Mining and aboriginal Art

I thought I was going to an art display at the Boomalli Arts Co-operative on Saturday, but it turned out to be a workshop about how to stop gold mining at Lake Cowal.

Lake Cowal is situated 47km north-east of West Wyalong, central western New South Wales and is the biggest inland lake in the state. It is protected under two international agreements on migratory birds with Japan (JAMBA) and China (CAMBA), it is also listed on the national heritage register as a significant wetland, and home to many native and endangered species. Lake Cowal is an ephemeral lake that floods into the Lachlan river catchments which leads to the Murrumbidgie and Murray Rivers.

Canadian Gold mining company Barrick has proposed to mine at Lake Cowal ...

Lake Cowal is the sacred heartland of the Wiradjuri nation and holds many artefacts ...

Boomalli is an arts cooperative located in the inner west of Sydney. They put on a display of aborignal art on the topic of "Mining on Sacred Ground" for the occasion. This includes an interesting program, which not only has photos of the art works and stories about them, but discussion of mining. Unfortunately Boomalli only have a few reproductions of the artwork on the wed site without the text.

Graeme Dunstan was there with his "Peacebus".

Peacebus.com captain, Graeme Dunstan, is on the road organising for the Cyanide Watch campaign. ...

Everywhere Peacebus rolls it becomes aware of small but active local concerned citizens working to bring some awareness and restraint to local corporate environmental crimes, and up against the vast fog of distractions that is modern mass media lies and the complacent, if not complicit and outright corrupt, centralised State and federal governments.

Peacebus.com undertakes campaigns of witness for peace, justice and the Earth. It is both a colourful and crusading Mitsubishi L300 van called Happy Wheels and this website which promotes and records its adventures. ...

Veteran peace campaigner and nomad Graeme Dunstan is Peacebus.com's mission commander. His faithful follower is Jennifer the Maremma.

The only change which seems to have happened with such environmental protests in the last 30 years is they now have web sites. A video and some photographs of the mine site at Lake Cowal were shown at the workshop. It occurred to me that the video should be turned into a series of short podcasts and the location could be documented using Google Earth. That would make better use of the available technology. I did find that Falling Rain Genomics, Inc. had some data on the area.