By Tony Wright
Choy Lan Seet‘s eyes flash her indignation. “Is there a plan for this island? Tourism? Refugees? If there is a plan, and if it is not to be mining, then someone should tell us so we can decide what to do with our lives. There seems to be no plan,” she says.
Choy Lan knows something about uncertainty on Christmas Island, the little Australian territory in the Indian Ocean that is much closer to Indonesia than Australia.
As a 16-year-old girl, she was forced to watch as her father, mother, grandmother and three sisters were packed into the hold of a steamer and sent from Christmas Island to a life of hopelessness in Singapore.
Her father, Seet Pew, had worked for almost 40 years in the crushing heat of Christmas Island‘s phosphate mines, wielding a changkul — a form of hoe — from dawn till dusk. He was, like all the imported workers of his time, little better than a slave, an indentured coolie, paid a pittance and trucked to and from the phosphate fields each day in the open tray of a lorry.
Yet he and his wife had managed to raise seven children in a single-roomed hut on Christmas Island, and he had saved enough of his few dollars a week to bring his mother from his native Canton (Guangzhou) in China, too.
And then, in 1972, aged 58, bent by the years of drudgery and hoping for a little ease on his island home, he discovered that the mine bosses and the Australian authorities had no more use for him. He was forced to leave Christmas Island with half his family, while the four eldest children, including Choy Lan, were left behind. The promised hotel accommodation in Singapore turned out to be a single room in a cut-price boarding house, and he had no choice but to rent a tiny home and work for the rest of his life at any job he could find to prevent his remaining family starving.
Such stories, of fathers cast off with the letters NTR (Never to Return) stamped on their papers, are told by many on the little island. Australia, and the British before Australia took over the island in 1958, wanted the cheap phosphate to fuel agricultural wealth on the mainland, but they did not want responsibility for the slaves who dug it up, many of whom were worked to death.
Choy Lan, steeled by her family‘s appalling treatment, grew to become the public face of a hard-fought campaign that eventually won for the Chinese and Malay communities of Christmas Island the right to Australian citizenship and proper wages. It is confronting to understand that this did not happen until the 1980s, when exhausted workers still slept in sweltering rooms with no mattresses or furniture, and air-conditioning was a comfort only for white bosses.
Bob Hawke was a big supporter of the new Union of Christmas Island Workers when he was the ACTU chief, but as prime minister he oversaw the closure of the mine that supported almost everyone on the island, and a new round of removals, this time to mainland Australia.
Choy Lan lived through that period, too, and was among those who celebrated after yet another long fight in the 1980s, first to reopen the mine, and then to achieve what seemed a miracle. In 1989, the workers, many of them children and grandchildren of slaves, became part-owners of the phosphate company, most of them borrowing heavily to buy shares.
Choy Lan, now a mother to a third generation of Christmas Islanders, is employed as the executive assistant to Christmas Island Phosphates manager Alfred Chong. Like almost everyone she knows, she wants to spend the rest of her life on this speck in the Indian Ocean. “We want a future; we want to stay here,” she says. “This is our home.”
But a confluence of forces makes that a decidedly uncertain hope, with the future of the mine — Christmas Island‘s single biggest employer — once again in the balance.
Most Australians‘ knowledge of Christmas Island began only during the Tampa controversy of 2001, and extends little beyond news reports about the arrival of asylum seekers in leaky boats, and the massive detention centre that has been built there. Less understood is that the recent influx of asylum seekers has put new pressures on the permanent population of about 1200. With 720 asylum seekers now in residence, and another 300 officials to care for them, accommodation is at breaking point.
Rents for houses have skyrocketed to about $600 a week. The islanders grumble that the asylum seekers have fresh food flown in while locals have to pay extortionate amounts for meat and vegetables. Recently locals were furious to learn that four tonnes of bottled water had been flown to the detainees at $6 a kilogram. What was wrong with the local tap water, the islanders asked. Last year, no meat shipment arrived for four months.
Yet this is no broken-down, mined-out wasteland, unlike that other island chosen by the Howard government for the incarceration of asylum seekers, Nauru. Christmas Island‘s tiny port at Flying Fish Cove, blurred with phosphate dust when ships are loading, may present an unprepossessing sight to the new arrival. Yet a short drive to the rainforests, or a boat ride around the jungle-clad cliffs (or better, a dive on the coral gardens out to the dizzying drop-off), soon persuades the most jaded soul that this is an outpost of paradise.
The island‘s cliffs hiss and moan as the Indian Ocean swell forces itself through limestone fissures and blowholes. Above, hundreds of thousands of sea-birds perform aerobatics, the opportunistic frigates harrying the other fliers until they drop their catch.
Paradoxically, the island‘s astonishing natural beauty has become the greatest barrier to those hoping to live out their lives there supported by income from phosphate mining. On Christmas Island — a 50-million-year-old volcanic upthrust that developed a unique biodiversity in the long peace that reigned before Europeans began exporting its rich phosphate deposits in the 1890s — the mismatch between modern environmental concerns and scooping resources from the ground could hardly be clearer.
The phosphate mine is currently a scavenger, reworking old diggings. But if it is to continue extracting worthwhile ore, mine management insists it needs to expand. It has applied for eight new leases covering 256 hectares, or less than 2 per cent of the island.
The plan hit a big snag in the last year of the Howard government when the then environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, turned down the application, citing likely significant impacts on listed threatened and migratory species and the environment. Turnbull had not visited the island, but based his decision on departmental advice. The future for mining, and for employees whose only hope of remaining on the island was linked to the mine‘s fortunes, suddenly dimmed.
