To me hip hop is all about expression and framing an idea. Alot of my hip hop is political and that is because I was right into politics even before i started learning to emcee.

Rule number one is to emcee about what is in your heart and your mind. My politics have deepened as i have developed my emcee styles and right here I would like to talk about an issue that is very important to me and an area in which I want to help create meaningful change during my time on this earth. 218 years ago Australia was invaded. The occupying force remains and has entrenched a racist political system which exploits mineral and natural resources on native land, continues destroying native culture and languages, and poisons, erodes and breaks the ecological equilibrium of the continent.

Indigenous people are imprisoned at a far greater rate than people of overseas descent and are denied access to the same quality of healthcare and education that the broader Australian society enjoys. Aboriginal Australia is a third world nation within a rich developed nation. The Aboriginal people never ceded soverignty of their land to the invaders, and have never recieved an apology for the dispossesion and destruction of their people, culture and land.

Reconciliation is a process which seeks to heal the deep rift created by the invasion of Australia and which seeks to end the ongoing denial that any wrongdoing has occurred.

Significantly, the many Aboriginal nations contained within australia had a common cultural thread: they considered the land sacred, and had developed an intricate and sophisticated understanding of the many overlapping ecosystems which they lived within.

In our world, with its great disharmony between man and nature, cultures such as Aboriginal Australias may be very useful in providing solutions to environmental problems. A major element of the many aboriginal tribes was the idea of a symbiotic dialog or relationship between people and their environment.

By learning more about the history of our land and those who lived here before us, and by actually beginning to practice some of the basic principles of indigenous culture in broader Australian society, we would be moving towards two important goals.

The mine at Lake Cowal uses cyanide and lethal chemicals to extract the gold from the earth. The mine will be an open cut mine 1km long, 325m deep (the height of Centre Point Tower) and 825m wide on the very edge of the lake. The low-grade ore that is dug up is sprayed with a cyanide solution that leaches out tiny gold flecks; the waste cyanide is then transported through pipes to tailings dams 3.5km from the Lake. The dams are left open so that cyanide can break down. The tailings dam will eventually fill up, exposing over 200 million tonnes of waste rock to air releasing arsenic, a heavy metal poison, which accumulates in living tissue and is concentrated by the food chain. The arsenic would be washed into the lake and rivers after rain.There are close to a hundred toxic chemicals that are breakdown products of cyanide, there are also heavy metals that remain from this process which are a threat to health. One teaspoon of a 2% solution can kill an adult human.

 

Above: Map of Lake Cowel Project Area, west of Sydney

On the one hand, we would be respecting the traditional owners of the land by observing some of their guiding philosophies, in itself an act of reconciliation.

At the same time, we would be developing a sustainable society by using not only our scientific methods to reverse our negative environmental impacts, but by adopting the less tangible holistic approach to understanding local ecosystems which was developed by countless generations of Aboriginies. There is a whole 'maintenance' manual for this country which we are not using, and that manual is the traditional knowledge of our indigenous elders.

 

Lake Cowal holds many artefacts sacred to the Wiradjuri people that should not be removed or disturbed. This mine is extinguishing the rights of the Wiradjuri people to practice their religion and spirituality by excluding them from the Lake that is traditionally used for various ceremonies." The gold extracted from Lake Cowal will primarily be sold to jewellers and turned into wedding bands and the like. I have a gold ring which was my grandfather's and it would be a bit hypocritcal for me to bag out gold jewellry whilst wearing this ring. I don't buy the shit though. And here's the deal: contained within the world's stockmarket trading centres, the Fort Knoxes of the planet, is enough gold that each man, woman and child on the earth could have a few pieces of jewellry.

So how about we destroy the temples of capitalism and raid them of there gold, and get the fuck out of Lake Cowal.

Another example of a complete disregard for the traditional owners and a callous desecration of their land is to be found in the practice of uranium mining.

Once again corporate fuckwits have made it their mission to get some shiny rare metal out of the earth using cyanide leaching processes. Once they use it for a short time in a nuclear reactor, the time comes for the radioactive waste to be dumped. Where? On Aboriginal land, of course- this time near Coober Pedy.

