Nomad Ann

There is no place like Australia.
It is not a traditional beauty. You won't find any lush forests or snow-capped mountains. Mostly the bush looks a bit post-apocalyptic. Its’ beauty is in its strength, and how it endures, through bush fires and droughts and cyclones. Outback Australia is tough. Stoic. Too cool for school.

Several clicks inland from Sydney is an unassuming patch of bush named the Leard. Australians and tourists alike are oblivious to this patch of outback, it’s significance as a home to endangered flora and fauna and a high concentration of indigenous sacred sites. The only traffic coming here is the anarchist elite – environmental activists, hippies, policy writers, students, drifters, ferals. Ridiculous all-sorts who come from far and wide to defend this forests. For mining has come to town.

The corpses of freshly felled old growth line the edge of the ever-shrinking woodland, and red spraypaint stains the future sacrifices, a premonition of bloodletting. We pitch our tents on a local farm. We bathe in the creek and tromp into the bush to pee. Each day sees a tree-sit, a bulldozer lock-on, a roadblock, and eventually, an arrest. Everyone is passionate and opinionated, usually about different things. The only time we truly see eye to eye are those nighttime walks to the bush, when the miners and police have retired for the day and the way is lit by starlight, and the wind is speckled with fireflies on a nighttime surf, and the sounds of the forest blend into a hypnotic roar the way a healthy forest should. That’s when we are reminded what’s at stake and why we’re here.

It’s been three years of fighting this illegally approved mine. Three years of battling corruption, strategizing, legal appeals, midnight lock-ons, daytime court escorting. Finally, this forest is lost. Replaced by the eerie glow of the fully operational mine and the deep rumble of coal trains across the bulldozed and pockmarked landscape.

There are many forests like this. Perched on hilltops, lining the valleys, woods that have spent hundreds of years unconcerned by the comings and goings of man. There is an epidemic of destruction sweeping through Australia, from the shark cull in the West to the dredging of the Great Barrier Reef in the East. Whilst we petty humans scrap in the courtrooms and hold the land ransom to politics, outback Australia stands silent in the background. Tough. Stoic. Too cool for school.

This must endure.