Aboriginal Mining in Pre-European Australia

In the business section of the West Australian newspaper of December 4, 2012, David Collard - described as a leading indigenous spokesman - was quoted as saying that "Aboriginal people did not want to take mining jobs because digging up the land offended their traditional culture'.  I interpret this to mean that Mr Collard is claiming Aboriginal people never or rarely undertook mining activities prior to European settlement and that it's a new and not particularly palatable industry. I assume he's trying to insert this belief into  Australia's broader understanding of Aboriginal history so that indigenous people can more widely adopt a similar view, the end result being that Aboriginals will oppose or at least not offer support for mining.

As a geologist, I can attest to the falseness of Mr Collard's belief. Wilgie Mia near Cue was mined by Aboriginal people for thousands of years (Wikipedia says 40,000 years!), with much of its 14,000 tonnes of ochre traded throughout the western half of the Australian continent. The ochre from this mine was highly valued and it is my understanding that it formed an important part of many ceremonial and artistic practices within many Aboriginal groups.

The chert deposit now located offshore from Margaret River as a result of the sea level rise which stopped roughly at its current height some 8,000 years ago supplied tens or hundreds of tonnes of stone for cutting and hunting tools that were traded throughout the south west. The sharp edge that could be produced by skillfully breaking the stone into flakes made it a valuable and highly tradable mineral commodity.

In New South Wales, there are 183 identified Aboriginal mine sites, primarily for stone and ochre.

Clearly, Aboriginals were competent miners who undertook mining of a number of mineral commodities throughout Australia prior to 1788.

Mr Collard is then quoted in the same newspaper article as saying that indigenous people prefer green-friendly jobs. I agree with him and suggest that most Australians would prefer such jobs. For better or for worse, however, the reality of the world is that the products of mining are essential to our modern global economy and mining must exist if we wish to enjoy the social and economic benefits that its products provide.

Mining forms an undeniably important part of Aboriginal history. If today's mining industry can provide quality employment for Aboriginal people, then Mr Collard should not stand in the way of such jobs by asking us to accept his personal and inaccurate view of Aboriginal history. He clearly has an agenda that he's pushing - maybe he wants to reserve all the eco-friendly jobs for Aboriginal people and leave the other jobs to non-indigenous Australians - but I'm uncertain as to what his agenda is and hence what end goal he is trying to achieve by denying the reality of pre-European Aboriginal mining.

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By the way, I've never been comfortable with the word 'non-indigenous'. I find it somewhat demeaning that the people to whom it refers are non-persons of some sort. So, if Australia's first people are to be considered indigenous to this country (and I'm very comfortable with this use of the term), then maybe we should call Australia's more recent settlers exdigenous. If you do a Google search on this word, you'll find I'm not the first person to use it so I hope it will receive greater acceptance and usage in the future.

ONLY 'ROGUE' SHARKS SHOULD BE CULLED

MEDIA RELEASE - BUSSELTON NATURALISTS CLUB

ONLY 'ROGUE' SHARKS SHOULD BE CULLED

The state government's response to the latest shark attack tragedy should not involve a general cull of Great White Sharks.

Instead, only 'rogue' sharks that have lost their fear of humans and interact with people and their boats should be culled.

The Busselton Naturalists Club held a lengthy debate among members after local Busselton man Peter Kurmann was killed by a shark in March.

The Club agreed that there was no justification for a general cull of Great White Sharks as this could result in the death of sharks that had never been involved in past attacks.

Instead, individual sharks that have a prior history of interaction with humans, such as visiting boats, biting on their propellers or threatening divers, should be culled.

The Club also called on the state government to do more than just adopt a knee-jerk culling policy.

According to Club president Bernie Masters, who was a fisheries inspector in the 1970s, the government needs to adopt a detailed and comprehensive policy that goes beyond just culling.

"The Club supports the government's current program of tagging sharks to obtain a better understanding of Great White behaviour," Mr Masters said.

