Lead in my grandmother's body

The settler colonial frontier has long been a dangerous and unsafe place for the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

 In the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region of the Northern Territory, explorers, prospectors and cattlemen first entered the ancestral lands of the Garrwa, Gudanji, Marra and Yanyuwa peoples in the 1870s. Many of them carried the high calibre Snider and Martini-Henry rifles capable of killing a person more than a kilometre away.1

 The systematic killing of Aboriginal people trying to protect their land, water and families began soon after settler colonisers arrived and continued until around 1910 when the frontier was secured.2  

 In 1886, at McArthur River, when a cattleman was speared trying to shoot Aboriginal people, a posse of 22 men led by Constable William Curtis shot dead 64 people in one camp alone. ‘When the shooting was over, any babies still alive were killed without wasting bullets: held by the ankles, their skulls were dashed against a tree or rock. “Just like goanna”, say old Aboriginal people’.3

 In 1892, fleeing increasing settler violence, about 70 or 80 Aboriginal people retreated to the top of the Abner Range, a few kilometres southwest of McArthur River. The Aboriginal families, thinking that the colonists’ horses could not make it to the top of the range, made camp for the night on the edge of an exposed cliff face with a sheer 150 metre drop to the flat ground below. But the horsemen, following the fleeing men, women and children’s tracks, found their way up to the top of the range and formed a semi-circle around the camp.4

 At first light the colonists opened fire, murdering 52 Aboriginal people, with another dozen found mangled at the bottom of the cliff face.5

 Historian Tony Roberts estimates that at least 600 men, women, children, and babies, or about one-sixth of the population throughout the Gulf region, were murdered during the establishment of the frontier.6

 Massacre Hill, Massacre Waterfall, Massacre Creek, Cave Massacre, Uhr Massacre, Skeleton Creek, Flick Yard, Dunganminnie Spring, Irringa, Radjiji, Ganjarinjarri, Baladuna Waterhole, Yulbarra Creek, Waningirrinyi Waterhole, Murruba, Mawurra Cave, Gabugabuna, Coonjula Creek and Malakoff Creek are just some of the over 50 places where massacres were known to have occurred in the Gulf region.7

 Settler colonisers were making it clear that there was no place for Aboriginal authority.

The Extractive Frontier

 Today, the Gulf country is an extractive frontier. It is a place where settler governments and international capital work together to exert power to extract minerals and gas while in the process severing ecological connections, discarding toxic waste, erasing livelihoods and creating ‘extractive subjects’.8

 It remains a violent place for Aboriginal people. A place were the fast violence of invasion and dispossession has been replaced with a slow violence that ‘occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’.9

 The extractive frontier continues to be a place of battle, ‘between short-termers who […] arrive to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time’s scales’.10

​Slow violence—Environmental Contamination

​In 2006, McArthur River Mine—one of the world’s largest zinc, lead and silver mines—currently owned by Glencore, gained approval from the Australian and NT Governments for a massive expansion of the mine, from an underground operation to an open cut pit in the bed of the McArthur River.11

​The NT and Australian governments’ decision to approve the project was challenged in Court by Garrwa, Gudanji, Marra and Yanyuwa people. On 20 April 2006 the NT Supreme Court delivered a judgement in favour of the plaintiffs, finding that the NT Minister of Mines and Energy had used the wrong power to approve the change to open cut mining. On 4 May 2006, the NT Government passed legislation overriding the Court’s decision, signing off on weak environmental regulations to allow for the expansion.

 Text source: lead in my grandmother's body online exhibition. 

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