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Members of the W&J Traditional Owners Council outside the Federal Court. W&J Council

The Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council (W&J) is involved in a remarkable struggle to assert their Indigenous rights in opposition to the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine. Despite the company’s board-level decision to proceed, the mine has not cleared all legal hurdles.

W&J’s efforts – recognised globally as a leading Indigenous rights campaign – are challenging Australia’s native title system, and the notion that compliance with industrial projects is the pathway to development for Indigenous people.

The W&J struggle has largely focused on contesting Adani’s efforts to secure an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (Ilua) – the consent of the traditional owners for the mine to proceed. The Ilua would let Adani undertake all works associated with the project, and secure a 2,750 hectare area for critical infrastructure related to mine operations, including an airstrip, workers village, and washing plant.

While the National Native Title Tribunal authorised the Queensland Government to approve the mining leases for Adani in 2016 without the consent of the W&J, this is subject to ongoing legal challenge. Without an Ilua, there is no legal basis to build the infrastructure. In this scenario, the only option would be the compulsory acquisition of land by the state – an unprecedented move in the history of native title that would privilege mining interests above the wishes of traditional owners.

We are undertaking a research project in collaboration with the W&J and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. The W&J have provided us with access to their files, and we have conducted preliminary analysis of the political, social and economic context of their campaign.

Changing the rules

Earlier this week both houses of Parliament passed amendments to annul the effects of a February 2017 Federal Court full bench decision that confirmed the Native Title Act required all registered native title claimants to sign an Ilua. This overturned a previous decision made by a single judge, which allowed that one signature was sufficient, as long as an Ilua had been approved by the claim group.

The W&J had moved quickly, on the basis of the court decision, to have Adani’s claimed deal struck out. But the Federal Government moved swiftly too, less than two weeks later placing amendments before Parliament that removed the W&J Council’s option to annul.

These amendments, while validating existing Iluas that could have been brought into question, are also widely acknowledged as a fix for Adani. In April, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reassured senior Adani executives in India that the native title situation would be fixed.

However, the future of the Ilua and Adani’s mine is far from secure. W&J legal action challenging Adani’s Ilua process on several grounds is set for hearing in the Federal Court in March 2018.

The Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has affirmed the question mark over the agreement, saying:

It is not my understanding that this bill will provide some kind of removal of a final legal hurdle for the Adani mine […] they [the W&J] have made clear that there are some very serious allegations of fraud that have been made against Adani.

In a further recent twist, Wangan and Jagalingou representative Craig Dallen, who previously signed Adani’s Ilua documents, has withdrawn his support in an affidavit. He’s also raised doubts about the meeting processes that were used to construct the deal.

In evidence submitted to the Federal Court, the W&J argue the attendance record at the meeting organised and paid for by Adani shows that many attendees were not present at prior native title group authorisation meetings, and are not Wangan and Jagalingou claimants.

The lure of Iluas

Iluas are very hard for Indigenous people to resist. The native title regime provides very limited protection, such that Indigenous people are often forced to take a poor Ilua deal, rather than risk ending up with nothing at the National Native Title Tribunal.

While Adani has filed for registration of an Ilua, the W&J calls it a “sham”, asserting that the Wangan and Jagalingou people have rejected a deal with Adani on three separate occasions since 2012.

The limitations of Iluas for Indigenous people partly arise because native title is a highly contingent and weak form of title. It does not apply where Indigenous observance of custom has been disrupted. However the colonial pattern of frontier violence and policies such as assimilation sought, by design, to directly eliminate custom.

Native title can also be extinguished, and can only be claimed in certain areas where other legal title (such as freehold) does not exist. Rights granted under native title are also typically non-exclusive, giving little opportunity to control access to land or its use.

While the W&J are making use of the legal avenues available to them through the native title process, they are also asserting their rights apart from it. Their legal strategy is a rejection of what they see as a constrained native title system, in which Indigenous peoples’ agreement or acquiescence to mining is the norm.

Instead, the W&J are part of a growing international Indigenous rights movement that firmly centres Indigenous peoples’ interests in struggles for restitution and a sustainable future for their people. They stand on their right to free, prior and informed consent, reflected in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

More fundamentally, though, the W&J stress that they are custodians of country, and are acting in accordance with Aboriginal law in their resistance to the Carmichael mine. This is contrary to Marcia Langton’s recent assertion that opposition to Adani’s mine is driven by a minority of Indigenous people at the behest of the greens.

This article is based upon a recently released report, Unfinished Business: Adani, the State, and the Indigenous Rights Struggle of the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Council.

Morgan Brigg receives funding from through the Global Change Institute’s Flagship Program at The University of Queensland.

John Quiggin receives funding from the Global Change Institute’s Flagship Program at The University of Queensland. He is a consultant for Farmers for Climate Action and has worked for other environmental organisations on a voluntary basis. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council, and was formerly a Member of the Climate Change Authority

Kristen Lyons receives funding from the Global Change Institute’s Flagship Program at The University of Queensland. She is a research fellow with the Oakland Institute and is a member of the Australian Greens.

Internationally renowned geographer and conservation ecologist, Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick AM, is the recipient of the Australian Heritage Council’s 2017 Sharon Sullivan National Heritage Award.

