Xstrata Dreaming: The Struggle of Aboriginal Australians against a Swiss Mining Giant

Xstrata Dreaming: The Struggle of Aboriginal Australians against a Swiss Mining Giant

by Michael Deibert, Special to CorpWatch

February 16th, 2009

The McArthur River winds through Australia's remote Northern Territory creating lush floodplains that sustain vast herds of kangaroos, wallabies and cattle. Above them, finches, wild turkeys, and flocks of migratory birds fill an endless sky. The area around the river, which runs 300 kilometers before emptying into the Gulf of Carpentaria, also provides spiritual sustenance to the region's four main Aboriginal linguistic groups: the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.

Australia's indigenous culture is among the oldest continuously existing communities in the world, and one whose spiritual cosmology, known as the Dreamtime, ties its members closely to the land of their ancestors. At once a mythical time of creation and a present-day spiritual cycle, the Dreamtime includes such totemic animals as the Rainbow Snake, the Turtle and the Alligator. Rituals in tribute to these symbolic guides and protectors must be performed at certain times and in specific places around the expanse of this immense but sparsely populated continent.

Despite the region's glaring lack of basic services, education and employment opportunities, Aboriginal residents value the McArthur River area for its spiritual wealth. But a multinational mining company's pursuit of material riches threatens the core of this already beleaguered culture. In the 1950s, Mount Isa Mines (MIM), a mining concern based in neighboring Queensland state, discovered vast lead, silver and zinc deposits beneath and around the river, and conducted extensive exploratory drilling and feasibility studies.

The Yanyuwa had lived in the region for millennia and were able to legally claim the land in 1977 under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which allows indigenous people to establish ownership of land based on traditional occupation. Nonetheless, MIM, which by then had been operating in the area for three decades, began underground mining activities along the river in 1995.

In 2003, the government of the Northern Territory approved MIM's application to transition from underground to above-ground ("open-cut") mining, a process involving the diversion of the McArthur River. A short time later, MIM sold its operations to Switzerland-based Xstrata Plc, Europe's largest zinc producer. Described on the company's website as "a global diversified mining group" with a "meaningful position in seven major international commodity markets: copper, coking coal, thermal coal, ferrochrome, nickel, vanadium, and zinc," Xstrata has operations that span 18 countries.

Now, as full owners of McArthur River Mining Pty Ltd, Xstrata is authorized to extract 43 million tons of the resource over the next 20 years.

Read the full article here.

Notes from Borroloola

In Australia’s remote Northern Territory, the small town of Borroloola represents for many, both theoretically and literally, the end of the line, only a scant few miles away from the Gulf of Carpentaria as it empties out into the Arafura Sea. Once a way-station for outlaws and all sorts of criminal drift from Australia’s southern reaches, Borroloola has nevertheless historically been of great importance to four of the country’s most important indigenous linguistic groupings, the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.

Visiting the region to examine the controversy surrounding a mining project, its affect on the local population, and what the results of decades of official neglect and indifference have had on Australia’s indigenous inhabitants (one of the oldest continuous groupings of humanity on earth), I drove down the thinnest ribbons of road, populated by a vast array of endemic flora and fauna that were bracing in its natural beauty, so different than the civic mistakes that pose as town in the south of the country. In Borroloola itself, I felt transported back to central Africa, not only because of the landscape but, alas, from the glaring lack of basic services to the original residents of what is ostensibly one of the world’s richest democracies. I must also, say, though, that I found a great dignity and awareness of history and tradition among the Aboriginal residents there, that gives me some small hope that this ancient and important culture will not be lost entirely, no matter what forces are arrayed against it.

For my travels in Australia thus far, in addition to the novia, I have had as company some fine books, the most relevant to my understanding of the places thus far having been National Geographic writer Harvey Arden’s quite beautiful account of his conversations with Aboriginal elders, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia, the art critic Robert Hughes’ often hair-raising account of the country’s conquest by its white population, The Fatal Shore, and, by way of a gift from Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Murray McLaughlin in Darwin last week, Nicholas Jose’s Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola, an account of his search for the true history of an opportunely long-lost relative, the Borroloola hermit Roger Jose.

Back from Borroloola and now ensconced in Sydney once more, we await, with the rest of the world, the innaugruation of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. As one indigenous person told me in Borroloola, “he’s one of us.”