A mine excavating coal beneath greater Sydney’s water catchment has damaged a site of “significant” cultural heritage, prompting an investigation by the New South Wales government and warnings from Indigenous elders about “a second Juukan Gorge”.
A routine inspection at the Dendrobium coalmine near Cordeaux dam in March found fracturing and associated rock falls beneath an overhang that features culturally significant artwork, authorities say. Subsidence, as soil and rocks sank into the void left by the mining, is blamed for the cracking.
Four months later, on 25 July, the then mine owner South 32 invited WaterNSW and the registered Aboriginal parties to inspect the damage to the site. The First Nations’ stakeholders were distressed by what they saw, authorities said.
An environment planning department compliance unit will visit the site, near Sandy Creek Road, as soon as next week.
Paul Knight, a former head of the Illawarra Local Aboriginal Land Council, one of the mine’s registered Aboriginal parties, said the damage from coalmining was just the latest involving cultural and environmental sites on the Woronora plateau region north-west of Wollongong.
Knight, who is a traditional custodian of the area, noted that Dendrobium and other mines within the Illawarra Metallurgical Coal group were approved with a “performance measure” based on modelling that less than 10% of such sites would be affected by subsidence.
“The whole system is flawed in terms of accountability,” he said, adding it was up to the mine owner to report damage. Its inspection teams may not visit each year and traditional owners had only limited visiting rights.
One site might have hundreds of individual artworks or another a few stone tools, making the 10% level “random” and meaningless, Knight said.
A 2023 report by Niche, an environment consultancy, said the area of Longwall 19, now being extracted, contained Aboriginal sites “of high cultural significance”. These included site 21, the one being assessed for damage.
Knight said destruction or damage to one site potentially disturbed links to the landscape as a whole.
“Songlines are basically a journey, a path of a story,” he said. “Now if you damage one in the middle, that’s like removing a whole section of pathway [and] you can never journey take that journey again because you’ve disconnected.”
“It’d be like me taking the Mona Lisa and cutting it in half, and saying, ‘Sorry about that,’” he said. Knight was not a member of the July visit to the site.
Sydney is among the few cities anywhere in the world to allow mining within its water catchment areas. Scientists have argued for years that the longwalls were causing cracks to reach the surface, diverting water away from some of the 1,000 upland swamps in the Woronora plateau and reducing inflows into nearby dams.
‘Very concerning’
The catchment’s 364,000 hectares are also designated as “special areas” with restricted public access. Those curbs have served to preserve Indigenous cultural sites dating back thousands of years – unless they are damaged by mining.
Damage to Indigenous sites – or the potential for it – was deemed sufficient cause for the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, to reject approval for a tailings dam in August for the McPhillamys open-cut goldmine proposed for Blayney in NSW’s central-west.
The coalmines, though, are designated as state-significant developments with fewer environmental or heritage hurdles to clear to secure approval.
A spokesperson for WaterNSW said the agency had written to [the mine owners], registered Aboriginal parties and other government bodies “expressing concerns about the extent of the damage caused and the potential for irreparable loss of this and other significant environmental (such as upland swamps and watercourses) and cultural values and landscapes”.
It also “requested that all reasonable steps are taken to protect them”.
A spokesperson for NSW’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said the report of damage to Aboriginal cultural sites “was very concerning and is being investigated”.
“The investigation will determine the extent of any harm to the various sites known to occur in the area,” she said. The department would inspect the site next week.
A spokesperson for South 32, the mine owner at the time of site 21’s damage was detected, said the company aimed “to develop natural resources responsibly and minimise our adverse impacts”.
The mine plan for longwall 19A beneath the site had been approved by the NSW Department of Planning and Environment. It was “developed carefully and incorporated setbacks to avoid or minimise impacts to the environment and surface features”, he said.
In late August, South 32 sold Illawarra Metallurgical Coal to GM3, an entity owned by the Singapore-based Golden Energy and Resources and M Resources.
‘They are trying to cover it up’
A GM3 spokesperson said the company was “strongly committed to long-term sustainability, including environmental management, social performance, operational excellence, and economic contribution”.
“We are currently co-developing a specific site management plan in collaboration with the registered Aboriginal parties and the landowner, WaterNSW,” he said.
The Illawarra Local Aboriginal Land Council declined to comment until its board meets this month.
Sue Higginson, a Greens MP and former chief executive of the Environmental Defenders Office, said in situ protection of cultural heritage was vital to ensure their integrity.
Every registered Aboriginal party she had worked with understood that taking part in the mining process meant they would not be able to “genuinely protect” their culture. That inevitably meant they were “living the harm and the trauma of the destruction of their cultural heritage”, Higginson said.
“It’s so difficult to explain a process so perverse,” she said. In NSW, “a decision has been made that mining will be prioritised over the protection of cultural heritage every time”.
“When I was at the EDO … over a 10-year period, the [planning] department had never once refused the granting of a licence to destroy cultural heritage,” Higginson said.
The Minns Labor government promised to reform the state’s heritage laws before coming to office. “It’s had 18 months and still not changed the laws that have been in place for decades and decades that allow mining companies to go and smash the crap out of … significant Aboriginal cultural heritage that should be protected,” she said.
The reforms may involve standalone legislation to ensure traditional owners have more say over what happens to their heritage, as is the case elsewhere in Australia, Higginson said.
Kazan Brown, a NSW Indigenous leader, likened the damage to heritage sites by the mines under Woronora to Rio Tinto’s notorious blasting of a cave in the Pilbara in May 2020 to expand an iron ore mine. The cave had been occupied for 46,000 years.
“This is like another Juukan Gorge, and they are trying to cover it up in the same way,” Brown said.
The miners “should be taking responsibility for the damage they do to cultural heritage”, she said. “They’ve been able to get away with it for too long.”
