WA: Saving The Kimberley

Bob Debus (Wentworth Fall May 2011)

A successful strategy to maintain or improve the conservation of the Kimberley must seek to preserve the connectivity of vegetation and waterways both at the level of individual land owners – the average pastoral station is around 230,000 hectares – and also at the regional level. All property managers will have to join in.

And this is where national heritage listing could bring significant benefits. It would support a variety of the protective and restorative measures that can be put in place to keep the country intact: the creation of more national parks using state or federal funds; the philanthropic purchase of leasehold properties for conservation purposes ; the provision of incentives to land holders to improve management of fire and weeds and to protect river banks and rain forest patches; the continued expansion of the highly successful federally-funded Aboriginal ranger program on indigenous owned and managed land.

However, you can’t make a whole of landscape conservation strategy that works if people are going to be permitted to stick gigantic industrial plants or strip mining operations in the middle of pristine environments.

I don’t believe it is realistic at all to expect that extractive industry could ever be prohibited but it is certainly reasonable to ask, as more people are now asking, that government should develop “a comprehensive conservation and development plan for the Kimberley.” It is not reasonably acceptable, from the point of view of many people, for the premier of Western Australia to refer to the Kimberley as “the new Pilbara”.

It is certainly reasonable, from the point of view of a many people, that government should, in consultation with traditional owners, create a large multiple use marine park right along the Kimberley coast. After all, that’s what was been done long ago in Queensland.

Until conservation and protection strategies of the sort I have described are actually in place there is little chance that World Heritage status for the Kimberley– such as we here in The Blue Mountains enjoy—will ever be achieved

We enjoy that status but it is manifest that the Kimberley also deserves it– and we need a lot of people to make a lot of fuss so that it may be so.

more at Save the Kimberley