paul howes our unlikely hero, page-7

Just fell into a site called nofibs.com which is a citizen journalist site run by good old Margo Kingston formerly of the SMH. Anyway, there is an article there by this lady named Annie Kia, telling her story a trip to the Qld gas fields to make a movie for LTG.

- See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2013/10/16/wandoan-thriving-dying-either-way-new-name-town-anniekia-reports/#sthash.oZj5DU6s.dpuf

Fair enough. However it is the reply from one of the "Dayglo" workers to her named Stanley Thordon, another unlikely hero, which is worth copying in here to the MEL posts. With your permission, take it away, Stanley:

"I’m a “dayglo” and reside in one of the camps I helped build. Bus in bus out from the city. I was there 9 months before I even had the opportunity to travel to Wandoan and buy treats from the local IGA and the cafe. I had not been there since I was a small child. Wandoan is the town where my father was raised, where his parents received a land grant after the war when Pop had done his bit in New Guinea. I even know that Wandoan was once named “Juandah”, but that changed when the mail got mixed up with “Jundah” down the road. I doubt the author of this article had even heard of Wandoan until the “Lock the Gate” campaign surfaced. Sure I get treated as an “invader”.. Not shabbily, but I know how these things go. I work in construction. A college educated tradesman, yet I get called “a miner” and now a “dayglow”. Doesn’t bother me. There are worse things. Like walking into a pub in Wandoan and realising there’s a 20 minute wait in line at the bottleshop. If only their internet was faster, that eftpos could hit warp speed!

My grandfather was a farmer, among many other things in his lifetime and saw many changes. He even saw the landscape change while he was there through deforestation. He was part of that. That’s part of what crop farming is about. Changing the landscape to make that rich brigalow soil more productive, with the one goal of putting food on the family table and a roof over their head. Something we all do. Some of us do it for several other less fortunate families who can’t do it for themselves via income tax and the welfare system.

Farmers have cleared the land around them in the plying their craft through hard labour. So many trees… gone, even just in the last 70 years or so. To feed the “machine”, like a virus in pandemic proportions, spreading, unrelenting. The masses in the cities, the people that use so many of these resources and don’t give an ounce of thought to where they come from. From milk, eggs and bacon, to diesel, petroleum, power and LPG, the hungriest beast this planet has ever endured. All pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, which paradoxically, is largely consumed by … trees.

I guess you can see the double standard I aiming at here. “But farming is a sustainable resource” I hear you say. Is it? Soil salinity wasn’t a problem before unconventional gas extraction? I’m sure it was, but that’s all gone away now… conveniently enough. It’s all about fracking and land subsidence, residual gas (which was recorded as present decades ago ) and bores that you can ignite (again.. that was possible many many years ago as my father will attest).

Perhaps one day my own family home will get engulfed and or demolished by the machine to make way for a new highway or railroad to transport all those resources. What can I do about it? Not a damn blasted thing! I wont be using every conceivable avenue of creative possibility to discredit the road building industry.. From poor health due to stress, noise and air pollution, to depression and despair that my family will endure from being relocated. If only I could find some article on depleted uranium used in road building equipment I might be onto something. But unfortunately, the more things I seek to find at fault, or people I seek out to fault find for me, so we can correlate our findings and pin it all on the same process… to achieve a common result, the less credibility we’ll have overall. Another act of futility. When it’s all over bar the shouting, my family and I will then use the road."

And a bit more:

"My conscience is clear friend and for more clarity, my old boy left the area well before I was conceived. I guess that’s what did the trick. My job if you’re interested entails providing commodity to treat product water so it may be reintroduced to the aquifers from which it is taken. I know EVERYTHING seems to be wrong with that doesn’t it? People’s towns being taken over by city workers, their rents increasing, bores are waning to record lows, again..and toxic hazards, being anything from alleged radioactive materials to airborne carcinogens, the sky is obviously falling.

I see these ag hippy pages and as someone a little closer to both sides than most, including your good self I would wager, I see the polarising misinformative views being thrown into the public eye. So many Erin Brockoviches and doomsayers, not to mention those who’ve picked the sour grapes in the scenario and various others reluctant to change with their own axes to grind>

When you finish coughing up the desiccated coconut from the lamington you’re having with your tea after what I am about to say, why not look up what these companies are actually doing to protect the environment, to reinstate and promote the regrowth of native flora that has long been lost, the lengths and expense they are going to, to purify product water to far beyond what is required for drinking let alone agricultural use. Even just for a little balance in your information diet.

Or you can just keep surfing these green websites that all have the same message about anything that was born out of the industrial revolution their ancestors apparently had no part in."
- See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2013/10/16/wandoan-thriving-dying-either-way-new-name-town-anniekia-reports/#sthash.oZj5DU6s.dpuf

Motsa