When a place of outstanding natural beauty receives special protection, dissenting voices are rarely heard. In the case of Australia's remote Cape York peninsula, the move has prompted death threats, the resignation of a prominent Aboriginal leader and calls to barricade the area.
The controversy was sparked by a state government decision to declare three waterways on Cape York "wild rivers", prohibiting any development within a kilometre of their banks. While conservation groups welcomed the announcement, indigenous people, who make up the majority of the Cape's population, say it prevents them achieving economic independence.
The peninsula, a huge expanse of land in Queensland, on the far north-eastern tip of Australia, is known as one of the last great wild places on earth. Its varied habitats – wetlands, tropical rainforest, savannah grasslands and bone-white sand dunes – shelter half of the country's birds and one-third of its mammals, many of them rare and endangered. It is also home to 10,000 Aborigines, who live, for the most part, in conditions of poverty and social dysfunction.
To their leaders, including the highly respected Noel Pearson, economic activity – mining, cattle grazing, forestry, tourism – on Aboriginal-owned land represents the best way out. However, the bans on development, which will eventually affect 13 rivers, have left large areas of the Cape out of bounds: a move that critics say amounts to "economic apartheid". So disgusted is Mr Pearson that he resigned last week as director of the Cape York Institute, a think-tank that has led the national debate on indigenous policy and training. The former land rights activist, who has had the ear of Australian prime ministers for the past decade, said he was returning to his roots to fight the rivers legislation.
Meanwhile, Michael Ross, chairman of the Cape York Land Council, called for outsiders to be barred from the peninsula. "Traditional [land]owners must regather and form a barrier in the Cape to make sure our country is protected in the right way," he said, following a meeting of local leaders in Cairns. "We must do as our elders did, and fight for our country on our terms."
Mr Ross and others believe the Queensland Labor government, led by Anna Bligh, struck a deal with the Wilderness Society to "lock up" the peninsula's rivers in exchange for political support. The conservation group has been campaigning for years for the rivers to be protected. Ms Bligh was returned to power last month with the help of green votes.
Feelings are now running so high that the Labor MP for the constituency covering Cape York, Jason O'Brien, has received death threats. Police are investigating three messages by the same person left on his answering machine. The MP said: "I take it seriously and I worry about the safety of my staff and family... He has threatened physical violence and death." Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that green and black interests were once closely linked in this isolated, scarcely visited region, considered as significant as the Serengeti or Amazon by some environmentalists.
Wilderness Society activists supported the indigenous battle for land rights, while Cape York Aborigines echoed their friends' concerns about conserving the land. Now the green-black partnership is in ruins, with indigenous leaders claiming that middle-class greens are engaging in neo-colonialism and a new form of dispossession. The greens accuse Mr Pearson of trying to "bully" them out of the Cape in order to pursue an agenda of rampant economic development. Local Aborigines now find themselves allied with cattle farmers – incongruously, perhaps, since in decades past, black workers across Australia were shamelessly exploited by ranch owners. But Cape York farmers are equally opposed to moves that could threaten their livelihoods.
Not everyone agrees with Mr Pearson. Gina Castelain, an indigenous woman who runs an eco-tourism venture near the newly declared "wild" Archer River, said her business was being hampered by commercial fishing. "We want to protect our environment and our rivers," she said. "We are working hard to develop economic activity which does not harm our waterways."
But what offends many Aborigines in the Cape is the idea, implicit in the new law, that they cannot look after their own resources. On the contrary, they point out, the rivers are pristine because locals have been managing them for 60,000 years. Apparently unimpressed by this, the Wilderness Society is seeking "wild country" legislation to protect the land between the waterways. Ultimately, it would like the entire peninsula, all 34 million acres of it, to be World Heritage-listed.
The Queensland government has defended the "wild rivers" decision, to which it says it has been publicly committed since 2004. But Ms Bligh has a fight on her hands, and she may regret making an enemy of Mr Pearson. "Let there be no doubt: we will be putting all our energies into this campaign," he warned. "Premier Bligh has to understand that Aboriginal land in Cape York is not some gift that she can just hand over to urban green groups to secure their support at elections... We will have to get back to the barricades because those rights that were fought for and hard won are being stripped away."
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