"In addition, the research program should include developing methods to allow identification of individual sharks using visual methods, so that fishers and divers can attempt to identify problem sharks by methods other than electronic tags," he said.

"In particular, the government should make it illegal to feed sharks or otherwise encourage them to be attracted to boats, as this will encourage them to interact with humans and lose their fear of people."

"Ultimately, of course, if a particular shark is shown to have attacked a human being, then culling is an unfortunate but necessary action."

"But a general cull of large Great White Sharks is not scientifically justified and the state government needs to do more than it's current level of research and investigation."

Bernie Masters
President
Busselton Naturalists Club
0408 944 242

Colin Barnett's influence within the WA Liberal Party

On June 21, I sent the following letter to the editor of The Australian. The newspaper chose not to publish it.

In 2003, while the member for Vasse in the WA Parliament, I lost Liberal Party endorsement to contest the 2005 election. Troy Buswell was selected in my place and he subsequently went on to win the 2005 and 2008 elections. Early on in his political life, he was touted as the 'great hope' of the Liberal Party, being seen by some as a future leader and premier. Since then, we have witnessed his many indiscretions and personality failings.

This history is important in understanding WA premier Colin Barnett's disappointment in not having his preferred candidate Kate Lamont chosen by the Liberal Party to stand as its candidate in the safe seat of Churchlands. Barnett was made the leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party in 2008 because then leader Buswell had committed another personal indiscretion. In desperation, the party's power brokers made Barnett leader in the expectation that then premier Alan Carpenter would win the next election, after which Barnett would retire from politics.

When Carpenter called an early election and then ran an inept election campaign, Barnett was able to win government with the support of the Nationals. However, the Liberal Party had failed to endorse enough quality candidates prior to the hastily called election, the result being that Barnett had a very limited talent pool from which to choose his cabinet. His personal qualities have been the major factor in his government retaining majority elector support. With the next election only nine months away and using his authority as the Liberal leader who won the unwinnable election, Barnett tried to get a quality candidate - Lamont - endorsed for a safe seat so that, after winning the next election, he'd have a better range of MPs from which to select his ministers.

The rebuff he has suffered as a result of Lamont's failure to win preselection is a reflection of the hold that the ABC faction - Anyone But Colin - still retains within the WA Liberal Party. Noel Crichton-Browne, Norman Moore and Senator Mathias Cormann currently control the lay party and, as they have shown in the past, they believe it is better to retain control over the party and lose government, rather than lose their control but retain government.

Lamont's failure should be viewed as nothing more than the party's power brokers retaining their control. The people of WA may see it as a deliberate slap in the face to a premier who has only moderate factional support within his own party but, in reality, it's just a reflection of the sad malaise that currently afflicts most political parties in WA and Australia.

DON'T PLANT TREES ON PLANET ARK'S NATIONAL TREE DAY

July 27 is Planet Ark's National Tree day but it's the wrong time of year to be planting trees in south west WA. A date in late July was selected by Planet Ark more than 10 years ago to best suit tree planting in eastern Australia but it's a totally inappropriate time of year for most of the south west of this state.

I make this call in my capacity as an environmental consultant based in the south west since 1976. I'm also president of one of rural WA's largest and most active conservation groups, the Busselton Naturalists Club.

The end of July is mid-winter in our Mediterranean climate and it's usually the coldest part of the year. Plants put in the ground in late July will generally just sit there and hibernate, waiting for the warmer temperatures of spring in September and October.

They then just have a few weeks of warmer spring weather to get their roots deep enough into the water table to survive our hot summers.

So the best time of year to plant is right now - June - after the first heavy winter rains have fallen and while the ground is still warm.

Planting in late July also means that seedlings miss out on the 4 to 10 weeks of root development that could have been achieved if they had been planted in the period from mid-May until the end of June. These few weeks may be the difference between life and death for the seedlings when the rains stop in spring and our hot dry summers cause water tables to drop by a metre or more.

If seedlings can get their roots down into the water table early in the growing season, they have a better chance of following the water table down into the subsoil as summer evaporation takes hold.