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Surrey
The soil responds quickly now to every genial touch. Meadows and clover fields which, after they had been cut and the hay gathered, appeared brown and sere two days ago were this morning, after a spell of rain, as green almost as in spring. The foot sank among rich young leaves and blades along the ditch side below, where wild pink roses have opened as if by some quick stroke or call. On the very top of flowering brambles yellowhammers perched, preening their feathers, and started a little song the last note of which drew out longer than the others. There was a pause and a spell of silence until the song was run through again, the heads of the birds bobbing yellow in the sunshine all the while.

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Giant northern cockroaches are surprisingly caring parents. Urasimaru/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

To most people, cockroaches are abhorrent, disease-ridden pests, scuttling under the fridge when you go to the kitchen for a midnight snack. But those who know cockroaches well understand that they can be very caring creatures.

There are about 5,000 named cockroaches, and in a small minority of species mothers look after their babies (nymphs), and feed and care for them in a protective burrow. A good example is the Australian giant burrowing cockroach (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), which lives mainly in northern Queensland.

Around 20 baby cockroaches live with their mother for 5-6 months, and she drags leaves collected from the soil surface down into the burrow for food. If you’re so inclined, you can buy a pair of adult giant burrowing cockroaches as pets for around A$150.00, and see their maternal behaviour for yourself.

Macropanesthia rhinoceros, Frantisek Vecernik. Pinterest

Some cockroach mothers are even more caring, with elaborate parenting behaviours to look after their babies. The mother wood-burrowing cockroach (Cryptocercus) from North America lays its eggs in a nest formed in a rotting log.

Mum and dad wood roach then live in the nest with 20 or so nymphs for three years or more. The parents defend, extend and clean the gallery, feeding the young by regurgitating food (much like many birds do) and with specialised fluids produced by glands in their gut. The babies return the favour, spending almost 10% of their time grooming the adults.

These cockroaches have an unusual diet: they digest the cellulose in wood with the help of specialised gut microbes. The nymphs don’t have these microbes when they are born, but obtain them by feeding on the regurgitated contents of their parents’ stomachs. Eventually the teenage cockroaches leave the parental nest to form their own nests.

Cryptocercus adult (dark brown) and nymph (light brown) from the eastern US. David Maddison

Until recently, maternal care in cockroaches was considered an evolutionary oddity. A few other insect groups have similar behaviour, but it was considered to be just one of a range of (often bizarre) strategies that insects have evolved to increase the survival chances of their offspring.

However, as our understanding of insect relationships has increased in recent years, maternal care in cockroaches is now seen not as a strange evolutionary dead end, but an important stepping stone in the development of the huge, complex and well-ordered societies formed by other insect species. This realisation is partly down to the fact that we now know termites evolved from cockroaches. This was first discovered in 2000 by a team led by a laboratory at the University of Sydney, and has been confirmed numerous times since then.

Termite time

Termites are known as Isoptera to entomologists – and never as “white ants” because termites bear no close relation to true ants at all.

As it happens, some of the earliest-evolved groups of termites live in Australia. The giant northern termite (Mastotermes darwiniensis) is found only in Australia, north of the tropic of Capricorn. They show similar maternal care to the wood roach in north America, but have extended this behaviour even further.

These termites live in colonies that number in the thousands or millions. At the centre of the colony is a mother (queen), and father (king), and these are responsible for reproduction. A queen giant termite can lay millions of eggs in its lifetime? and live for decades. Giant northern termites live in a nest underground, or inside rotting wood, and because they almost never see the sunshine they have become pale (hence the erroneous term “white ant”).

However small and pale, these termites can be a major agricultural pest in northern Australia because they consume almost anything organic, including living and dead plants, and trees, rubber, leather - even plastic. They digest cellulose from plant material using specialised gut microbes, much like wood roaches do.

Giant northern termite, Mastotermes darwiniensis, worker caste. scienceimage.csiro.au

How do giant northern termite colonies containing thousands or millions of individuals differ from the 20 nymphs of the wood roach? The first and most obvious difference is that the termite colony contains several types of individuals: the reproductive kings and queens; the soldiers who defend the nest; and the workers who clean and excavate the next, carry out running repairs, and gather food.

These different types (castes) have different anatomies, each tailored to their job. In contrast, all wood roaches look the same, and the nymphs leave the parental nest, find a partner and begin their own little families.

The second major difference is that the king and queen termite outlive their children (the soldiers and workers) many times over, and as a result their offspring never leave home. This in turn begs the question: what makes the workers and soldiers forego reproduction and spend all their lives in the colony?

The king and queen produce biological signalling chemicals called pheromones, which are transferred to the workers that feed on the king and queen’s excretions. In essence, the parents are feeding their young a chemical that makes them stay at home and help mum and dad with the housework.

This is a neat, self-regulating system: if mum or dad dies, the chemical isn’t produced and some of the youngsters begin reproducing for themselves.

It is unusual for any animal to surrender the opportunity to propagate its own genes, and there must be a very good evolutionary reason for it. Highly cooperative behaviour is thought to develop when the benefits of living together outweigh the benefits of building or finding your own nest.

Perhaps we can even think of termites as cockroaches that love their babies a little bit too much.

David Yeates receives funding from CSIRO, The Australian Biological Resources Study, the US National Science Foundation, and holds the Schlinger endowed research position at the Australian National Insect Collection.

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