First there is a river, then there is no river...

My apologies to Donovan, folks.
This is a story about a river and the place of that river in an Aboriginal culture, but it's also a story about mining.
But first a wee bit of history. More than forty years ago, a Swiss mining company - one of the then giants of the world bauxite trade - bulldozed its way into the consciousness of Yolngu people of North East Arnhem Land when surveyors found substantial deposits of the mineral under clan estates.
The Yolngu leaders tried everything to stop the mine, including legal action and an appeal to Parliament that revealed the legal title deeds to those estates in the form of a composite bark painting that showed the clan stories.
All to no avail. The Australian Government of the day issued the licence and they got a mine. They got a town. And they got a pub.
In the process, they saw the authority of their leaders disregarded, their lands alienated and their sacred sites desecrated. One celebrated photograph shows a senior man sitting by helplessly as a big D9 Cat rips into a sacred tree near his camp. It's arguable whether the Yolngu have ever recovered from the psychic shock of the rape.
Throughout their ownership of the mine, which ended a few years ago, Alusuisse continued to treat local landowners with the same disdain.
Small wonder when, as I discovered only within the past five years or so, Alusuisse assumed its leading position in the industry on the backs of slave labour - Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, displaced people from throughout Europe - supplied to their mates by the Nazis from their concentration camps. Nice people, eh?
And now another Swiss-owned mining company - Xstrata - is about to do another act that will desecrate a sacred place, with the inevitable cultural fall-out.
Xstrata has been mining various minerals at a mine on the Macarthur River, a few hundred kilometres from Darwin and in the floodplain country that stretches north to the Gulf of Carpenteria.
It wants to extend the mine and open up a huge open cut operation. That in itself is environmentally dodgy. One Wet a couple of years ago, the mine site had nearly TWO METRES of rain in a week. But the really dodgy thing about this operation is that they want to divert the river for about five kilometres.
Yes. Divert a river.
Shades of the 1950s? The can-do philosophy that made America what it is? (Q: What is America? Rasta answer - Babylon; Muslim answer - The Great Shaitan. Ask people in Chile and Nicaragua. Or Vietnam. Or Panama. Or Palestine. Take your pick.)
Whichever it is, it's an act of wilful cultural vandalism rather than an engineering miracle. The Macarthur River is the Rainbow Serpent and where they want to divert it is a particularly sacred part of the story.
So did the Swiss back off?
Not on your life. Sensing that they were operating on questionable ground, they threatened the Northern Territory government that they'd withdraw the entire operation - which they claimed meant the NT losing millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs - if the government refused to let them divert the river.
Their argument has been revealed as somewhat piss-weak: most of the jobs on site are filled by fly-in fly-out workers from other States; and they haven't paid any money over to the NT anyway.
Nonetheless, the NT government caved in and the Mines Minister announced the other day that the mine and the river diversion would go ahead. As far as we know, there's yet to be an acceptable package of compensation for the Aboriginal people of the region. Y
anyuwa traditional owners from the region came to Darwin to protect, but the dirty deed was done. They looked the parliament in the eye, though, and not a few on the padded benches flinched.
One who didn't was herself a Yanyuwa woman - Barbara McCarthy, a former journalist who won the local seat of Arnhem at our last elections for the ruling Labor Party. Barbara was painted up by her elders with ochre and she wore the paint proudly as she stood up and questioned the deal.
Predictably, her motives were questioned, since she accepted party discipline until the deed was done and spoke up only after the event. I think she did a brave and honest thing, the right thing by her people.
The company, equally predictably, tried to play down what she'd been saying. They continue to insist that they've got the traditional owners on side and they have a really good package to hand to them.
Previous experience with overseas mining companies in the bad old days suggests that this is so much old cobblers. They might well have talked to the very few people who were likely to agree with them. They might have offered inducements to those few. But they sure as hell don't have the agreement of the real custodians of that country and its stories.
And it all makes me wonder what's happened to a Labor Party that behaves much like the Tories we revile.
In the bad old days of conservative rule in the Territory, you could count on blackfellas getting the rough end of the pineapple every time. I didn't expect to see it done so blatantly - and so consistently - under a Labor government.
Perhaps that's why people don't trust politicians any more. Social democracy is not worth shit if the underdogs keep losing.

It's a conspiracy!

