed by CSG and the financial enticements offered through the ILUAs and the associated mining royalties, he added, ‘they chuck a bit of money on the table to one of our mob, they run with it … We don’t want the money; the land is precious to us.’ Githabul elder no. 1 concurred adding (author interview, 23/01/2017) ‘we are strong witness against some of those in our community who are prepared to take the dollar and run’. Githabul elder no. 2 (author interview, 23/01/2017) stated categorically there were three documents that divided Indigenous communities: ‘Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the Native Title Act, and religion’.

The NSWALC CEO Geoff Scott has publicly taken issue with this stance, arguing that signing the ILUA would be the only way to end their community’s welfare dependency, avowing (Code, 2013), ‘[d]o you want to get benefit from it or do you want to continue to get the scraps off the table? Do you want to continue to rely on government for your livelihood? I think we owe our children better than that.’

Indeed, there is a logic to this, if one accepts the structural realties of Indigenous co-existence within the settler-colonial social formation, dominated by capitalist production. And yet, this is the very colonial dilemma discussed above, what Short (2016, p. 149) described as a ‘stark choice between a settler-colonial rock and a hard place; a native title system devoid of veto power and extreme energy “solutions” being presented, counterfactually, as environmentally safe and the only realistic lifeline for economically disadvantaged Indigenous communities’. In fact, Indigenous communities rarely benefit from the much-vaunted employment opportunities provided by CSG production (Trigger et al., 2014). Moreover, this is the financial and structural compulsion to negotiate examined earlier, which assumes the market as the path to development (Altman, 2013, p. 132, 2009a, p. 41), with all its biopolitical and interpellating implications regarding what was earlier referred to as neoliberal assimilation (Altman, 2013, p. 92).

Turning to the broader institutions set up under the NTA and the NSW ALRA (1983), Githabul elder no. 1 averred (author interview, 23/01/2017) that the Aboriginal Land Councils, despite being statutory bodies empowered to advocate on the behalf of Indigenous communities, were indeed being instrumentalised as a colonial weapon with genocidal implications. He explained:

They’re using State Land Councils under the persona of being an Aboriginal organisation and supposed to be holding our properties in trust, and they’ve been using the state to come down to force local tribes into 40-year land lease agreements over the properties upon which our people suffered, where we have our language and our ceremonies and our connection to Bush ripped away from us … It’s using the persona of the word Aboriginal to represent us as a people, when it’s basically a land office belonging to the state doing business for mining companies … the State Land Council is just one office that is utilised to try and fulfil the process of wiping us away as a culture. [emphasis added]

Githabul elder no. 1 even suggested that those who chose to agree to the ILUA, enticed by the financial rewards, played their part as unwitting pawns in their genocidal destruction: ‘It’s not just the State Land Council. It’s some of our own mob who’ve been sitting up there quite comfortably living off our suffering.’ He caveated this by explaining that it was due to their already impoverished and marginalised status that this sort of co-opting of members of their community was possible. Indeed, as I argued above, the history of forcible articulation with the settler-colonial economy has, through the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx,1976, p. 899), left many Indigenous people with little choice but to seek development though the settler-colonial economy on colonial terms.

The use of Land Councils as colonial instruments, he explained, was commonplace: ‘that isn’t just happening on the Northern Rivers. This is happening right across every tribal system in the area.’ Referring to the Indigenous group Boggabilla, he explained how they had been manipulated into an agreement:

They were forced because they were ignorant of the English language. They were fraudulently conveyed the ‘truth’ and they signed off on a 40-year lease, and the next thing they knew they had one big hell of a road going straight through their old reserve to a mining spot. People have been evicted.

Referring to these evictions and the inevitable displacement that comes with ILUA agreements and the extinguishment of native title, he added:

This is just a way of forcing us out of these old concentration camps that are a reminder to the old Commonwealth of their past history. And if they can close these places down and assimilate us into the broader community then the tribal structure that stands here is fragmented and gone!

This is of course of a piece with the racial spatialisation central to the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist system (Lefebvre, 1974) discussed in Chapter 2.

He stressed that in order to compel his community to acquiesce to an ILUA, the Aboriginal Land Council would threaten to deny the local Indigenous community funding that they receive to provide essential services for Indigenous communities. This was a ‘bargaining chip’. He continued:

Do you know the saying? To rob a strongman, you must first bind him. Once you bind him you can rob him of all that he has. Well, this is what the government is about. Binding us legally to an agreement knowing that we are honourable peoples, erm, into these agreements with the Commonwealth.

