LAMENT FOR A BROKEN HEARTED COUNTRY. When I read the headlines in The Australian this morning - how plunging prices for liquid natural gas are dashing government expectations of all the riches they assured us were coming, I felt nothing but grief for my country. And - unlike all the financial writers and the investors - it had nothing at all to do with the money. it was about the sense that the land is who we are - the land that shapes us, makes us, breaks us - and how dreadfully and how badly we have let her down. All that beautiful farming country right across the Western Darling Downs that is now pierced and pock-marked, all those dark and mysterious aquifers being sucked dry – and all the rest they have planned – from Tamworth to the exquisite Liverpool Plains to Narrabri to Moree and Goondiwindi. . Because the hard truth of this is that all of the fertile farming country that has been fracked and drilled could had still been producing crops and food and exports for a nearly broke nation, a perfectly renewable resource that has been compromised - and mostly destroyed right in front of our eyes. How did this happen? I have a hunch we will be explaining that to our children and our grandchildren for a very long time. I shall try and express it best with two words that I know to be true: traitors - and corruption. My dear friend Dame Mary Durack once wrote a poem called “Lament for the Drowned Country” when her beloved Argyle station was drowned under Lake Ord. It has always been judged as her finest poem. “Lament for the drowned country” is spoken in the voice of Maggie, one of the old Aboriginal woman that Dame Mary grew up with, and Maggie is mourning the loss of her born country’ in the Ord River Irrigation Scheme. It’s a deeply moving poem about the loss of country for both the blackfella and the whitefella, about the grief it brings, the ties that bind us forever to the land. Along with a group of friends from a station near Kununurra, I took Dame Mary back to Argyle Station for what would be her final visit. We were surrounded by her old stockmen, her aboriginal family, and everyone who held her dear as the Great Queen of the North. That day might as well still be today, so deeply has it burnt into in the landscape of my heart. ...I sit along river coming down from my born country. That heart place! I got to talk to that water. I got to tell that fish: ‘You go back – you go back now - talk strong my country. You tell him that spirit can’t leave ‘em. You tell him – Wait! Hang on! This is not the finish!.. I sincerely hope and pray that one day, when the battle for our land is finally over and we have won, we will be able to express how we feel about what has been done to it in music and literature and art. It’s probably hard for some of you to understand if you do not trace your roots here, if you do not feel your spirit call you home. We would like to share it with you, because this land belongs as much to you as it does to the rest of us. And that way, we can love it together. Heather Brown Pascoe (headlines from todays Australian) ...PLUNGING prices for liquid natural gas are dashing state and federal expectations of a revenue bonanza from the country’s massive new gas projects, with at least $2 billion being stripped from tax and royalty forecasts. The seven giant projects being built at a combined cost of about $200bn represent the largest capital investments made in Australia and are still expected to be financially viable. But as prices tumble, the industry’s export revenue could be as much as $20bn a year lower than was expected a year ago…
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 10:28:32 +0000
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