In 2022, for the second consecutive year, a team of scientists, activists, campaigners and volunteers from the Bob Brown Foundation (BBF) gathered to watch drill rigs from the giant resources company MMG—majority owned by the Chinese government—retreat from the precious, carbon-rich, World Heritage-proposed takayna/Tarkine forest in Tasmania’s northwest.
The BBF had started their blockade in takayna’s McKimmie Creek valley back in December 2020, after a mining lease there had been controversially approved. One of MMG’s plans for the area was to establish a new tailings dam—an open storage pit containing mining waste. If constructed, the dam’s impacts on the ecosystem here would be devastating. The natural, roughly undulating hills on three sides mean the company would have to build up one side to create the 140ha dam, with the end result being a giant swimming pool fifty metres deep filled with toxic waste. They wouldn’t even need to employ chainsaws to clear the trees destined to be flooded by the dam, says BBF spokesperson Scott Jordan, “[because] the 25 million cubic metres of acid-producing tailings will do the job of killing [them].” Surrounding the dam, however, 145ha of trees would be bulldozed for supporting infrastructure and settling ponds.