The traditional wisdom: 'Irati wanti- the poison:leave it'. I'll leave the last word to these ladies because I think its a powerful demand and very timely given the government's new push to expand uranium mining. This extract comes from the Irati Wanti website (www.iratiwanti.org):

"We are the Aboriginal women Yankunytjatjara, Antikarinya and Kokatha. We know the country. The poison the Government is talking about will poison the land. We say 'NO radioactive dump in our ngura - in our country.' Its strictly poison we don’t want it.

We were born on the earth, not in the hospital. We were born in the sand. Mother never put us in the water and washed us when were born straight out. They dried us with the sand. Then they put us, newborn baby, fireside, no blankets, they put us in the warm sand. And after that, when the cord comes off, they put us through the smoke. We really know the land. From a baby we grow up on the land.

Never mind our country is the desert, that’s where we belong. And we love where we belong, the whole land. We know the stories for the land. The Seven Sisters travelled right across, in the beginning. They formed the land. Its very important Tjukur the Law, the Dreaming that must not be disturbed. The Seven Sisters are everywhere.

We can give the evidence for what we say; we can show you the dance of the Seven Sisters. Listen to us! The desert lands are not as dry as you think! Can’t the Government plainly see there is water here? Nothing can live without water. There’s a big underground river underneath. We know the poison from the radioactive dump will go down under the ground and leak into the water. We drink from this water. Only the Government and people like that have tanks. The animals drink from this water malu kangaroo, kalaya emu, porcupine, ngintaka perentie, goanna and all the others. We eat these animals, that’s our meat. We’re worried that any of these animals will become poisoned and we’ll become poisoned in our turn.

Everywhere there is underground water. We know that. It doesn’t matter what station you make the dump on or near. They’ve all got wells. The sheep and cattle have to drink from the bores. Of course they’ll get poisoned in their turn. Can’t the pastoralists see that plainly?

The poison the Government is talking about is from Sydney. We say send it back to Sydney. We don’t want it! Are they trying to kill us? We’re a human being. We’re not an animal. We’re not a dog. In the old days the white man used to put a poison in the meat, throw them to feed the dogs and they got poisoned, straight out and then they died. Now they want to put the poison in the ground. We want our life.

All of us were living when the Government used the country for the Bomb. Some were living at Twelve Mile, just out of Coober Pedy. The smoke was funny and everything looked hazy. Everybody got sick. Other people were at Mabel Creek and many people got sick. Some people were living at Wallatinna. Other people go moved away. Whitefellas and all got sick. When we were young, no woman got breast cancer or any other kind of cancer. Cancer was unheard of with men either. And no asthma, we were people without sickness.

The Government thought they knew what they were doing then. Now, again they are coming along and telling us poor blackfellas “Oh, there’s nothing that’s going to happen, nothing is going to kill you.” And that will still happen like that bomb over there.

And we’re worrying for our kids. We’ve got a lot of kids growing up on the country and still coming more, grandchildren and great grandchildren. They have to have their life.

We’ve been fighting this radioactive waste, this poison, for more many years. Arguing about it, talking to people, asking people to help us. They might help us, but they’ll really be helping themselves. Whitefellas have got kids too, we all have to live in the country.

And then, we really couldn’t believe it when we heard them talking about sending the rubbish from all other countries as well! They must really want to kill us! We can’t believe it! How can you live like that? They’re really aiming to wipe the country out, not just us but all living things in the whole earth!

It’s from our grandmothers and our grandfathers that we’ve learned about the land. This learning isn’t written on paper as whitefellas knowledge is. We carry it instead in our heads and we’re talking from our hearts, for the land. You fellas, whitefellas, put us in the back all the time, like we’ve got no language for the land. But we’ve got the story for the land.

Listen to us!"

 

 

Article by Zane Alcorn a.k.a. Doc Fruit

www.iratiwanti.org

www.savelakecowal.org