Catholic Diocese of Broome

One of the magnificent aspects of the Kimberley is its pristine beauty, largely untouched by resource exploitation and industrial development. The air in the Kimberley is mostly clean, the waterways are largely unpolluted, and the forests, though too often ravaged by fire, usually give the appearance of being as they were before colonial times. It is still possible to explore a coastline or a National Park and experience it without the distractions of invasive crowds and the negative effects of urban living. You may still today camp on a remote beach or sail an inviting estuary and enjoy it as it was when only Indigenous people lived there. So much of the remote Kimberley shoreline remains just as Philip Parker King, the explorer, first saw it when he circumnavigated the continent in 1821. Unlike the coastline of the Queensland tropics in Eastern Australia, the Kimberley shores are not punctuated with glitzy resorts or ugly pretensions of wealth. There are no golf courses sprouting Bali motifs, no holiday villages packed with caravans, no burgeoning theme parks and no tacky shopping centres selling cheap tee-shirts and plastic crocodiles. Neither are there factories, industrial conglomerates or processing plants scarring the terrain or filling the sky with unwanted impurities.

Just when we were thinking how fortunate we are to have this northern seashore, the last untouched wilderness in Australia, original and pure, along comes a gas project and a company, Inpex, who wants to build a gas processing plant on the Maret Islands. This hub will receive gas via a pipeline from the Browse Basin, then process it to be packed aboard ships bound for the energy-hungry factories of Japan and China.

Future planning for the development of the Kimberley needs to begin at a point of departure consistent with principles of conservation, not exploitation. A question to ask is: What constitutes the greater human value – the country as a national treasure or the resource as a commodity to be exploited? And again we ask, is there an absolute necessity to exploit this pristine country or is there an alternative?

Fortunately, there are a few outposts of resistance, Indigenous and non Indigenous, that may well be able to coalesce in the coming months to lead an effective opposition to the Inpex proposal. There are also signs that the Governments, State and Federal, prefer a single hub, one that is far away from the beautiful wilderness that surrounds the Maret Islands.

A brief look at the ugliness of development in the Pilbara region should be enough to make people stop and think about resource exploitation and development in the Kimberley. Such thoughts may lead them to conclude that the natural beauty of our region is worth preserving just as it is, for future generations. It is never too late to speak out.

Perhaps commonsense will prevail. Great things can happen when good people stand up together for what is right.