This use of the Land Council constitutes a violation of the right to self-determination (Articles 3 and 31) under UNDRIP (UNGA, 2017).

Moreover, the cunning of recognition would not stop there. In a story of manipulation, deception and fraud that will be echoed when we examine Kenya and their attempts to assert their sovereignty in their negotiations with the (neo)colonial government, the Githabul elder explained (no. 1, author interview, 23/01/2017) that, in order to secure the ILUA, an Indigenous community member turned native title applicant was prematurely released from a seven-year prison sentence to sign the ILUA ‘and do this business’. Moreover, Githabul elder no. 1 explained, ‘the government, if you don’t already have a system of governance set up, will impose one on the community’. In the Northern Rivers that was the ‘Bundjalung’, which translates as ‘black man on country’. He affirmed ‘we will not come under a fictitious tribal council known as “Bundjalung”!’ Explaining the function of this fiction of representation, he added, ‘all the endeavours of the Crown and State [are] to basically usurp and ethnically cleanse us of our country’. Githabul elder no. 4 clarified (author interview, 23/01/2017) that the new tribal council was ‘literally put together so the government doesn’t have to talk to all the different tribal systems … to do their business on country’. When asked who constituted this new Bundjalung tribal council, Githabul elder no. 1 explained that they were black pastors, men of the cloth from the Northern Rivers who had good standing in the Indigenous community due to their knowledge of the Gospel. He clarified that these black pastors believed they were doing good for the community, but ultimately embroiled them in a colonial deal through the ILUA. This imposition of illegitimate representative structures clearly violates FPIC (Article 190) and rights to self-determination (Articles 3 and 31) under UNDRIP (UNGA, 2017). These testimonies, once again, as we saw with W&J and their struggle with the Adani mine, exemplify asymmetric fields of negotiation and unequal bargaining power where agreements are signed under duress and with settler-appointed Indigenous ‘leaders’ who held no such rightful claim. It is evident from the fields interviews that those Githabul interviewed felt that both the land rights and native title system, as well as the anti-ecological nature of extreme energy, posed a genocidal threat.

Unfortunately, these forms of political, legal and economic asymmetries in the colonial terrain of negotiation are evident in the experiences of another Indigenous nation at the forefront of the struggle for sovereignty and alterity against the rapidly advancing frontier of extreme energy. Gomeroi country, by some estimates, spans 75,000 square kilometres, tipping over into the southern border of QLD as far as the MacIntyre river, and extending all the way down to the northernmost reaches of the Tongo State Forest and Goulburn River National Park in NSW. Assailed on multiple fronts by various mining projects in the north-west of NSW, there are currently multiple conventional coal mines on the Liverpool plains operated by Whitehaven coal, with two at Werris Creek, one in Gunnedah, two Whitehaven mines close to Boggabri, an open-cut Tarrawonga Mine near the township of Narrabri and another, also near Narrabri operated by Boggabri Coal Pty Ltd. (Norman, 2016, p. 243). The Tarrawonga Mine and another mine, Maules Creek Mine, also run by Whitehaven Coal, operate in the vicinity of Leard State Forest, whilst the Boggabri mine impinges on large areas of the forest (Norman, 2016). The Leard Forest contains at least 11 Indigenous sacred sites that face destruction due to the operation of the mines (Hunt, 2016). This is aside from the cumulative environmental hazards that are generated by multiple mining operations in close proximity to each other that can exponentially accumulate and reach ‘tipping points’ which bring about qualitative shifts in ecosystems (Clearly, 2012, loc. 287). These cumulative impacts are rarely measured or ‘picked up’ by environmental impact assessments in Australia which invariably only examine mines in isolation (Clearly, 2012, loc. 269).

To add to their woes, the Gomeroi now face a CSG project known as the Narrabri Gas Project operated by gas company Santos on portions of the Pilliga Forest. The proposed project will span 98,000 hectares, encompassing Crown and private land as well as the Pilliga Forest, and impinges on Gomeroi registered native land. It will have 850 coal-seam gas wells (Knaus and Cox, 2021). Despite many years of protests from various communities, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and many legal battles to shut down or suspend the CSG project, the NSW Land and Environment Court issued a judicial review decision upholding the initial decision of the NSW Independent Planning Commission to go ahead with the proposed CSG project. In fact, in yet another indication of the power of the mineocracy, the incumbent Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the Narrabri gas project would be among fifteen other projects given fast-track approval to accelerate Australia’s economic recovery in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis (Knaus and Cox, 2021).

