Showing posts with label unceded land. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unceded land. Show all posts

Sunday 29 May 2022

National Reconciliation Week 2022 is happening 27 May - 3 June 2022



















The National Reconciliation Week 2022 theme, “Be Brave. Make Change.” is a challenge to all Australians— individuals, families, communities, organisations and government—to Be Brave and tackle the unfinished business of reconciliation so we can Make Change for the benefit of all Australians.


Last year Reconciliation Australia encouraged all Australians to take action; not just in National Reconciliation Week but every week of the year.


We saw unprecedented response to our suggested actions for everyday and for braver action.


This year we are asking everyone to make change beginning with brave actions in their daily lives – where they live, work, play and socialise.


National Reconciliation Week—27 May to 3 June—is a time for all Australians to learn about our shared histories, cultures, and achievements, and to explore how each of us can contribute to achieving reconciliation in Australia.


Find out more about National Reconciliation Week #NRW2022 #BeBraveMakeChange 


Source: https://nrw.reconciliation.org.au/


Tuesday 22 February 2022

And the tale of Rous County Council decision making under new pro-dam majority continues......


Echo, 21 February 2022: 


During last week’s Rous County Council (RCC) meeting, Cr Big Rob spoke of contact he had with Professor Stuart White regarding the proposed Dunoon Dam. 


 Professor White is the Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS in Sydney where he leads a team of researchers who create change towards sustainable futures through independent, project-based research. 


 With over twenty years experience in sustainability research, Professor White’s work focuses on achieving sustainability outcomes at least cost for a range of government, industry and community clients across Australia and internationally. 


The Echo spoke to Professor White who made a late video submission to Rous that missed the deadline. A representative of Rous said it was too late to be screened in public access and was ‘forwarded to all Councillors on the morning of the Council meeting for their info’. The rep also mistakingly thought the video was a submission from the Northern Rivers Water Alliance who already had a space in Public Access


Rous County Council meeting 


During the meeting Cr Rob did not give Councillors all of the information he received from Professor White. 


At the meeting, Cr Rob said: ‘I circulated an email overnight relating to the experts that have been relied on – Professor Stuart White for example. You know, his position was the cost and when I made inquiries with Professor White, he finally agreed that yes, that dam should be considered. So if you take the cost out of it, then his position [is] all options on the table, the dam must be considered because that is one of the options.’ 


The Echo asked Professor White about his conversation with Cr Rob because Cr Rob’s comments seemed to be at odds with the information Professor White has been giving other interested parties. 


‘I have not spoken to Cr Big Rob,’ said Professor White. ‘I only had email correspondence. 


‘My position on the Dunoon Dam is clear and I’ve been public about it: it is too expensive, too risky, not useful for the purpose it is intended for, and not needed within the planning horizon. This is before considering the environmental and Aboriginal heritage risks.’ 


Time to rule out dam 


Professor White said that this does not mean the Dunoon Dam, or any supply option should not be considered and investigated alongside other options. ‘It is just that under any reasonable analysis it would be rejected. The proponents have already had a chance to make their case, at great public expense, and my view is that this case has not been made, so it is now reasonable to rule the Dunoon Dam option out.’ 


‘My understanding of the decision by Rous last year was to reject it primarily due to the Aboriginal heritage considerations, which are of course very important and remain very important.’ 


The Echo does not know if any Rous Councillors saw this submission before they voted 6 to 2 to put the dam back on the table.  [my yellow highlighting]


BACKGROUND


NORTH COAST VOICES, FRIDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2022 



Friday 18 February 2022

Rous County Council and that Dunoon Dam proposal now risen from the dead

 

In 2014 Rous County Council (RCC) adopted its Future Water Strategy which recommended detailed investigations to assess the suitability of increased use of groundwater as a new water source, and if groundwater was not suitable, investigate complementary options such as water reuse and desalination.


After completion of this investigation Rous produced the original Future Water Project 2060 which did not prioritise groundwater use, reuse of already available water or building a desalination plant/s.


Instead it chose another option – the 50 gigalitre Dunoon Dam, with the concept design indicating an initial capital cost of approx. $220 million.


In considering options for the future, Rous County Council conducted extensive assessments to weigh up environment, social and economic impacts. The result of these assessments indicate the Dunoon Dam is the preferred long-term water supply option when compared to demand management and water conservation, groundwater sources and water re-use”.


