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I've always counted myself lucky to have been born and raised in WA. There
are plenty like me, people whose childhoods were touched by nature. People
who grew up in the open air, who saw a clean sea and a bush horizon often
enough to accept them as a given. There's a song we used to sing at school
in the sixties. It's by Dorothea Mackellar and if you're old enough you'll
remember it. You might cringe a bit but you'll recall it. One of the verses
goes I love her far horizons, I love her jewelled sea, her beauty and
her terror, the wide brown land for me. And look, it has its problems
as a poem and I'm not sure why the continent gets to be a girl and everything,
but I never did shake off the sentiment. It gave me goosebumps as a six
year old and it still does now. I believe in the emotion behind it. If
you were ever going to connect with the idea of the wide brown land it
was odds on to happen to you in WA. I'm not talking nationalism here,
but something else, something simpler, more fundamental. It might be patriotism
but not of the sort that bigots have recently resorted to, wrapping themselves
in the flag.
If Australians share any kind of birthright then perhaps it's a sense
of amplitude: a sense of space, physical freedom, openness, grandness
of scale. We live on a big island and the island has been good to us.
For my money WA is the prime bit of the island because its added isolation
and low population have afforded us areas of real wilderness. A good deal
of that wild country is coastal. There are still places you can go to
experience Australia as it was for your great grandparents. That's an
incredible, empowering thing, to feel connected to other generations.
It allows you to imagine your children and theirs taking the same nourishment
from the natural world. To date we can claim very little credit for being
able to have these wilderness experiences because these blessings are
due more to good luck than good management. Honestly we don't know how
lucky we are.
Consider how exceptional it is, in global terms, to be able to step off
the beach in an industrialized country, wade into the sea, put your head
in the water and see a coral lump absolutely livid with fish. To have
something like The Great Barrier Reef within wading distance. There's
250 kilometres of it. Think how rare it is to walk all day and perhaps
the next without encountering an effluent pipe, an oil stain, a carpark,
an artfully placed palm tree, or a great shimmering wall of condos. We
take such experiences for granted. But the isolation that provides such
landscapes and experiences also produces our great complacency. As a kid
throwing craypots off the reef edge at Greenough, casting for tailor at
Floreat, diving for abalone at Triggs and surfing from Esperance to Broome,
I took in all that richness, all that geographical privelege, and every
bit of that complacency. I thought that it would all go on forever, that
the wide brown land would provide, that it was big enough to cope, that
it could absorb whatever we did to it.
The things you love, just like the people you love, the places you hold
sacred will eventually make some claim upon you. Nothing that's sacred
comes without a sacrifice. Sadly, the only time you ever hear talk like
that is just before a war. Then they're talking about the defence of woolly
political concepts, ideas about nations, systems of government. How many
people think as passionately as that about the ground beneath their feet,
the landforms and species and habitats that have sustained them? How many
of us have developed a deeper patriotism and wondered not what our island
will do for us, but what we might do for our poor long-suffering island?
So many West Australians from so many different backgrounds have been
to Ningaloo and seen manta rays, humpbacks, whale sharks, turtles, dugongs,
birds of all kinds, enough fish to make you dizzy. For decades people
have gone north as campers, anglers, divers, bushwalkers, surfers and
naturalists, and we all come away with a richness of experience, something
special that makes us want to return. Ordinary citizens treasure the reef.
It's an icon. What makes us return, what brings people from the border
and from overseas is the same thing. It's the experience of a place preserved
by isolation. What people are encountering at Ningaloo is a wilderness
experience. Nobody argues about its status as a gem, but many of us take
it for granted and we do so at our own peril.
But there is, I believe, a gradual awakening amongst West Australians.
There are more and more burrs in the comfort-blanket of our sandgroper
complacency. Right along our coast, from the Bight to the Kimberley there
has been a wave of concern about disastrous planning and inappropriate
coastal development, and a few unlikely battles have been won by community
groups speaking out, making themselves heard, saving their places from
insensitive development by commercial operators. Think of Smiths Beach,
and the triumph of people power at Leighton. But the major challenges
still lie ahead, and of them all Ningaloo will be the big one. Maud's
Landing is shaping up as the first and perhaps the most important engagement
in the struggle to save the Ningaloo Reef. To secure its future and integrity.