The Pilliga Forest also holds powerful cultural significance to the Gomeroi, with many significant sacred sites (MEHI Centre, 2021), thus placing an important cultural obligation of custodianship and stewardship on Gomeroi elders over the land and waters of the Pilliga. To date, Santos have drilled eight exploratory wells in addition to one core hole. Aside from the 1,000 hectares it plans to clear from the forest for well sites, tracks and pipelines, which will have devastating impacts on the habitats of the koala bear (which includes thousands of hollow-bearing trees) and the Pilliga mouse, the internal fragmentation of the forest will facilitate the penetration of weeds and exotic animals throughout the forest (MEHI Centre, 2021). Once up and running, the CSG project will have all the ecological and social harms associated with this form of extreme energy detailed at the beginning of this section. The eco-genocidal threat to the Gomeroi is clear.

One Gomeroi elder (Gomeroi elder no. 1, author interview, 27/02/2017), who is now part of the registered native title group, conveyed the threat that CSG poses:

Throughout our nation there are many areas that were used for initiation for our men and women, for example Bora rings. In the Pilliga Scrub there are men’s areas as well as women’s. They are very sacred places, with us six generations before colonisation. There are many endangered species of animals that are in that area, scarred trees that are a major part of our songlines.

Recall that these aspects of the landscape were in Chapter 2 referred to as ‘mythic geography’ (Servello, 2010, p. 673). He continued:

They told people where to eat, where to camp and what type of food was in area, and with 850 wells going in there, they will certainly knock those out … and most certainly it will kill the water. It [the CSG project] sits above the Artesian basin. The hot water baths have come out of the ground [sic] are healing water … water is life … the spirit of our land has already been killed by mining projects and this here project will do it even more.

After explaining the threat to local river systems and linking extractivism to climate change, he was quick to add that by far the biggest threat to the land and environment came from CSG:

The biggest threat out there I believe, if you know what I mean, is the CSG. The Great Artesian Basin with underwater aquifers that runs into the Surat [basin] and that runs into Galilee basin, and that’s where they’re going to build the Carmichael Adani coal mine. It will be a ‘flow on effect’ … that will go through three states: New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. People down South are going to face the full effect of it as well. That will affect millions of people, not hundreds, not thousands, but millions.

Not only is he demonstrating a detailed understanding of the complex hydraulic system and the threat posed to it by CSG, but he is alluding to cumulative impacts right across the country and their relationship to other resource developments such as Adani coal mine, which was the subject of the case study above. Regarding the Pilliga Forest, which is the site of the proposed Santos CSG project, he said ‘there are 13 endangered species within that forest alone there … the endangered species that are in there are our totems. Some totems are plants, some are trees. There are box trees, there are burial sites within that area.’ Another Gomeroi elder (author interview, 21/03/2017) concurred:

With all the wells that are going in there, we have the Great Artesian Basin and the underground water systems that run through Pilliga Forest where Santos is planning on putting 850 wells for starters, and a pipeline stretching out for miles and miles and miles. We’re concerned with the groundwater obviously and the impact that will have on all the animals and the vegetation within the forest and the cultural impacts of that. You know many of those animals are our totems, those animals are our totems … they are our spiritual connections … We’re supposed to look after them to ensure that they have continuation of life, so that they don’t become extinct. We look after them and they look after us, and we can’t do that when we have the threat of coal seam gas and mining on our country.

Recall that what Keen (pp. 1, 15; Birdsell, 1970) referred to as ‘totemic geography and totemic identity’ plays a key role in organising kinship relations and the sustainable management of land, air and water. One Gomeroi elder (author interview, 27/02/2017) explained that those sites included the aforementioned Bora ring ceremonial and initiation sites through which younger members of the nation would be given knowledge. He explained the gravity of destroying those sites which the CSG gas wells threaten to do:

Social structures that we had back then, the colonisation process has broken them up, you see. But with our land still intact, and our knowledge keepers still being able to go out there and teach the younger generation, if they say, knock them out, that’s another part of our history and nation lost.

In this sense these sites are essential for the successful transmission of culture. By destroying them those intergenerational relationships, which Card (2003, p. 63) recognised as essential to social vitality, would be lost.