It is worth noting that the proposed Dunoon Dam would be the second dam on Rocky Creek thus further fragmenting this watercourse. The first water storage is Rocky Creek Dam which will continue to operate if the Dunoon Dam was built. Rocky Creek Dam does not have an outlet structure so it does not provide releases for downstream flows. [NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, 2020]


By 2020 this incredibly flawed second dam plan still relied on the widely discredited ‘offset’ scheme as a workaround for the widespread level of environmental destruction, significant biodiversity & species local population loss and, for the drowning of land sacred to the Widjabul Wia-bal People and the desecration of highly significant cultural sites.


Rous authorized preliminary investigation of the Dunoon Dam project in mid-2020 allocating a $100,000 operating budget.


However, the Widjabul Wia-bal, local residents in Lismore Shire and many people in the three other shires within Rous County Council (Byron, Ballina & Richmond Valley) remained concerned with Rous’ choice – the Future Water Project 2060 Public Exhibition Outcomes revealed that 90% of the 1,298 submissions received by 9 September 2020 expressed concerns about the Dunoon Dam proposal.


In March 2021 Rous was reconsidering its earlier Dunoon Dam decision and by 21 July it had voted 5 to 3 to remove the Dunoon Dam from its Future Water Project 2060. At that time a second public exhibition from 1 April to 24 May 2021, this time of the revised Future Water Project 2060, was put in place which resulted in an RCC digital file of supporting submissions 1,754 pages long and confirmed that voiced public opinion was still against building the Dunoon Dam.


By 16 December 2021 Rous County Council had authorised “the General Manager to cease all work on the Dunoon Dam and provide a report on the orderly exit from Dunoon Dam as an option in the future water project, including revocation of zoning entitlements and disposal of land held for the purpose of the proposed Dunoon Dam”.


There the matter should have rested, but after the December 2021 local government elections there was a changing of the guard at Rous Water and six of the eight current sitting RCC councillors are pro-dam.


This led to the unedifying sight on 16 February 2022, of Rous County Council by a vote of 6 to 2 vote reinserting the Dunoon Dam proposal into the revised Future Water Project 2060. No genuine forewarning of what that first RCC meeting of 2022 would contain, no prior consultation with Widjabul Wia-ba elders on the Item 12.1 motion, no community consultation.


The community scrambled to respond. So on the day RCC did hear objections to Item 12.1 from Hugh Nicholson, a previous Chair of Rous Country Council and Friends of the Koala representative Ros Irwin.


A young Widjabul Wia-ba woman, Skye Robertsaddressed the councillors as a “custodian” of the land. She spoke with conviction, determination and, clearly informed all present that: the proposed dam was sited within the large tract of land between three ancient mountains and that land was “sacred land” to all the Widjabul Wia-ba; this included Channon Gorge, the waters that ran through it and the wider dam site; the stone burial mounds which would be submerged by dam waters were part of the circle of cultural connection between land and people; men’s places & women’s places were on land to be flooded; and that land connects to living culture.


The message she carried for her grandmother and mother fell on predominately deaf ears and it was ‘ugly Australia’ which voted the dam back into future planning on that Wednesday in February.


Rous County Council already has before it the Ainsworth Heritage Dunoon Dam: Preliminary Cultural Heritage Impact Assessment for Rous Water, May 2013” which can be read in digital form or downloaded from:

https://issuu.com/jwtpublishing/docs/ainsworth-heritage-preliminary-cultural-heritage-i.


It also has before it the SMEC “Dunoon Dam Terrestrial Ecology Impact Assessment, Prepared for Rous Water November 2011”. An assessment of which can be found at:

https://waternorthernrivers.org/ecological-impact/


For a brief summary of some of the technical flaws in the Dunoon Dam preliminary investigation:


Dunoon Dam: 4 Risks & Considerations by Water Expert Professor Stuart White - Feb 2022

 

Tuesday 26 January 2021

A Quote for Australia Day-Invasion Day 2021

 

“I'm astounded at the comment [from the Prime Minister]…..


"It indicates to me a very shallow understanding of the arrival of the First Fleet and the impact of that on Aboriginal Australia.


"It's a very selfish comment. He said nothing about the arrival of that fleet on the Aboriginal owners who own the place.


"There's no empathy there at all. He's turning it inward. It's all about self-praise and aggrandisement of white fella colonisation.


"It's so shallow in that it doesn't involve inclusion or diversity.


"I just think he's very lightweight when it comes to understanding Australian history and Aboriginal perspectives about the British colonisation of the country.”


[Former Australian of the Year. Northern Territory Treaty Commissioner and ANU Professor of Law, Michael Dodson AM, a proud Yawuru man, quoted in ABC News online, 22.01.21]



An example of how Australian colonial history was re-written


In 1803 the first British soldiers and convicts landed in Van Diemen's Land and in 1824 it became a separate colony to New South Wales. 


By then the colonial population of the island numbered est. 11,967 souls and a population explosion had begun which expanded across more of the land.


