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.
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.
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.”
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.