Turning to the issue of cultural heritage and the protection of sacred sites, which has been as a central mobilising issue for Indigenous communities like the Gomeroi who face resource and development projects on their land (Norman, 2016, p. 243), he (author interview, 27/02/2017) told me ‘they never ever ever look at our sacred sites in the same way that they look at a church’. One Gomeroi elder (author interview, 21/03/2017) elaborated on the vexatious problem, expressing doubts about the feasibility of avoiding damage to sacred sites in the course of resource extraction and poured scorn on the myopic methods used, which demonstrate a fundamental lack of cultural understanding or sensitivity:

People like Santos and Whitehaven Coal, they think that you can mitigate everything. You can’t mitigate everything. They say, ‘we’ll go around this, we won’t destroy this’. They think it’s just about a little artefact on the ground. There might be a knife edge on the ground, but it’s much more than that … it’s the connection of all those things to each other, in the place they are. It’s the significance of all these things, the relationship they have with each other, not just a singular item. It’s how they relate to everything else in the landscape. To remove it from an area then that’s desecration … how would you like chopping up the Great Wall of China!

This is precisely the sort of mechanistic thinking discussed at the beginning of this chapter that sees nature, refracted through the commodity form, as bearer of exchange value, which can be fragmented, disembodied and dislocated in a manner that pays no heed to its relationship with the ecological whole. Reflecting on this problem, Harvey (1993, p. 10) mused ‘Newtonian mechanics and Smithian economics may be adequate to building bridges, but they are totally inadequate in trying to determine the ecosystemic impact of such endeavours’. One incident she conveyed exemplified the colonial nature of the cultural heritage laws. A request for protection under the cultural heritage laws for a sacred site on the grounds of a Whitehaven coal mine was rejected by the relevant federal minister because although the government recognised the cultural significance and sacredness of the site, apparently it didn’t meet the requirements of the act: ‘This is a white fellas act we’re talking about. How does a non-Aboriginal person know what’s sacred and what’s not sacred to an Aboriginal person?’

Turning to the problem of NTA and the ILUA process, when asked if during the negotiation process with the CSG company one Gomeroi elder (author interview, 27/02/2017) felt his community had been properly consulted and given the right of FPIC (Article 19). He explained:

With native title, look it’s a government construct, to benefit them and mining companies. Everyone knows that. There are ways around that with unity. Now, let’s say for us with the Gomeroi nation we have 17 or 16 [native title] applicants who speak on behalf of 32,000, that is the estimate of how many Gomeroi people there are out. So, if you have just 16 people going in there, just talking on behalf of everyone else, that’s not informed consent, is it?

As for the institutions set up under the other land recovery regime, the ALRA, and the associated LALCs, one Gomeroi elder (author interview, 27/02/2017) averred ‘they allow mining, they were one of the first ones! Look here, when they first set up the Local Aboriginal Land Councils, they were supposed to be the governing body for the communities, but they went away from that.’ When I asked why this was the case, he argued this was due to corruption and manipulation. Referring to the Narrabri LALC which has responsibility for the Pilliga Forest, he said wryly that ‘last year Whitehaven and Santos threw them a Christmas party last year’. Referring to the work undertaken by the LALCs to identify sacred sites under the provisions of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth), he observed with keen dryness, ‘If you have registered Aboriginal parties who go out there and do cultural heritage, then just sign off and say, “no no no, it’s not significant”, they will go straight in there and do it. And they [resource companies] got people there in the Land Council doing it’.

Venessa Hicki, a Gomeroi woman living in Walgett, NSW not far from the site of the Santos CSG project, conveyed a similar experience, arguing (author interview, 06/02/17) that their local LALC were ‘out for themselves’. She explained that when she asked if they would do anything about the Santos CSG project on the Pilliga Forest, they would typically retort, ‘that’s got nothing to do with us’. But she exclaimed, ‘we are all Gomeroi’. Arguably, here, the architecture of the Indigenous representative institutions can act as a fragmentary force, weakening potential solidarity on broader geographical and indeed cultural scales. Her persistent questioning at the LALC eventually granted her a meeting with a member of the State Land Council, who told her, ‘we’re doomed if we do and we’re doomed if we don’t. But it’s up to us Aboriginals to get in, because if we don’t get in, white man is going to get it all.’ This is as a clear a statement of the colonial dilemma as any I have recorded. Recall that earlier it was argued that tying the material fates of the various institutions erected under the Indigenous land recovery legal regimes to that of the resource companies through mining royalties would compel those institutions to function as technologies of government ensuring conformity to new ‘neoliberal’ norms. On a more fundamental level, though it may ensure fiscal independence from the government, it does not ensure fiscal independence from the mineocracy. Moreover, this alleged fiscal independence from the government conveniently side steps the fact that the government itself, under the political economy dominated by the resource sector, is not structurally independent.

