A surfer with zinc in his ears sits in the middle of a small room during a community meeting in Port Fairy. He has a laptop on his knee and a homemade badge on his shirt that says Relevant Person.
One of these, drifting serenely at the pinnacle of life on earth, is the blue whale. But there are also the southern right whales and humpbacks, pygmy whales, orcas, dolphins and porpoises, among a host of sonar-dependent cetaceans that use Bass Strait for feeding, migration and nursing their young.It's the cetaceans that put another big red 'X' in the gas column: to locate and measure deposits, companies use seismic blasting.
And of course we're an integral part of that ecosystem: if there's no krill, there's no crayfish, no tuna.found that whiting, one of our most sustainable recreational target species, are almost totally eradicated in areas where seismic testing is performed. Whiting catch rates at Lakes Entrance during seismic testing fell 99.5 per cent, while the flathead catch declined by 71 per cent.
Mirning elder Bunna Lawrie's opposition to drilling in the Bight was founded upon his seniority in whalesong. Gunditjmara woman Yaraan Couzens Bundle cites her own culture as a bulwark against the industrialisation of Sea Country. She has a cultural responsibility – that is, she is actively obliged – to fight it. "Our songs are about creation,'In the community consultations that the energy companies are obliged to carry out, they are very careful with language.
The customary demurral of such people, when backed into a rhetorical corner, is to plead that this is just a consultation meeting, a little something to help us all understand the process, but not the time to protest or to ask thorny questions, if you don't mind. If you want to do that, you need to register as a Relevant Person.We'll be taking a vote at the end of this meeting, the surfer announced.
The earliest that Otway Basin gas can come online is 2030. More broadly, the fossil fuel industry has said Australia will run out of domestic supply in 2027. So what problem do such proponents imagine they are solving?This year's line-up includes award-winning local authors like Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood and Tony Birch, and bestselling international talent like Richard Osman, Amor Towles and Sophie Elmhirst.