New activists' battleground: their own Dinosaur digs

Geelong Advertiser
Monday 3/12/2007 Page: 15

HOW is it that environmentally sound endeavours, as we understand them, are becoming increasingly difficult propositions to justify or execute? It might be wind farms and the hostility they prompt from wildlife preservationists. It might be tidal power opponents anxious about marine life impacts. biofuel opponents worried about palm-oil or corn-led incursions on environments faunal, floral or human. Or it might be, as we've seen this past week, a new breed - palaeontological heritage agitators anxious about desalination plans along the Gippsland coast.

Gippsland, if we venture back to its early encounters with Europeans, was a wild and mysterious place. Trees, trees and more giant trees. Dense, impenetrable bush - a wild place to be feared. It's no accident the antipathies of white to black in the 19th century led to the gloriously ludicrous myth of the Captive White Woman - an Eliza Fraser-style piece of theatrical scaremongering to keep the natives in their place - being situated in Gippsland. It was the perfect site for a mystery.

Now we have a new mystery. Sort of. The previously, supposedly, unknown dinosaurs of Wonthaggi have surfaced as a major impediment to the multi-billion dollar desalination plant the State Government wants to build, instead of dams, to safeguard Victoria against future droughts. Sure, it's a political sop to the greens. And, sure, we should be able to better utilise water without ripping up more trees for reservoir sites, or exposing ourselves to water from dams serviced by logging catchment areas. But where's all this activism coming from?

You've got to face it. Activism has come a long way. It's become such an art form, it's outdoing itself. It's an entire new world of marketing in which numerous single-dimension vested interests stand to threaten the broader champions of the good cause. What it means is environmentalist pitted against conservationist, preservationist against indigenous, heritage activist versus naturalist - all of them high profile, all of them vocal and influential. All manner of permutations and combinations of idealism, realism and personal agendas.

In short, the environmental turf war is turning loudly local and self interested. And very NIMBY - not in my back yard. And sophisticated, media-savvy and wide awake to due process. The dinosaurs of Wonthaggi area classic example. Why? Well, for one, because the folk protesting the desal plant's earthworks and their effect on dinosaur precincts have been gazumped by boffins suggesting the works offer one of the best chances of discovering more dinosaur samples and information. The chances, the finances, would be scarce otherwise.

Myself, if someone needs to stop the desal works, I'd prefer they invoke the Francis Drake defence. The Elizabethan buccaneer/explorer made it to Wonthaggi too, you know. Well, maybe, the story's been about for awhile among some of the heritage world's more imagination prone figures. It can perhaps be sourced to the 1776 novel Voyage de Robertson aux Terres Australes in which the author claims to have sailed from Chile with Drake aboard the Elizabeth in 1585 to discover a new continent, Australia, away in the west. Australia was popular also with writers like Jonathon Swift, whose Lilliput was somewhere around the Great Australian Bight. (That's why yahoos come from South Australia.)

However you care to look at it - dinosaurs, Drake or damsels in distress - protests are often a tad too conveniently staged. And more than a little self-righteous. Which, over the longer term, isn't really going to help anyone.