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.