Turning to divisions within his own community, one Gomeroi elder (author interview, 27/02/2017) said there were people who were helping the mining companies to destroy their landscapes and threaten their culture, ‘they ought to be ashamed of themselves’. One Gomeroi elder (author interview, 27/02/2017) added, ‘and that’s why we voted the old boys out … and we’ll go in there as a unified force and deal with Santos’. This is a reference to the fact that the original Gomeroi native title claimant group, who had once taken a strong stance against CSG and mining more generally, in 2015 signed two ILUAs with Whitehaven Coal. The agreement was criticised by a number of Gomeroi for being conducted and negotiated behind closed doors and largely in secret, stressing the lack of consultation with the broader community (Norman, 2016, p. 249). One Gomeroi elder (author interview, 21/03/2017) told me:

They made a deal with Whitehaven Coal that none of us were privy to … they signed off on a deal without any of the [Gomeroi] nation knowing what that deal entails. They were not supposed to sign off on any deals until it was brought back to the nation and agreed to by the nation.

When I asked why, she responded bluntly:

There’s money involved. As far as I’m concerned it comes back to dollars and cents, [sic] being able to look after themselves rather than the nation as a whole. It’s not just jobs going into the future, because it’s not just about money. First and foremost, it’s got to be about protection of country. That goes without saying for Aboriginal people, or it should.

Again, it must be stressed that not all Gomeroi are opposed to mining. Some, as Norman (2016, p. 248) in her fieldwork found, hope that it will offer opportunities for desperately needed investment in their communities. The quote above and the reference to ‘jobs’ clearly speaks to this desire, as well as the tension and division created by the need for development assistance and the manner in which it is provided by the settler-colonial state. And care must always be taken to avoid falling into the discursive trap of reifying an ‘ideal type’ of Indigenous person that will naturally sacrifice all in the name of the environment and see those that do not as somehow embodying a ‘corrupted’ form of indigeneity, as the Left and the environmental movement are sometimes guilty of (Vincent, 2016, p. 223). But again, as with the Githabul above, this is a position taken not in historical isolation, not devoid of historical context, but one informed by a history of forcible articulation with a settler-colonial economy and centuries of systemic violence and chronic underfunding in their communities, leaving many with very little choice in practice. These are issues recognised in the literature (Trigger et al., 2014), but all too rarely are they historicised within a context of settler colonialism and relations of genocide. Ultimately, a new leadership group were voted in, replacing the former applicants, despite legal attempts to have the election declared illegitimate (Murphy, 2016). Suffice to say those attempts failed.¹¹

The stories of the Wangan and Jagalingou, the Githabul and Gomeroi demonstrate empirically Freeman’s (2002, p. 85) warning that we must always pay attention to the manner in which rights are institutionalised. Indeed the ‘shifting structural target’ of the settler-colonial logic of elimination has been found to reside within the discursive, normative, legal and institutional landscape of human and Indigenous rights, ironically violating those very rights enshrined in UNDRIP and menacing the group life of those Indigenous communities. Indeed, the rights codified under the complex land recovery regimes in Australia continue to ensure the partial destruction/reproduction of Indigenous societies and economies so that they can be ‘made ready’ for fusion with settler capitalist or market relations and articulated with the broader imperatives of Australia settler-colonial economy. In turn this nourishes and supports the Australian economy’s role in the international division labour as a key site of fossil fuel and mineral extraction. The system of rights in the age of recognition and reconciliation serve not only to reproduce a particular form of articulation between settler-colonial and Indigenous societies and economies, one which ensures the extraction of commodities in different ways (Hartwig, 1978, p. 129), but also subjects the target Indigenous populations to remorseless structural pressures to conform and assimilate to the ‘real economy’ and in so doing foster their ‘development’. However, the success of these processes is not a foregone conclusion. These are not economically deterministic processes but shaped by struggle. The driving force of history has always been struggle, which is decided in the political sphere (Bedford and Irving, 2000, p. 94). It is to this struggle we now turn.