Spring is an important time to plant seedlings into wetlands, as the receding water levels allow plants to be placed into damp but freshly exposed soils, allowing good root development to sustain the seedlings over summer.

In heavier soils in the wheatbelt where soil moisture can persist late into the spring, plantings in late winter can make some sense.

But the sandy soils of the Swan Coastal Plain where most West Australians live dry out very quickly in springtime, so a July 27 planting is risking the loss of most seedlings.

I've previously spoken with Planet Ark about how unsuitable their National Tree Day is for much of the south west of WA. I've suggested that they should select a more suitable date in late May or June and call it WA Tree Day or similar but my pleas have been ignored.

While I was the member for Vasse, I also approached the state government and urged them to promote Arbor Day as the south west's tree planting day. The Department of Environment and Conservation's website doesn't show when Arbor Day was scheduled for 2012 but it's usually in middle to late May or early June which is often ideal for most of the south west.

I'm urging school and community groups, as well as individuals, to get out and get dirty now, with planting through to the end of June preferred.

I'm also urging people to buy local plants that are well suited to our climatic and soil conditions.

And buying from local nurseries makes a lot of sense, especially from the Geographe Community Landcare Nursery on Queen Elizabeth Avenue who specialise in seed collected locally and whose staff can provide excellent advice on the plants best suited to your garden or farm.

Western Australia’s catastrophic forest collapse

The Conversation 5 June 2012  

Western Australia’s catastrophic forest collapse

Recent, unprecedented, climate-driven forest collapses in Western Australia show us that ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic. These collapses are a clear signal that we must develop new strategies to mitigate or prevent the future effects of climate change in Australian woodlands.....

Authors
George Matusick, Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Murdoch University
Giles Hardy, Professor in Forest Pathology at Murdoch University
Katinka Ruthrof, Research Associate at Murdoch University

Recent, unprecedented, climate-driven forest collapses in Western Australia show us that ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic. These collapses are a clear signal that we must develop new strategies to mitigate or prevent the future effects of climate change in Australian woodlands and forests. But society’s view of forests is ever-changing: are we willing to understand ecosystems and adapt to changing conditions?

The south west of Western Australia has experienced a long-term climate shift since the early 1970s, resulting in dryer and hotter than average conditions. This shifted baseline, or average, has also led to more frequent extreme events. In 2010, the region experienced the driest and second hottest year on record.

These climate changes have resulted in significant decreases in stream-flow and groundwater levels. For example, formerly permanent streams now stop flowing for considerable periods. Groundwater levels have fallen up to 11 meters in some forested areas, with larger decreases in populated areas. Clearly, soil water reserves have dried out substantially and will likely continue to do so; we are now starting to see the implications of this. Although most of the West Australian society, particularly those in urban environments, may be well-buffered from these changes, ecosystems are not.

The climatic changes occurring in the south west of Western Australia are contributing to deteriorating woodland and forest health. In the past 20 years, insect infestations and fungal diseases have plagued many iconic tree species, including tuart, wandoo, flooded gum, marri, and WA peppermint, increasing their mortality rates. Many of these disorders are likely triggered or incited by changing climate conditions. 


The recent climate-related deaths of tracts of Western Australian forest go beyond a green issue. George Matusick





In extreme climate conditions, woodland and forest health suffers most. For instance, during the record dry and hot period in 2010 and 2011, large patches of trees throughout the region suddenly collapsed, with little recovery in some areas. Along the coastal plain surrounding Perth, some areas of Banksia woodland suffered losses as high as 70-80%, while over 500 ha of tuart woodland collapsed and over 15,000 ha of exotic pine plantations (~70% north of Perth) were destroyed. In the northern jarrah forest, over 16,000 ha of forest suddenly collapsed, with mortality rates 10.5 times greater than normal.

