Truth Telling

An member provides a first-hand account of living conditions on a discrete Aboriginal community where residents are exposed to contamination and waste.

“In my community's history, we were forced to live on the actual living rubbish tip.

I'm only 43 years of age. I grew up with the rubbish being dumped in our backyards as kids, we didn't know any better and we played in that. There’s medical waste. There’s asbestos. There’s development waste, industrial waste. Everything you could think of was just dumped in our places. None of that has been dealt with.

It has had soil put over soil, put over soil. Now we all know the history of the way the environment works. Soil erodes away over time and all of that contamination just keeps coming up. So right now, we've got asbestos piles. We've got little jars with body parts and everything from medical waste being eroded.

We're not getting anywhere with the Council. We're only just now getting drains put into our mission. So we’re all alone dealing with chemical waste and all that, our Land Council is not equipped to deal with this. We've got nobody who is qualified to deal with the asbestos, which is the main contamination.

It's been left up to us living today as community members to deal with it, we have to be proactive, we have to go around and try and figure all this out for ourselves because we’ve gotten no help.

Nobody's being accountable. It's a pass the buck to everybody, like the Land Council saying it’s Council’s responsibility and Council saying it's Land Council’s responsibility, and now I'm hearing it’s the Aboriginal Housing Office’s responsibility. We’re just stuck in limbo and have to live with this.

My father is dying of cancer right now. My grandmother died of cancer. My grandfather died of cancer Probably 90% of my uncles and aunties, they’ve all got cancers. We know it can't be genetic. It just can't be because it's not affecting all of my genetic family who live elsewhere. It's only affecting my genetic family that's living in Armidale now and has been raised in Armidale.

The Council produced a community garden here and done an investigation and through that investigation, the report states that the soil is highly contaminated, and it's not fit for human consumption or cultivation of foods for human consumption. But to this day, they still maintain their community garden.

No Aboriginal people eat off of it anymore. because we know this, but they still maintain it. They still out there growing the foods and it has been a bit of a publicity stunt. But all we're asking for is, can we just please get our soil officially tested, see what's going on with it? If there's a problem, help us rectify the situation.

We don't know who's going to take responsibility. We can't find any help for it at the moment. We just beg everybody for advice and guidance.

Armidale is the highest city in Australia and all our rivers flow down to the sea. We’ve got the Gara River, Salisbury River and Bakers Creek that come together to create the Macleay River, with a further 26 tributaries joining the Macleay as it stretches from the top of the Great Dividing Range to the sea.

It is one of the largest rivers in the northern New England Tablelands and considered one of the most Culturally significant rivers to our people and environment.

Everything we do to the river up here, affects the environment and people living downstream.

Now, we had an arsenic leak at one of the mines 15 years ago and that destroyed the fish, the turtles, the eels and everything where we traditionally fish in those waterways. In one year we turned up and then all the fish had pink rashes and sores. And then the next years we just seen a more depleting size of the fish and a fatigue in nature, then with some of the floods, there is a cleaning out of some of the rivers naturally and they're coming back.

You know, that’s correction. That's true nature.

500 metres off our mission, we've done an investigation for the RTA on the foam, which the Fire Brigade was spraying because our mission again is the Fire Brigades practice place because it was the tip, so all that foam they were spraying around went into our soil. Now we've just proven that it's 8 metres deep contaminated.

We're still living on it. We're still here. It's leaked into the water system. So now all of that is going and spreading down to the Macleay River and valleys to Tamworth, valleys to a western side down to Tinga and everywhere they're all being affected by the gold mining the phosphorus in the farming industries. These are all killing our river systems, encouraging the algae blooms and all of those sorts of things.

My people talk about the black fish they use to eat up here. What black fish? In my lifetime, there's none. We still eat the eels. We still eat the mussels. We still eat the turtles up here. The fish, we have to go off our mountain now to get some.

But then can we eat them?

We are eating them again. Is that a reason why we were dying of cancer?

These are the big concerns that we have. But it's not just concerns, it's actual physical evidence to justify some of those concerns, but we just haven't got the scientific investigation and background to cement that in and make it, you know, legit for Australia to see and really take action.”

Steven Ahoy
Anaiwan
Freshwater
APKG Member