Stop Adani destroying our land and culture
We, the Wangan and Jagalingou people, are the Traditional Owners of the land in Queensland’s Galilee Basin. Corporate conglomerate, Adani, wants to use our ancestral lands for their Carmichael coal mine.
SIGN OUR PETITION
We do hereby firmly REJECT a Land Use Agreement with Adani for the Carmichael mine on our traditional lands.
We DO NOT consent to the Carmichael mine on our ancestral lands.
We DO NOT accept Adani’s “offers” to sign away our land and our rights and interests in it. We will not take their “shut up” money.
We will PROTECT and DEFEND our Country and our connection to it.
Why is this important?
We are gravely concerned about the push by Adani and the Queensland and Federal Governments to open up the Carmichael Mine on our traditional lands. Our traditional lands are an interconnected and living whole; a vital cultural landscape. It is central to us as a People, and to the maintenance of our identity, laws and consequent rights.
If the Carmichael mine were to proceed it would tear the heart out of the land. The scale of this mine means it would have devastating impacts on our native title, ancestral lands and waters, our totemic plants and animals, and our environmental and cultural heritage. It would pollute and drain billions of litres of groundwater, and obliterate important springs systems. It would potentially wipe out threatened and endangered species. It would literally leave a huge black hole, monumental in proportions, where there were once our homelands. These effects are irreversible. Our land will be “disappeared”.
Nor would the direct impacts be limited to our lands – they would have cascading effects on the neighbouring lands and waters of other Traditional Owners and other landholders in the region. And the mine would cause damage to climate, with the burning of the coal unleashing a mass of carbon into the atmosphere and propelling dangerous global warming.
We could not in all conscience consent to such wholesale destruction. Nor could we allow such a project to contribute to the dire unfolding effects of climate change that pose such great risks to all peoples.
We know that many other people who care deeply about conserving natural places, vital water resources, the great fauna and flora of central Queensland, and a health planet share our concerns about this mine.
Please stand with us in our Defence of Country.
When we say No, we mean No.
We, the Wangan and Jagalingou people, are running our own petition on the CommunityRun platform, hosted by GetUp, where anyone can start their own campaign. This is not a GetUp petition or campaign.
I am writing an essay about the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Protection Act 2003 and how major corporations are dismissing the importance of our culture. As a proud Yidinji Kalkadoon woman, I stand with you my brothers and sisters, we will defeat these capitalists one day. Stand tall and proud, just like our old people did.
The Wangan and Jagalingou deserve to have their ancestral homeland untarnished and free from coal mining.
Leave Queensland alone. A beautiful natural Queensland does not need to be tainted by coal mines, and the native people should be in charge of their native lands and those lands’ destiny.
I am American and live an ocean away, but I have Native American blood in me, and when I see fellow native peoples from around the world who struggle with oppression and injustice it lights a fire in my heart and makes me raise my voice in support of the voiceless.
All of Australia and the world should raise their voices in support of the Wangan and Jagalingou, and may they prevail in their struggle to save and preserve a beautiful, natural Queensland.