Resistance to the relations of genocide

The Githabul and Gomeroi case is notable for another reason. Their struggle against forms of extractivism has involved building alliances with non-Indigenous communities. In the case of the Githabul, after years of struggle, and a series of direct actions, including blockades of drilling equipment and CSG drilling sites, in alliance with a broad grassroots community and environmental movement in the Northern Rivers region, culminating in the Bentley Blockade in 2014 (Luke, 2018), they successfully denied the CSG firm a ‘social license’ (Luke, 2017) and shut down the development project. The Gomeroi have also recently built emerging alliances with environmental groups and local farmers. It offers a glimmer of hope that, through what has been dubbed the green-black alliance (Vincent and Neale, 2016), the colonial terrain will not inevitably succeed in subduing and pacifying Indigenous peoples and that, depending on the balances of forces, it can be restructured to favour Indigenous peoples resisting colonisation.

Invariably, the state of green-black relations has been cast in a negative light with the discourse assuming an inescapable and irreconcilable conflict between the values of the environmental movement and those underpinning Indigenous land rights (Ritter, 2014). It is wise to caution against those who would automatically assume a natural affinity between the two causes (Langton, 2004). From the beginning of what can be called the modern environmental movement from the 1970s, in Australia there have been cases where environmentalists have used problematic language and imagery not too dissimilar from that which will be examined in the following chapter when we turn our attention to the British occupation of Kenya: that is to say, an imagery and discourse that depicted nature as a ‘natural wilderness’ bereft of people, Indigenous or otherwise (Neumann, 1996). And even if, today, these discourses have largely been rejected, in part due to the influence of Indigenous movements and eco-centred spirituality, problems remain in what Vincent and Neale (2016, p. 4) describe as the ‘sticky problems of fostering relationships across racialized difference in a settler colonial setting’. Vincent (2016, p. 213) pithily summarises the ‘unstable relations’ between ‘black and green’ when he observes ‘non-Indigenous desires for contact with Aboriginal people, reification of cultural otherness, and post-colonial guilt combined to shape, constrain and sometimes wreck these relations’. Indeed, these relations can be fraught and complicated by virtue of living in what was earlier referred to in Chapter 2 as a single field of life structured along colonial lines. Nevertheless, what the interview data shows is that despite these tensions and historically informed complex entanglements, there are promising alliances in which what Vincent and Neale (2016, p. 5) call Indigenous ‘greenies’ and non-Indigenous environmentalists are not only succeeding in common goals to halt and sometimes reverse the tide of resource extraction and environmental degradation, but are dialectically mutually transformed and constituted by each other (Vincent and Neale, 2016, pp. 4–5). Of particular interest is the potential for the transformation of broader layers of Australian society towards a greater level of ecological consciousness.

The case of the Githabul typifies and illuminates these issues. With the CSG industry rolling out rapidly since 2009, predominantly in QLD, the state of NSW took a more cautious regulatory approach. More importantly, experiences and issues faced in the neighbouring state of QLD, and overseas in the US, stimulated community-level discussions in a number of rural areas in New South Wales and elsewhere (Luke, 2017, p. 266). These discussions would sow the seeds of an anti-CSG movement across rural Australia called ‘Lock the Gate Alliance’ (Lloyd et al., 2013). Critically, this alliance would be constituted by farmers, rural residents, environmentalists and ultimately some Indigenous nations and activists. The anti-CSG movement in the Northern Rivers, spanning between 2011 and 2015, involved not just the blockade of wells and drilling sites, but included petitions, marches, protests and landholder visits to parliament (Lloyd et al., 2013). Although not the only protest movement in Australia, the movement in the Northern Rivers was arguably the most successful, since it both halted the development of CSG by the resource company Metagasco in the area (Hawke, 2015) and built alliances with the local Indigenous nations.

The Githabul elder explained (author interview, 23/01/2017) his involvement in the Northern Rivers movement against CSG starting with the now infamous blockade against the CSG company Metagasco’s building of a drilling pad on their land back in 2014:

I think my first platform was ‘Doubtful Creek’. We got involved because the mining company coal seam gas implicated us in a deal that we were not aware of. So, we had to stand our ground and say there was no dialogue between the mining company and the original peoples. They may have had some contact with some individuals that were prepared to sell out but when it comes down to the crunch, they didn’t recognise tribal council and eldership, so we had to step it up.

In other words, it was because of what they believed to be a fraudulent ILUA as well as the threat to country that CSG posed, that he and a number of other Githabul elders decided to get involved.