Between 1825 and 1831 - when the British-European population had almost tripled - Aboriginal resistance to invasion and occupation of their country increased, with 219 colonists and 260 Aboriginals reported killed. [Nicholas Clements, 2014] 


Though the reality is that Aboriginal deaths were likely considerably higher as this number may not have counted all men, women and children gratuitously murdered, as it is believed that few so-called 'reprisal' incidents were officially recorded at the time they occurred. [Hobart Town Gazette December 3, 1823; Ryan, 1996:86-88; Bonwick, 1870:99, Hobart Town Gazette May 5, 1827; Colonial Times May 11, 1827; George 2002:13, Lee 1927:41; AOT VDL 5/1 No.2, 14/1/28 in SciencePo, 5 March 2008]


However, contemporary colonial history often tried to paint a different picture......


 
Legend reads: "Why Massa Gubernor", said Black Jack. "You Profflamation all gammon.
"How blackfellow read him eh? He no learn him read book."
"Read that then", said the Governor, pointing to the picture.'


Images are treacherous; labels more so. As it happens, Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines 1816 had nothing to do with Governor Davey. It does not date from 1816. And it is not really a proclamation. It was commissioned by Lieutenant Governor Sir George Arthur; in 1830, around one hundred copies were published by the government printer in Hobart, placed on wooden boards, and disseminated. The misattribution dates from its re-discovery in the 1860s and might be explained in two ways. First, by setting the date back almost a generation, the notion that the British colony was founded on the principle of the rule of law is thereby promoted.


Law always needs some mythic retrospectivity to shore up its legitimacy—a penal colony established by dispossession and maintained by violence over whites and blacks alike, especially. The violence and chaos that mark the birth of any new legal order thus become cloaked in a myth that emphasizes instead its inevitability, its order, and its naturalness. By the 1860s, it surely served the interests of Tasmania’s free settlers to inject the rule of law into their narrative of legitimate settlement, as early as possible.


Secondly, Thomas Davey cuts a more attractive figure as author of the Proclamation than Sir George Arthur. As governor, Davey had protested in 1814 his “utter indignation and abhorrence” about the kidnapping of Aboriginal children. But Governor Arthur was an altogether more paradoxical figure, a man who oscillated wildly between expressions of concern for the Aborigines and military campaigns against them; between inciting white settlers to kill Tasmania’s first inhabitants and expressing outrage when they did. He was a man who combined eruptions of extreme action with outbursts of remorseful reflection. Above all, as the man behind the notorious Black Line, the dragnet which attempted to corral like cattle the Aboriginal population of the whole island, Arthur symbolizes a way of thinking about the original Tasmanians that “would be laughable were it not so criminally tragic.” Such a background surely taints and complicates the promise of the rule of law.


The cartoon was suggested and apparently drawn by Arthur’s Surveyor-General George Frankland, and he in turn was inspired by Aboriginal bark paintings.....


The paradox that this drawing raises lies in the difficulty of squaring “the real wishes of the government,” as the Proclamation presents it, with the “the actual state of things” in Van Diemen’s Land. At the very same time that Governor Arthur’s Proclamation elaborated an expansive commitment to the rule of law, he was extending martial law throughout Tasmania. Martial law had initially been declared in 1828 in the face of Aboriginal resistance to colonial settlement. In February of 1830, a reward of five pounds was proclaimed for the capture of adult Aborigines (two pounds for a child), describing them as “a horde of [s]avages” consumed by “revengeful feelings.” In October of 1830, faced by “continued repetitions of the most wanton and sanguinary acts of violence and outrage,” Arthur extended martial law to “every part of this Island.” On October 7, “the [white] community . . . en masse” was to spread out like a human chain across the whole island and, by moving forward, herd the Black or Aboriginal Natives on to Tasman’s Peninsula where they could be penned in once and for all.


Yet martial law had always been understood as involving the suspension of the rule of law. In 1829, the brutal murder of an Aboriginal woman was deemed by the Solicitor-General to be beyond the reach of the common law precisely because it fell under the very broad rubric of “necessary operations against the enemies.” Subject to “an active and extended system of Military operations against the Natives generally” and until the “cessation of hostilities,” Aboriginal Tasmanians were specifically placed outside the rule of law. The Black Line, a dismal and notorious folly, led to the capture of a grand total of two Aborigines and the shooting of two more, but it was powerfully evocative of the colonial government’s attitude towards them….


[Desmond Manderson (January 2013) in NYLS Law Review, Vol 57, Issue 1, THE LAW OF THE IMAGE AND THE IMAGE OF THE LAW”, pp. 157-158]