In several ecosystems, species have died out and not been replaced, permanently shifting vegetation structure and ecosystem function. Some believe that species and ecosystems will transition slowly in response to climate change. But following the extreme conditions experienced in 2010-11, we now know the transition in many West Australian woodlands and forests will likely occur in sudden, catastrophic, step changes.

Many species may not have time to adapt. Other species - like Carnaby's Black Cockatoo - suffer when forests die. Ken & Nyetta/Flickr







These often sudden and dramatic shifts in vegetation health, structure and function have profound consequences on associated flora and fauna, including many critically endangered species. The Mediterranean type-ecosystems of the south west were recently named among the top 10 ecosystems most vulnerable to climate-induced tipping points and degradation by a panel of 26 leading Australian ecologists. The region is one of 35 global biodiversity hotspots, harbouring approximately 1500 plant species, most of which aren’t found anywhere else.

Among the most well known animal species is the near-extinct Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo, which relies heavily on Banksia and pine food resources made scarce by habitat conversion. Tree collapse on the coastal plain in 2010-11 likely played a role in the 34% decline in the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo population in the Greater Perth Region between 2010 and 2011.

Many more plant and animal species are susceptible to similar collapses given the current climate trajectory and future climate predictions. Indeed, many of the traditional values that forests have provided could well be under threat.

Historically, Australian forests have been valued for the resources they provide: timber, charcoal, water, recreation, sequestered carbon, and biodiversity amongst others. With failing forest health, all of these resources are affected. The threats to forests from climate change cross ideological boundaries: this isn’t just a “green” issue. The management of forests is at a crossroads, where decisions about their future need to be made.

To do this, society needs to answer some basic questions:
• Do we still value forests?
• What do we want forests to look like in the future?
• What are we doing now to preserve forest health in this period of climate change?
• Should additional strategies and methods be developed to help forests have time to adapt to these changes?

Although the recent forest collapses in WA are tragic, they are also a valuable opportunity to understand forest susceptibility, stress thresholds, interactions among stress factors (such as insect pests and fungal pathogens) and forest tipping points. Better understanding these aspects is critical if we want to prevent future collapse.

The debate on this article can be found at
https://theconversation.edu.au/western-australias-catastrophic-forest-collapse-6925#comments

Poleward-shifting climate zones – where are they headed and why?

The following article appeared online in The Conversation on 28 May, 2012. Its author is Joseph Kidston,Lecturer, Climate Change Research Centre at University of New South Wales. Its most important point is in the final sentence: "while recent research significantly increases our understanding of the climate system, it also shows that both the forcings, and the processes that give rise to large-scale circulation changes, may be a lot less certain than we previously thought." It also points out that much of the global warming experienced over the last 200 years may not be due to the emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2.

The Earth’s principal climatic zones appear to be shifting poleward. If this continues, as climate models project, the weather patterns that give rise to deserts in the subtropics, and stormy wet weather in the mid-latitudes, will move towards the poles of the Earth.

These shifts are the cause of many of the future regional changes scientists expect to affect our climate.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that most models of atmospheric circulation produce these changes, the underlying causes and the precise dynamics that give rise to these poleward shifts are still not clear. This is a major focus of research in atmospheric science. One point of contention has been that models appear to consistently underestimate the shift when compared with observations.

The reason that the underlying causes are difficult to determine is that many climate “forcings”, such as increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs), changes in aerosols and increases and decreases in ozone (depending on where the change is located) all result in similar circulation changes in models of the atmosphere.

Moreover, the fluid dynamics that lead from forcings to circulation changes are largely resolved by the models, rather than prescribed. This means that the models are not “told what to do”, but rather that they simulate a fluid flow and there can be many steps between initial cause and final effect, which are difficult to understand.

Shedding some light on circulation changes

Last week a team including including Professor Steve Sherwood at the Climate Chnage Research Centre at the University of NSW published new research in the journal Nature. This work has shed some light on the underlying cause of these circulation changes. They find that in global climate models, changes in black carbon and tropospheric ozone can be more effective at causing the expansion of the tropics than well-mixed green house gases.