Many felt they had been relegated to the dark days when they could be forced off what they considered their home. “No mine, no future,” one of the workers, Zakariah Hassan, told The Age last week.
Environmentalists and green groups, however, celebrated. West Australian Greens senator Rachel Siewert, who occasionally stays at a friend‘s home on the island, welcomed Turnbull‘s decision and called on him to permanently ban any further rainforest clearing. “The island‘s unique ecology must be preserved,” she said at the time.
“Christmas Island‘s future is in tourism that is based on its unique natural environment. Mining on the island is a short-term proposition that is incompatible with nature-based tourism, and it cannot compare with the long-term economic benefits for the Christmas Island community,” she concluded.
Zaini Ahmad, a fourth-generation islander, sees it differently. “People talking about the future don‘t know the past,” he said. “The harbour, the power station, everything that makes this place operate — people don‘t see that all these things rely on the mine. How can we have tourists if these things are not working?”
He might have added that a return flight to the island from Perth is about $1300, far more than to more popular tourist resorts; and, from Melbourne, you could fly to Europe for the cost of a ticket to the island. Tourism on Christmas Island is for the determined, with little accommodation since the casino went belly-up and lost its licence.
The phosphate company, outraged at Turnbull‘s decision, appealed to the Federal Court, arguing Turnbull had used a departmental report that was incomplete and misleading and had ignored the mine‘s own environmental impact statement.
Last October, the Federal Court‘s Justice Robert Buchanan overturned Turnbull‘s decision, finding he had failed to take into account the phosphate company‘s environmental impact statement and had failed to apply the correct tests under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
The phosphate company then turned to the new Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, who took the trouble in April to visit Christmas Island. As he tramped around the old workings and visited the vast rainforest, precisely four tourists were on the island, and two of them had no transport because government officials had hired every available rental car.
Garrett yesterday announced a process allowing all interested parties to comment on the application for new mining leases. His decision is likely within months.
The mine management and environmental groups are each holding their breath for opposite reasons. Company secretary Kevin Edwards is blunt about his suspicion that some of the environmental evidence used to oppose the mine‘s application is concocted. “The problem with environmental science is that a lot of it is not science, but it is ideological,” he says.
The suspicion becomes clear in a letter from Edwards to the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, in which he asks the whereabouts of an endangered fern known as Tectaria devexa variety minor. Turnbull, in his decision to disallow further mining, relied on a report from Parks Australia of eight occurrences of the fern within the boundaries of one of the proposed leases.
“Since early this year we have been endeavouring to obtain from Parks Australia the detail of the co-ordinates of these occurrences,” Edwards‘ letter says. “Despite undertakings to the contrary, the information has not been supplied to us.”
What is not in dispute, however, is that Christmas Island‘s ancient ecology is under serious attack. Invasive species such as yellow crazy ants, giant centipedes, Asian wolf snakes, snails and other pests are playing havoc. The pipistrelle bat, once numerous, has all but disappeared, and Garrett is considering a captive breeding program to stop it becoming extinct.
More than 60 per cent of the island is tropical rainforest protected within a national park. Tens of millions of red crabs skitter along the forest floor, clearing it of leaf litter and recycling its nutrients deep within their burrows. The result is a jungle floor free of entanglement, unlike anywhere else. Once a year, the red crabs perform the world‘s greatest migration, a seething crimson tide hurrying from the mountains to the sea and back, a sight described by naturalist David Attenborough as one of his 10 most remarkable natural life experiences.
Big robber crabs strong and determined enough to rip apart coconuts lurk among sharp limestone outcrops.
However, large infestations of yellow crazy ants introduced from some forgotten ship‘s cargo decades ago are posing serious dangers to the vast crab population. The ants spray formic acid at crabs, blinding them and condemning them to death. It is a simple matter to find a crazy ant colony: with the crabs dead, the forest floor builds up litter and the very nature of the forest is changed. An estimated 20 million red crabs, from a population of more than 100 million, have already succumbed.
Parks Australia has tried to control the ants by baiting them with a poison called Fipronil dropped by helicopter. Nine years ago, park scientists were optimistic, but the ants kept spreading, and unimpressed observers accused the scheme of causing deaths of other insects and crabs. Another helicopter drop is scheduled for this year.
The phosphate company has employed its own scientists, who have devised a technique using plastic traps that attract ants with honeydew laced with 1 per cent boric acid. The hope is that the ants will feed the poison to their queen, thus killing the colony. A team of mine employees, led by an enthusiastic young man named Sultan Syed-Abuthahir, is in the early stages of a trial that also employs acoustic monitors to try to detect pipistrelle bats.
It is clearly part of an attempt to persuade the Government that mining can be environmentally responsible.
The mine is also proposing a little honeydew of its own if the Government approves its application for new mining land over the next 21 years: a multimillion-dollar trust fund to be jointly managed by Parks Australia and the Attorney-General‘s Department for ecologically sustainable projects on the island. It would kick off with a $5 million downpayment, plus a payment of $1.15 per dry tonne of shipped phosphate for 21 years. That‘s on top of the $2 per tonne conservation levy already applicable.
The mine is also offering to accept full responsibility for, and the costs of, rehabilitating the 256 hectares. At an assumed output of 650,000 tonnes of phosphate a year, this honeydew package would be worth $50 million.
For now, though, the hopes and life plans of Choy Lan and her fellow mine employees are on hold. Again.
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Tony Wright is national affairs editor. His trip was assisted by Christmas Island Phosphates.
Source: http://www.theage.com.au