Hello Koala Lovers,

A typical day at the AKF office is me reading emails (often hundreds of them) to see what is happening in Australia and around the world. As you can see from the Environmental Defenders Office newsletter in this link, a coal mine has been cancelled. That coal mine site was a landscape that had many Koalas and I have been travelling out to that part of the world since 2006 and made many friends in the region. AKF has played a part in ensuring that those Koalas had a voice and I certainly want to thank our scientific team for providing me with maps, logic, common sense and sound advice about what to say in either private meetings or in the public arena.

That fight, particularly by farmers in the region who opposed the mine from day one for a myriad of reasons are now exhausted and out of pocket in the millions. I remember being in a little country hall out there talking to farmers’ wives about how to go about fighting a project like this, and I sort of predicted how it would go. Just as I have in the Koala Manifesto. I said things like; how did this get approved? Was it really thought through in relation to its closeness to the food bowl of Australia? (the Liverpool Plains which grows about 60% of the cereal of Australia). Who is going to benefit from it? Will there be local jobs? Have they taken everything into account? At that time, I had been in my job for around 18 years, and they were the questions I always asked whenever I was called in to stop things.

And now after 15 years it finally ends and who gets reimbursed? Certainly the Koala population has been absolutely decimated during that time because while that site languished and all manner of people argued the point for and against, our climate changed, it stopped raining, trees died, which I talked about in my May 2019 Diary. What a completely senseless process. As I have argued for most of my career; before you approve anything you need to look at the big picture and that is why we have Bob’s Map which shows all the Koala habitat in Australia.

One of the things we all need is water, and industry absolutely needs it for most of their activities. Washing coal seems one of the most ridiculous and senseless things that we could use this precious resource for, and I was ridiculed for even suggesting that you could re-use water after that process instead of releasing it into ponds or possibly even back into a water system. This is what you see in Dickens novels; people throwing their sewerage and water out into the streets with consequences that brought about plague and disease.

This image absolutely shows how much water there is on the planet and it soothes my soul to see it because we, the collective, must stare at it, realise that we cannot waste one single drop, and start looking into the future, which we might not want to look at, but we must have vision. Print it out and put it front and centre so you think about it each day as you wash your clothes, brush your teeth, flush your toilets, because this will run out if we are not careful.

Have a vision for the way you/we want to see the world. The AKF team does have a vision and we have had it ahead of our time. We predicted the Koala populations were declining long before the science was in and it suited industry to ignore or ridicule our protests. Industry has that relentless ability because of money and political power to just grind down their opponents.

I am glad this coal mine is not going ahead, but I feel so much sorrow for the heartache, including my own for the community who had that vision and strength to stop it, and they will now have to rest and recuperate. But I will predict now that unless laws like the Koala Protection Act are in place their children or grandchildren will again, have to fight for the same thing. That coal is still in the ground and industry, unless they absolutely change or go completely out of business, will want to dig it up when we have all forgotten this fight. I often ponder on why humans do not learn our lessons from the past.

Our supporters continue to amaze me and I am dedicated completely to a vision of healthy Australian forests with “lots of fluffy grey things sitting in them.”

Regards,
Deborah