We had nothing to do with the mining, so we seized the opportunity to take the platform to be a tribal voice within our own country that was acceptable to the rest of the community, and that was the safety of land for the young. If we destroy it then we destroy our children’s future.

Githabul elder no. 3 concurred, stressing when referring to Doubtful Creek and the Bentley movement (author interview, 23/01/2017), ‘it wasn’t Lock the Gate that got me there, but the conscious decision to be there for Mother Earth’.

A number of Githabul seemed to agree that forging an alliance with non-Indigenous communities, such as those engaged in Lock the Gate, is crucial to successfully resisting ecological and genocidal threats to land and ecosystems. Githabul elder no. 3 argued, ‘if the broader community can understand why sovereignty can be there for all of us … we built good relations with the broader community’. Githabul elder no. 1 agreed and added (author interview, 23/01/2017), ‘and we maintain them. I don’t think black fella and white fella can no longer stay apart while the Commonwealth is about to rip this country apart’. Githabul elder no. 3 added:

I think the government thought they had us with regards to ‘separation’. They thought they had the majority of the Githabul under their thumb, but when we united with our brothers and sisters, our white brothers and sisters, we came as one. When we came as one, we were powerful. It was untouchable. Because them two cultures standing together, black and white fighting for one thing, and that was to save Mother Earth.

Githabul elder no. 2 (author interview, 23/01/2017) explained that the Bentley blockade, the culmination and high point of the long-running resistance movement against CSG in the Northern Rivers, and perhaps the high point of the black-green alliance, was a powerful and unique occasion: ‘it was something that was displayed as white and black fellas coming together to defend country. I don’t think that this sort of campaigning has ever been done before in Australia, it’s quite unique’. Reflecting on Bentley and the anti-CSG multi-ethnic protest movement, Githabul elder no. 1 (author interview, 23/01/2017) said, ‘It was a gathering of minds, it was a gathering of social structures within our society that normally wouldn’t come together except for in the extreme emergency for the safety of the land.’ Githabul elder no. 3 (author interview, 23/01/2017) agreed, saying, ‘what I saw at Bentley was the collective knowledge of all colours coming together: hippies, farmers’. Here there is a clear recognition that the jeopardisation of the land and the life supporting ecosystems united otherwise disparate and historically divided communities.

Speaking of his nation’s struggle against CSG on the Pilliga, one Gomeroi elder (author interview, 27/02/2017), after acknowledging the settler-colonial role of farming and pastoralism in particular, conceded that he and a number of other Gomeroi elders decided they had no choice but to unite with white farmers:

We co-exist at the moment. Sure, history is not that good, but we’ve gone to a couple of meetings with Lock the Gate Alliance and they believe that working together and forging a new path, a new history from this point … colonisation in Australia started 229 years ago. Let’s say we go forward and in 229 years we can look back and say we came together to stop the evil threat of CSG in NSW. [emphasis added]

In one interview with local carpenter Ian Gaillard from Lismore in the Northern Rivers, involved in anti-CSG demonstrations against Metagasco and one who worked closely with members of the Githabul, the very first thing he reflected on was this fraught and complex history (author interview, 23/01/2017):

Just around here in Lismore there are very powerful places now being taken over for housing or bulldozed and developed and the significance of them to the local people [Indigenous communities] is huge. So how can they even begin to trust people of European descent? And they are, in some ways, in fights like the gas. It’s been a bridge for a lot of people to get involved.

The carpenter demonstrated a deep sensitivity to the privileges inferred to himself and the settler community repeatedly throughout my interview. Discussing the NTA regime he described it as ‘white man’s thinking’. A recognition of white privilege and the history of settler colonialism is not uncommon to the environmental movement in Australia (Vincent, 2016), but, at least in the Northern Rivers, is evidently spreading even to the rural community, and those like himself who wouldn’t traditionally be involved in environmental activism. This is arguably due in part at least to his relationship with Indigenous communities in organising against CSG. Demonstrating an ecological awareness that is clearly influenced by his relationship with Indigenous communities as well as a respect and deference, he said:

You hear farmers in Australia, and it makes me sick to the core to hear it, ‘we have the right to do what we want in our land’. Fuck you man, it’s not your land! It [the land] belongs to the land, it’s not ours. We might be custodians … I’m 65 years old and I’ve done quite a lot of time with Indigenous people, but I’m still a novice … if I was sitting here with an [Indigenous person] they would cut me to ribbons.