Black carbon particles are released through burning fossil fuels and bio fuels. You may think of them as “soot”. The input of these into the atmosphere has increased significantly over the past few decades, particularly from Asia and Africa. The sources are numerous, and include forest burning, bio fuels used for residential heating and cooking, and diesel engines. Tropospheric ozone increases have also been attributed to anthropogenic pollution. Motor vehicle exhausts and industrial processes including the generation of chemical solvents all release chemicals that increase ozone in the troposphere.

The result could be a major step toward reconciling the discrepancies between models and observations, increasing our understanding of the climate system.

The study raises the prospect that anthropogenic emissions other than GHGs will dominate global scale circulation changes, at least in the medium-term. This raises the question of whether such understanding may warrant a case for controlling emissions of ozone and black carbon.

Future changes are uncertain

The study also raises important questions for producing accurate regional climate projections

Large-scale circulation changes are the foundation of many regional climate changes. If these circulation changes are substantially affected by emissions of black carbon and ozone precursors, we need accurate projections of future concentrations of these substances.

Unlike well-mixed greenhouse gases, these substances remain in the atmosphere for only a short period of time. This means that their concentration at a given point in time depends on activities over just the preceding few years. This makes prediction inherently less certain than for the concentration of well-mixed greenhouse gases alone.

There is a second, and more serious reason, why future changes in large-scale circulation are extremely uncertain.

Recent work, led by Adam Scaife at the UK Met Office and Michael Sigmond at the University of Toronto, has shown that the circulation changes in a model can be critically dependent on aspects of the atmosphere that are often dismissed as unimportant.

The wind-speed in the stratosphere and mesosphere – remote parts of the upper atmosphere containing less than 10% of the atmospheric mass – is crucial to modelling circulation changes in the lower atmosphere. Unfortunately, most models are a long way from simulating the upper atmosphere accurately.

Moreover, some of the processes that determine the state of this part of the atmosphere are simply prescribed in the models. This means that important forces affecting this part of the atmosphere are approximated, or parameterized, rather than generated through the equations of fluid motion, and so it is very hard to know how they may change in the future.

So, while recent research significantly increases our understanding of the climate system, it also shows that both the forcings, and the processes that give rise to large-scale circulation changes, may be a lot less certain than we previously thought.

NON-VIOLENT PROTESTS ARE VIOLENT!

The much repeated claim by anti-logging and other activists that their actions are non-violent needs to be challenged.

Activists pretend that actions such as throwing rancid butter into an bureaucrat's office, putting sand into the engines of logging machinery, pouring glue into locks and immobilising machinery by locking people onto them are harmless and innocent. They do this by defining non-violence to mean that no physical pain is suffered by the victims of these actions.

However, emotional and psychological pain is real, capable of being inflicted on innocent victims with extreme results.

The cessation of old growth forest logging is believed to have led to suicides in affected communities. On-going anti-logging protest action is causing genuine albeit non-physical pain to contractors, public servants and timber mill employees. The financial pain suffered by third parties such as logging contractors can also be significant, with one former contractor still despairing of some $150,000 lost due to the actions of logging protesters against his business in the early 1990s.

Green activists who inflict so-called non-violent actions against their perceived opponents have blood on their hands and should be held fully accountable for the financial, psychological and emotional results of their actions.

As the US military has found in relation to its Guantanamo Bay prisoners, it is now illegal in the USA to subject people to sleep deprivation, water boarding and similar 'non-violent' torture. Confessions and evidence gained as a result of such torture is inadmissible in a court of law.

It is just a short step from Guantanamo Bay to WA's forests where the 'non-violent' actions of forest protestors have caused and continue to result in serious, long-lasting but largely hidden pain felt by affected people and communities.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH FEDERAL LABOR?

The last two weeks have provided some sad insights into the federal Australian Labor Party. Together they show that the party has lost its way and is no longer capable of being ‘the light on the hill’ for working Australians.

During the Rudd versus Gillard leadership fight, three statements were made by key ALP players which highlighted how badly Labor has lost the plot.

