Historic Enviro - Native Alliance To Stop Jabiluka Mine

by Andrew Nette

The conflict has pitted the area's traditional aboriginal owners, the Mirrar, and an alliance of environmental and anti-nuclear groups, against the money and power of one of Australia's largest mining companies, Energy Resources Australia (ERA).

ERA already has one uranium mine in Kakadu, also on land claimed by the Mirrar -- the Ranger uranium mine and mill -- and wants to prolong its operations in the park until the year 2027 by starting a new operation at nearby Jabiluka.

Peter Garrett, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the Jabiluka mine would be an environmental disaster for Kakadu. "Jabiluka will put at least 20 million tons of radioactive waste into the eco-system within Kakadu, and provide the green light for up 20 proposed uranium mines to commence in Australia."

"The Australian people are having the wool pulled over their eyes and will wake up one morning to find a brave new world of uranium mines in the most important national icon this country has," said Garrett.

Common in Australia, uranium is a mineral used principally to fuel nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Commercial mining has taken place across the country since the late forties.

Despite the country's huge reserves of the mineral, popular opposition to uranium has restricted the number of operating mines to only two: the gold, copper and uranium mine at Roxby Downs in northern South Australia, and the ERA-run Ranger mine, 20 kilometers from the Jabiluka deposit.

ERA's chief executive, Phillip Shirvington, said his company is pushing ahead with the Jabiluka project on the basis of an agreement reached with the traditional aboriginal owners of the area in 1982 by the mining company Pancontinental, which sold the Jabiluka project and agreements to ERA for 125 million Australian dollars ($77.5 million).

He says the Jabiluka mine contains the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in Australia, with a potential export value of about 3.8 billion Australian dollars ($2.35 billion) over the mine's 28-year life span. Uranium production is to be exported to nuclear plants in Europe, the United States and Asia.

"We are continuing with the mine because we have been through every legal process that we are required to do, and we have been through every environmental process that we are required to do," argued Shirvington.

He added that Jabiluka will not disturb the park's biological or cultural importance, while providing substantial benefits to the Mirrar community in the form of mining royalties for health, education and housing.

The Mirrar, a small clan of 27 adults and many children, who gained title to the land under the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1982, said the Pancontinental agreement was signed under duress and that they want no part of the mine's royalties.

"We have heard 20 years of these extraordinary claims about how Aboriginal people are going to benefit from mining, but the reality is that Aboriginal people are still living in third world conditions," claimed Jacqui Katona, executive officer of the Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation, a community organization run by the Mirrar.

"There is no access to employment, there is no access to education, the health conditions are as poor as any third world community," she said. "There has been no benefit from uranium mining at Ranger, and a new mine at Jabiluka will only make the situation worse."

After launching a series of court actions against ERA, the Mirrar organized a blockade of the proposed Jabiluka mine site in March in an attempt to sway public opinion in the lead-up to the next national election, which must be held by early 1999.

So far, the blockade has attracted hundreds of environmental and anti-nuclear protesters from across Australia. Over 250 people have been arrested in numerous demonstrations since the blockade was set up, including Yvonne Margarula, the current senior Mirrar traditional owner, who was arrested for trespassing on her own land in May.

The campaign's biggest draw card is the mine's location on the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, one of only 17 of the 469 World Heritage areas named by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for both its natural and cultural value.

The area is also of enormous cultural significance. Aboriginal people, including the Mirrar, have lived there for 40,000 years, and Kakadu contains some of the country's best-preserved and oldest archeological and sacred Aboriginal sites.

Despite its remoteness, 250 kilometers from the Northern Territory capital of Darwin, Kakadu is also a major tourist destination, drawing some 300,000 travelers each year.

As proof of their claims, environmentalists cite problems encountered over the 17 years of operations by the Ranger mine, including the periodic release of radioactive water from containment ponds.

A delegation of Mirrar people recently visited a UNESCO meeting in Paris where they lobbied for the U.N. organization's World Heritage Bureau to put Kakadu on its list of world heritage areas endangered by mining.

"They [UNESCO] understand that there are problems with managing a world heritage site with a uranium mine in the middle of it," said Katona, who attended the meeting. She added that a high-level delegation from the Bureau will visit Australia later this year to investigate.

"The expansion of uranium mining at a world heritage site does not indicate that the Australian government is taking their responsibilities seriously under the World Heritage convention," she said.