Last October, Mt Warning was closed permanently to everyone except Aboriginal people by the NSW Department of Planning and Environment’s National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) after it declared the mountain to be ‘a place of sacred ceremonies linked to traditional law and custom,’ particular to the Bundjalung nation.
Mt Warning in Northern NSW is one of the biggest shield volcanoes in the southern hemisphere and is surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful scenery which has drawn visitors to it since the mid-1800s. Since then, bushwalkers who have made the difficult climb to the summit have been rewarded with superb views of subtropical forests and the coast.
Understandably, the banning of non-Aboriginals from this area of outstanding natural beauty has not gone down very well at all with the general public, significant numbers of whom have continued to climb the summit with admirable impunity.
These acts of rebellion, however, have so angered NPWS bureaucrats that they hired a private security firm to ensure that not one single non-Aboriginal Australian should ever be able to enjoy the view from that summit again. It has come to light that the agency has been paying security guards $7,000 per week to keep people away, having spent a total of just over $100,000 since April. A taxpayer -funded government agency has been using tax-payer dollars to keep taxpayers from climbing the mountain.
NPWS is not only guilty of using taxpayers money to enforce an apartheid, but it has also been deliberately hiding the truth about the Bundjalung nation’s claims to the mountain. Before she died in 2007, Marlene Boyd, an elder of the Ngarakwal people, gave an interview in which she stated that Mt Warning had nothing to do with the Bundjalung nation but rather the traditional custodians of Mt Warning were the Ngarakwal/Nganduwal people.
What is more, she was very happy for everyone to climb the mountain, stating emphatically that ‘I do not oppose the public climbing of Mt Warning — how can the public experience the spiritual significance of this land if they do not climb the summit and witness creation!’
To add insult to injury, NPWS informs the general public that it can still look at Mt Warning from other places if it wants to. There are, it tells the punters, wonderful photo opportunities from Cudgen Nature Reserve, Border Ranges National Park, or the Nightcap National Park!
But the question is of course, how long until these are also declared sacred sites and permanently closed? Not long, actually. Last June the NSW Liberals said that they would give all the NSW parks to Aboriginal Groups that live within the vicinity of those parks, including land titles and the management rights.
Unsurprisingly, the Minns government has adopted this policy with gusto and has stated that it is expecting to have handed everything back in the next 15 to 20 years. Indeed, last week’s news that Minns is handing over Sydney Harbour’s Goat Island to Aboriginal groups the tune of $43 million is a disturbing portent of things to come.
