Let Aboriginal Australians speak for themselves

For a government that was obsessed with giving indigenous people a ‘Voice’, Australian ministers haven’t been too successful at actually listening to their Aboriginal citizens.

Just outside rural Blayney in New South Wales, mining company Regis Resources was due to set up a gold mine worth a billion Australian dollars. Regis received planning approval in 2023, and had cleared its plans with the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council, the elected representatives for the local indigenous Wiradjuri people. But earlier this year, the Labor government’s minister for environment and water, Tanya Plibersek, made an order to designate the land an area of special Aboriginal heritage. This would protect the area under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984, making it impossible to develop. Regis promised to appeal Plibersek’s order and began formal legal proceedings this month.

The designation doesn’t cover the whole area where Regis was planning to build its gold mine, only the sections where the tailings dam would be built. That’s the depository for all the dirt, mud and gunk that must be dug up to mine for gold. Plibersek has insisted that the mine could still theoretically go ahead, but Regis argues her order makes the whole project unviable. In fact, it would not only be uneconomical, but also irresponsible to build a mine and have nowhere to dump the waste it creates.

Plibersek nonetheless justifies her order by saying it will preserve the area’s cultural significance to the Wiradjuri. This is based on an application made by the Wiradjuri Traditional Owners Central West Aboriginal Corporation (WTOCWAC). WTOCWAC is a group of Wiradjuri leaders who, in conflict with the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council, argue that the Regis mine will damage their cultural heritage. WTOCWAC claims that the Wiradjuri have a significant spiritual connection to the area, citing a mythological story about a blue-banded bee at the site.

The Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council, however, believes the claim is baseless. Wiradjuri elder Neil Ingram said he had ‘never heard’ of the story. Anthropologist Dr Philip Clarke agrees. Clarke told the Australian last month that blue-banded bees ‘do not produce collectable honey, so they have no recorded Aboriginal economic use’. This would mean they are unlikely to become the subject of any mythology. He also found that the earliest record of the blue-banded bee story was from 2022. ‘If this story were so culturally important’, he said, ‘it would logically have been mentioned much earlier, during earlier consultations between Regis Resources and local Aboriginal representatives’. Based on Clarke’s assessment, the WTOCWAC’s claim looks less like knowledge based on genuine cultural authority and more like a fantasy invented to kill Regis’s gold mine.

When it comes to indigenous policy, Australia’s current Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has shown a preference for identity politics over democracy and equality. Last year, his government spent 400million Australian dollars on the ill-fated ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’ referendum. Had the motion succeeded, Aboriginal Australians would have been given a special constitutional body of unelected representatives to ‘advise’ parliament. Few details were given beyond that, but it was clear that, in practice, the Voice would give some Australians a greater say in government based on the colour of their skin. Thankfully, the campaign failed catastrophically. Not a single state voted in favour of the Voice and the national ‘Yes’ vote didn’t even reach 40 per cent.

The scuttling of the Blayney gold mine is another attempt by the Australian government to tell Aboriginal Australians what’s good for them. Despite a locally elected body deciding to allow the mine, Plibersek has chosen to overrule the community – depriving it of valuable employment and business opportunities in the process. ‘We’re about economic empowerment for our people’, one local Aboriginal leader pointed out, ‘our kids want to be a part of the economic base for future generations’.

Killing the Blayney gold mine will be an economic blow to all Australians. But the cost will be borne most unjustly by the very indigenous Australians the government claims it is trying to help.

William J Barker is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Read his substack here and his film-criticism magazine, Into the Screen, here.