Mariann Lloyd Smith, alongside her role as senior advisor of Australia’s National Toxics Network and expert on the environmental impacts of CSG, as a local resident played a central role in the Northern Rivers anti-CSG movement. She took part in various local town meetings and door to door awareness raising campaigns, campaigns across NSW and in the various successful blockades that took place. These included at Doubtful Creek and Bentley. Speaking of Indigenous participation in the anti-CSG campaigns, she spoke eloquently of the young Indigenous activists who gave strength, comfort and solidarity to those non-Indigenous who had no experience in blockading. She stressed (author interview, 26/01/17), ‘they had a very spiritual role, as well as an informative and active role’. Speaking of the tensions historically between the environmental and Indigenous communities, she said:

I’ve been involved in a lot of campaign issues and other than campaign issues that were specifically to do with Indigenous people, I’ve not seen that coming together with the environment movement, because the environment movement and Indigenous people have had a rocky history … fishing and hunting where there has been a clash of cultures. But this [anti-CSG] seemed to break down the barriers.

The threat posed by extractivism in Australia is laying the historical soil for the forging of alliances across communities that historically were alienated from each other. The influence of Indigenous ecocentric spirituality on the broader communities opposed to ecologically destructive development projects from the interview data is clear, as well as the greater efficacy of building extra-parliamentary direct action, rather than limiting the struggle to legal resistance, as the case of the Wangan and Jagalingou nation and the entire legal edifice of the land recovery regimes in Australia demonstrates. Arguably, what Marx called the ‘superior relations’ of production (Smith, 2005, p. 75), by which he meant Indigenous relations, play an important role in the struggle against ecological degradation. It is in the mutual constitution of the Indigenous, rural and environmental communities that the influence of Indigenous ecocentric and animistic cosmology plays an important role. It is this enduring ontology that offers hope for a resistance to a capitalist society irrevocably alienated from nature.

Notes

1. 1. Of course, it should be stressed that the Soviet Union, in its quest for rapid industrial expansion and the ‘overcoming of backwardness’, also played a major role in driving the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene. For its ecocidal history, see Feshbach and Friendly Jr, 1992; Peterson, 1993.

2. 2. Marx’s analysis of accumulation crisis brought on by materials-supplies disturbances operates on two levels: first, focusing on the conditions of crisis caused by fluctuations in the value of the materials in question brought on by shortages, and the second, relating to the indirect fluctuations in ‘prices’ brought on by the resultant competition, speculation and the credit system. See Karl Marx (1968, p. 515).

3. 3. Gibson, author interview, 10/02/2017.

4. 4. The NTA is constituted by an extremely complex array of institutions that includes Native Title Representative Bodies who represent native title claimants and the NNTTs which register native title claims heard in Federal Courts and also facilitate ILUAs and ‘future acts’, which refer to the necessity of resource developers to negotiate with native title parties, if they are impacted by new mineral development. Finally, once the native title is legally determined, Prescribed Bodies Corporate will be the legally recognised holders of that title in perpetuity.

5. 5. This falls under Section 237.

6. 6. Previously, the expedited procedure system contained in section 237 of the NTA had stated that an act attracts an expedited procedure if:

a) the act does not directly interfere with the carrying on of the community or social activities of the persons who are the holders of native title in relation to the land or waters concerned; and

b) the act does not interfere with areas or sites of particular significance, in accordance with their traditions, to the persons who are the holders of native title in relation to the land and waters concerned; and

c) the act does not involve major disturbance to any land or waters concerned or create rights whose exercise is likely to involve major disturbance to any land or waters concerned.

In the Howard amendments each condition would now begin with is not likely to, making it more difficult for Indigenous groups to object to the expedited procedure under the NTA.

1. 7. Burragubba v State of Queensland [2016] FCA 984.

2. 8. Burragubba v State of Queensland [2017] FCAFC 133.

3. 9. The ILUA was the subject of further legal challenges in the Supreme Court of Queensland based on NTA grounds: Burragubba & Anor v Minister for Natural Resources and Mines & Anor [2016] QSC 273; Burragubba & Ors v Minister for Natural Resources and Mines & Anor [2017] QCA 179.

4. 10. McGlade v Native Title Registrar [2017] FCAFC 10

5. 11. The original Federal Court ruling to have the applicants replaced affectively recognising the decision of the Gomeroi community (Gomeroi People v Attorney General of New South Wales [2017] FCA 1464) was appealed (Boney v Attorney General of New South Wales [2018] FCAFC 218) but failed.