Barrick Mine expansion stopped for now
BY JEREMY BROWN
Canadian company Barrick’s covert attempt to force through a major expansion of its controversial Lake Cowal gold mine as a ‘modification’ was blocked recently in the NSW Supreme Court of Appeal.
Wiradjuri Traditional Owner, Neville Chappy Williams, succeeded with some high powered help from the NSW Environmental Defenders’ Office (EDO), a not-for-profit community environmental law service.
Barrick was appealing against a February 2009 Land and Environment Court decision that put a proposed expansion of the mine on hold. The company had applied for permission to effectively double the size of the mine and extend its life by 11 years. On July 1 the Court of Appeal upheld the ruling that the application was not a ‘modification’ under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, rather describing it as a ‘radical transformation’, and the Justices reserved their decision.
It is expected they will hand down their judgment within the next three months. In the meantime the expansion cannot go ahead.
Outside the court Williams, representing the Mooka and Kalara traditional owners of Lake Cowal, said: “Hopefully this further delay to the expansion will mean the mine will close for ever. This is the sacred heartland of the Wiradjuri Nation.”
The mine has been the subject of intense and ongoing community concern for more than 14 years. Protestors have been arrested several times for demonstrating outside the gates: most recently, a group of 28 people were detained by police in April this year, after preventing mine workers from starting work.
According to Williams, Barrick are pumping water from the Kalara (Lachlan) River and from the Bland Paleochannel, an underground river and important dreaming track). The company wants to increase water use at the mine by about 50 per cent, but they are not saying how much water would really be needed if the mine was expanded.
The surrounding agricultural region is one of Australia’s most productive, and there have been concerns raised about Barrick’s existing water allocation and its effect on the water table in an area that has been in drought for a long time.
Environmental groups say huge quantities of cyanide are shipped by train from the Orica Plant at Gladstone in Queensland on a daily basis to process the gold, which is in very low concentration in the ore. The danger of cyanide waste affecting the underground water, the chance of mine tailings getting spread about the region, the difficulties of remediation when the mine is finally exhausted, and the effect of blatant and destructive earthworks in such a fragile environment have not been addressed publicly by Barrick.
“There have been many large dust storms across the Central West. And what could be mixed in the dust? Cyanide, arsenic, cadmium,” Williams said.