Despite the odds against democracy prevailing, the odds being habitually
skewed in favour of those within corporate coffers and PR drones, I believe
enough people will stir from their torpor and claim Ningaloo for the people.
Believe me, in environmental terms, Ningaloo is the Next Big Thing.
I take heart from the way in which all kinds of people, from the pierced
to the pinstriped, from the blow-waved to the dread-locked, came together
to save our old growth forests. This kind of communal passion, this sort
of broad coalition is what will be required to secure a sustainable future
for Ningaloo and the Cape Range. And I think it will happen.
The Coral Coast Resort at Maud's Landing has no place in our future. This
is the same old same old. The politics and the planning are the familiar
ad hoc mish-mash. Look at the proponent's plans. Developments like this
are the past. Resorts are standard issue worldwide. Like shopping malls,
they're all essentially the same place, that is, no place. Damaging, resource-draining
monstrosities that require real places to attach themselves to. They exploit
places and give nothing back. They're a dime a dozen. The Ningaloo Reef
on the other hand is a one-off. We go there for what it is already. We
have no need for the New Improved version that this proponent is trying
to sell us. The reef is an Australian icon. Given enough information,
West Australians won't surrender it without a fight. Our piece of the
island has been good to us. Maybe it's time for the arrangement to finally
be mutual.
Tim
Winton
25th September, 2001
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Save
Ningaloo Campaign
By Chris Tallentire
"The
resort is a misguided, exploitative monstrosity that should never have
been allowed to get this far. Developments like these in wilderness areas
belong to disasters of the past. They have no place in our future. Governments
who entertain such plans will live on in infamy. You can't undo decisions
like this. Why would any responsible government consider it?"
- Tim Winton
The
Save Ningaloo campaign brought together over 350 people in the Alexander
Library Theatrette on Tuesday 25 September. The evening marked a further
lifting of the campaign's momentum.
Tim
Winton, internationally acclaimed author and passionate campaigner for
the environmental protection of marine and coastal ecosystems, hosted
the evening and paid tribute to the efforts made so far by campaigners
against the proposed Coral Coast Resort.
Mr
Winton spoke of his sense of wonderment at the Ningaloo ecology and his
view that imposing a ubiquitous resort at Ningaloo was an attack on the
rights of future generations to enjoy the area in a magnificent state
of wilderness.
Scientific
information on Ningaloo's biodiversity values was explained by Dr David
Sutton, who highlighted the significance of Ningaloo's location at the
intersection of different biogeographic regions. Dr Sutton outlined the
environmental factors that would make World Heritage listing of the area
highly appropriate. He also spoke of the many gaps in scientific knowledge
about the area.
Mr
Dennis Beros of the Australian Marine Conservation Society presented mapped
information showing the ranges of humpback whales, manta rays, dugong
and turtles, upon which he overlayed the projected zone of impact of a
resort at Maud's Landing. By indicating the potential for specific impacts
on species it was evident that significant impacts on ecological processes
were likely. Mr Beros also spoke of the need to develop an alternative
vision for the area that put environmental values first.
Having
spent a number of years as a filmmaker in the area Mr Richard Todd was
able to speak of a typically wonderful Ningaloo day. He described the
thrill of swimming with a whale shark and asked where else in the world
this can be done while on the same day seeing turtles, humpback whales,
and manta rays, not to mention numerous stunning species of fish and coral.
Mr
Todd questioned the environmental soundness of using 1890s planning legislation
to justify the selection of the Maud's Landing town site for the location
of the proposed resort. Mr Todd suggested that for any essential development
in the region that Exmouth was a more logical location. He also spoke
on the various options for the development of a road in the Carnarvon
Coastal Strategy.
At
several stages in the evening the adequacy of the scope of environmental
consultants reports was questioned. Discussion was held on what the next
course of action should be. One suggestion was that shareholders of the
company proposing the development should be accurately informed of the
likely environmental consequences of the proposal proceeding.
Mr
David McKenzie of the Wilderness Society highlighted the need for all
concerned members of the public to write to the Government lodging their
disapproval. The present round of protestation includes writing letters
to Dr Geoff Gallop, Premier of Western Australia.
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