How's this for a conspiracy theory:
'Bureaucrats imported from draconian southern states are trying to destroy the Northern Territory's unique lifestyle and heritage. They come to Darwin for a few miserable years with no intention of staying or making innovative and intelligent decisions. Their aim is to implement the laws that have already been imposed on states that have no relationship or understanding of our truly unique part of Australia.'
So what's the burning issue? What's the infringement of our civil liberties? What's threatening to destroy our 'unique lifestyle and heritage'?
Never in your wildest dreams would you guess that it's simply a proposal to impose a speed limit on the Stuart Highway, all 1900 kms of road that stretches from Darwin to the South Australian border.
The reason?
We have a road toll that's out of all proportion to our population of 200,000-odd; 34 people (that's 17 in every 100,000) have died on our roads since Jan 1 and countless people have been injured.
Speed and booze are major contributors, but the state of the roads and the skill of drivers play a part too.
The highway has no speed limit outside built-up areas.
Theoretically, you can drive at any speed you like.
The police have a caveat - 'safest' speed - which enables them to prosecute the more outrageous speedsters for dangerous driving.
The Government is now floating the idea that we should have a a maximum speed limit of 11okm/h - just like everywhere else in Australia.
It's probably a requirement for more Commonwealth road funding, which we desperately need, particularly for remote Aboriginal communities.
Surprise surprise there's already a protest website - www.nospeedlimit.com - to complement the outpouring of outrage from the petrolheads.
I had a look at the website today and I have to say it's a professional job, which leads me to believe this isn't just a grassroots effort.
The articles on motor-racing and the puff piece for the new Camry are a dead give away.
Someone's interests are obviously being threatened and it ain't those of the average punter behind the wheel
I couldn't find the above quote verbatim on the site.
That comes courtesy of our Northern Territory News, the daily rag that devotes lots of column inches to crocodile stories and even more to our 'unique lifestyle and heritage'.
I'm taking it to be an accurate quote because the paper is owned by Rupert Murdoch and you can always trust a media baron's local outlets to tell the truth, can't you?
And according to NTN, the site also says that tourists and unlicensed drivers, mostly from Aboriginal communities, contribute more to road deaths than driving at 140km/h on the open road.
Oh yes, if I hadn't already pricked up my ears at the words 'lifestyle' and 'heritage', I think I just heard a dogwhistle.
Lifestyle and heritage in the territory context refer to something that is dear to the heart - in this case the so-called right to drive at any speed you want and bugger the rest of the world.
And I don't notice them lobbying for more road funding for communities - mainly Aboriginal - that are serviced by dirt roads.
There's a peculiar identity problem at the centre of this and it's called being a Territorian.
People who come here to live like to think they're different and, unfortunately, they also like to think that they shouldn't be subject to the norms of civilised behaviour, let alone the law, because they've chosen to live in what they fondly imagine to be a regulation-free environment.
So being 'Territorian' is, in the words of our home-grown political party, being 'Strong, Independent and Free'.
Wow.
Very few white people were actually born in the Northern Territory and live here for all of their adult lives.
Most of us come from the 'draconion' southern states and many only stay a couple of years, so it's a waystation on a career path rather than a serious life choice.
Quite a few of us have some sense of responsibility towards our fellow human beings.
And some of us even believe that being a resident of the NT doesn't entitle anyone to special privileges, particularly the hide to claim dangerous driving as a 'unique lifestyle and heritage'
A speed limit isn't much of a concession to make if you stand a better chance of not being hit by some junior racer who can't control a powerful car at the speeds it's engineered to do on roads that aren't designed as racetracks.
But our heavily-sponsored website has all the answers.
'NT residents who regularly drive from Alice to Darwin at anything under 120kmh complain that they get drowsy and are less alert than at the 140kmh speed that they travel at.'
Right.
I think flying is the most reasonable option.

Liberal?

We've had more than 10 years of government by a Liberal-National Party coalition.
10 years of John Howard.
10 years of ruthless ideological war by a gang of conservatives who are hell bent on extinguishing any shred of evidence that we ever had so-called social democratic government under Labor.
It's been a nasty, mean-spirited time.
The political discourse has changed dramatically and self-interest rules even more obviously than before.
Any sense of corporate responsibility - not to say compassion - for the wrongs done to Aboriginal Australians in our short history has been written off as a 'Black armband' or bleeding heart view of our country.
Contemporary Aboriginal life throughout the nation is now overseen by a gang of zealots in the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination under Mal the boofhead, instead of by a flawed attempt at Aboriginal self-determination.
The tax system has been largely replaced by a Goods and Services Tax regime and the rich are getting richer.
Any sense of international obligation towards refugees was thrown overboard when the first razor-wire detention camps for 'illegal immigrants'.
Any sense of common decency and politeness in the public discourse is scorned as 'political correctness'; but it is now politically correct to be a rude bastard and be indifferent to the effects of your actions on other people.
Any sense of industrial justice went by the board when Howard's toadies sidelined the concept of collective bargaining and replaced it with a system of individual contracts that needs to be propped up by a new and expanded array of agencies to replace the one-stop shop at the old Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.
Media ownership is just about to be thrown open to the robber barons; telecommunications is about to go entirely into private ownership, with none of the service guarantees for remote and regional Australia that public ownership demanded.
And the coalition is still looking for 'socialist' shibboleths to demolish and bogey men to demonise.
Now they've turned their attention on State and Territory governments, all of which are under majority Labor administration.
Latest target is education, traditionally a State preserve although it's heavily funded by the Commonwealth.
Successive Federal Education Ministers have had a go at standards of literacy and numeracy, but they were just the opening salvoes in the campaign.
The incumbent is making heavy noises about taking over curriculum from the States and territories because they look as if they've been designed by Maoist ideologues and they're teaching values and interpretations instead of 'facts'. History as a school subject, of course, is under the gun.
Yes, the accusations are loopy.
But the real worry is their increasing tendency to attempt to micro-manage every aspect of our lives and every detail of the policy landscape.
And the fact that they are so terribly fucking self-righteous in their assumptions.
But so much for small government.
I guess this campaign of vilification says a lot about the moral and intellectual status of the coalition.
If they're still governed by fear and loathing of Labor, then they're on the shakiest ground just when they seem to be at their most powerful.
Or is that too Zen for you?