Anthony Albanese provided some teary support for Kevin Rudd but, in explaining his political motivations, he stated that he got himself elected to Parliament “to fight the Tories.” Tories? The UK Conservative Party? What a sad insight into a seemingly competent and effective minister who now admits to have derived his inspiration and enthusiasm from another country and another political system. For decades, even generations, UK politics has focused on class divisions and the struggle by ordinary people to improve their standards of living and quality of life as a result of hard work and ability, rather than inheritance and birthright. In contrast, Australia is arguably THE best example on the face of the planet where the average citizen has been able to discard history and privilege and rely on the sweat of their brow in an egalitarian society. Albanese is living in the wrong country and at the wrong time in our history to be wanting to fight ‘the Tories’.

ACTU president Ged Kearney understandably wanted federal Labor to focus on the important issues for Australia rather than being distracted over the leadership issue. She was reported by the ABC as saying that she hoped the fight would be over soon so that ‘the ALP can return to looking after the rights of workers’. Pardon me: the rights of workers? Is that the primary responsibility of the federal Australian government? What about the responsibilities of workers; or the rights of the unemployed or people on welfare; or the 80% of employees who aren’t your typical white or blue collar workers and not in trade unions? Ms Kearney should have been asking our government to get back to doing what they were elected to do: govern the nation!

When Kevin Rudd suggested that aspects of the carbon tax might need to be reviewed, finance minister Penny Wong quickly came out and criticised this statement. She claimed that, if the review resulted in a lower carbon tax, then this would ‘place a threat to the budget”. Umm, let me get this right: the carbon tax is being imposed in order to encourage industry and individuals to lower their production of carbon dioxide; if effective, the tax will therefore diminish over time and eventually it will cease to exist thanks to Australia becoming a carbon-free economy. So the carbon tax, unlike the GST and income tax, is designed to do what Wong is so critical of – to ‘place a threat to the budget’ - because it will reduce over time and eventually disappear, assuming it has been well designed. Just so we all understand, the federal Labor government is restructuring the nation’s taxation system on the basis of a tax which, if it works, will reduce over time and hopefully cease to exist. As currently structured, the carbon tax isn’t just bad politics; it’s bad governance and poor financial management with a short-term, political focus.

Finally, as this article is being written, federal treasurer Wayne Swan is sustaining his unprecedented attack on three of Australia’s billionaires who’ve made their money from the mining industry. Because they are opposed to the government’s mining and carbon taxes, Swan is in effect saying that these people should not be allowed to speak publicly on issues about which they hold strong views. Isn’t Swan being anti-democratic? Isn’t this an example of the politics of envy and possibly even a return to class warfare (where ‘upper class’ means anyone with more money than the treasurer)? This reminds me of the super-property tax that the Gallop Labor government in WA wanted to apply in the early 2000s to people owning houses worth more than a million dollars. Who protested the loudest and succeeded in having it canned? Aspirational Labor voters, many of them working in the mining industry.

Taken together, the above statements by important federal Labor ministers and their key supporter, the ACTU, show that Labor is not genuinely interested in governing for the benefit of all Australians. The in-fighting, botched funding schemes, withdrawn and revised taxation initiatives, the apparent deceit of our prime minister in denying she’d asked Bob Carr to become foreign minister: all of these and many other mistakes, errors, misguided schemes and general stuff-ups suggest that Labor has seriously lost the plot.

To have a chance of governing effectively for all Australians, federal Labor needs to select people of quality, experience and ability to be its MPs in Canberra, not just union and party hacks who have done their time and now expect their retirement reward. I accept that it will be impossible to create a greater separation between the union movement and the ALP but one has to hope that union and ACTU membership includes many people of integrity, competence and ability, people who can put Australia as a nation first on their to-do list, ahead of their own narrow sectional interests. If such people don’t exist within the ALP and union movement, we can expect to see Labor returned to the opposition benches at the next election and stay there for many years.