#collarenebri

[just-me-youll-see]

Some remaining flood waters from last weeks rain. . . . #collarenebri #australia #straya #floodwaters #westernnsw #roadtripnsw #roadtripwithmates #nsw #landscape #nature #countrytownsaustralia (at Collarenebri, New South Wales) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjxeU0zSGm0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[berniesrevolution]

In February of this year, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a Green New Deal resolution into the United States Congress. The resolution outlined a 10 year plan for the decarbonisation of the American economy in the tradition of FDR’s 1930s New Deal, but rewritten for the 21st century (and the Capitalocene). Focused on climate justice for frontline communities and an ambitious jobs program, the resolution called for an “economic mobilisation on a scale not seen since World War II”. Naturally, it was quickly denounced as socialism by the right, while leftists debated the minutiae of the policy implications or dismissed it as green Keynesianism.

While the resolution has sparked much excitement and debate around the world, with movements for a GND emerging in the U.K, Canada, Europe and Australia, the Green New Deal isn’t new. Political economists such as Robert Pollin, Ann Pettifor and Frank Stilwell have been debating the merits of a Green New Deal for over a decade. We believe that the vitality of debate existing in the present conjuncture is due to an ‘upsurge’ of climate activism similar to that of 2008. Whether this new climate upsurge is capable of sustaining momentum and merging with other movements for racial and economic justice to form a progressive coalition remains to be seen. Such a coalition is all the more urgent due to a nascent form of ecofascism.

In this three part series we will make the case for an ecosocialist Green New Deal for Australia, consider what decommodification means for how we live and work, and why we need a strategy based in class struggle to make it a reality.

Ecofascism is the right’s response to climate change

A recent spate of reports and announcements from the upper echelons of the corporate and military world signal an unmistakable shift among finance capital and centre-right governments from climate denial to climate opportunism. Climate change is suddenly real: an investment opportunity, a risk to be managed and most importantly a crisis through which capital can reshape the world to maximise accumulation. The main thrust of these arguments is the need for increased public investment in the private production of renewable energy, heat resistant crop engineering, water catchment and bottling, increased population surveillance and of course nuclear energy. Now that climate change is acknowledged and the risks are ‘worse than expected’, there is money to be made. As predicted by Nicos Poulantzas and more recently by Ian Bruff, authoritarianism is the final form of the state in capitalist societies. The spectre of climate change provides the perfect catalyst for the transition to an authoritarian state, geared to act in the interests of capital.

The uptake of ‘deep ecology’ narratives by far-right groups is another indication that ecofascism is being ushered into the wings, stoking the fires of racism to imagine a safe, clean and green future, but only for a privileged few. For Australia, one of the most violent settler colonial states in the world, this means the continuation of carceral regimes that target First Nations people, indefinite offshore detention for refugees, and population control and monitoring that targets people of colour, people with disabilities, and LGBTIQA people. Dispossession and control of marginalised people has defined our country since invasion in 1788, which marked the first real wave of environmental and social destruction. Today environmental racism is embodied in fracking and mining on Aboriginal lands without prior consent, and government inaction to provide clean water to towns experiencing drought like Walgett and Collarenebri.

Without a fundamental challenge to capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, plans to ‘attack’ and ‘defend ourselves’ from climate change will kick into overdrive the very dynamics that fomented the crisis, reproducing the systems of harm and violence that underpin capital accumulation.

(Continue Reading)

[datuizm]

“FARMERS DID THIS” - 200-year old fish traps exposed, the riverbed is dry and the land is suffering. Second water run to the Kamilaroi country, Unc took us to Collarenebri to provide some relief. Elders, children and whole families are without basic access to clean water, many of them living on their own land. Uncle Larry said it never used to be like this, he used to be able to live off the fish from the river. But in the last few decades, booming agribusiness in the region has cleared thousands of acres of trees, pumped countless litres of water and worked the land til it’s dust. This is no way to live. Mob were able to take care of the land for more than 60000 years and ensure it could provide for ALL — now they’re copping the brunt of colonial crime. This blatant exploitation is causing devastating climate change right before our eyes, and rest assured unless we act that it won’t stop in Colly. Dust storms, droughts and desertification are a glimpse of what will happen across this continent if we don’t work immediately to destroy these systems of exploitation. Elders have stressed that if the land dies, culture dies with it. Blak sovereignty is the key to healing this land, and anticolonial action is the only way we’ll be able to properly defend it. Mob are on the frontlines of this struggle so it’s as good a time as any for all settlers to get behind them. Always was, always will be — Aboriginal land. https://www.instagram.com/p/BtwdbTsBHus/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1fy15o67ktve8

[pbhhill]

After the rather tenuous start this morning I get the pleasure of this view possibly for the next 24 hrs🖒#collarenebri #nsw #alternaterfix #4x4needshelp

[emergencymanagementnews]

Walgett, Collarenebri and Lightning Ridge isolated as more than 140 flood warnings remain in place across New South Wales and Victoria

[mattnicholls69]

NSW floods: three towns cut off by water relying on airdrops for food and medical supplies

[rainydaydriversclub]

18+ hours on the road in the rav4 there and back over the weekend, managed to carry about 600L of water (way overloaded) to the Kamilaroi aboriginal community in Collarenebri in northwest NSW. All together we managed to get 3500L to the area where farms are draining rivers for cotton.... (that pic of the dry river bed should give you an idea of how fucked it’s become)

Really happy with how the rav4 performed. Made a really good tent, was reasonably fuel efficient (sort of), handled the extra weight pretty well, and was fun to drive home when it was 600kg lighter. Managed to avoid hitting any kangaroos or emus (couple close calls) but the windscreen and rest of the car are plastered with dead mosquitos.

Next run in 4 weeks time I might try to get something with a bit better capacity, maybe a 2 ton Ute or something like that.

[thewondermentofillustration]

Daryl Lindsay - The Stone Crusher, watercolour over pencil

Daryl Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria. Daryl was a jackaroo near Collarenebri and later served in the war in France. In England he became a medical artist for the Australian Imperial Force. His brothers included artists Sir Lionel Lindsay, and Norman Lindsay.

[lindoig9]

Lightning Ridge

22 April

We needed to get to Lightning Ridge today and there were basically two ways to go – west and then south, or south and then west.  Our maps showed possible flood warnings on both routes, but no road closures and I opted for the ‘west and then south’ route – out to St George and then south through Dirranbandi.  Big mistake!

Off we went and we arrived in St George without incident so stopped to eat lunch there before heading for Dirranbandi.  When we arrived in Dirranbandi, we found that the road through to Hebel (lovely little place) and further south was closed due to extensive flooding.  The Police Station where we went for advice is only open for a few hours on Monday mornings and the service stations were all closed for Easter.  Fortunately, the Information Centre was open and all the news was bad – no way south for at least 3 or 4 more weeks (and they have subsequently copped quite a bit more rain).  It looked as if we would have to back-track all the way to Gundy and strike out in a different direction, but the woman at the Information Centre suggested a short-cut through Thallon to Mungindi to Walgett (where one of the flood warnings was extant).  The directions were a little vague, but I managed to follow them and a couple of hours later, we were in Mungindi.  Could we take a short-cut through Collarenebri? Of course, the Police Station and servo were closed, but I found a little café hidden off the main road and enquired there.  Yes, we could get to Collarenebri by either of two routes: one involving 40 kilometres of badly flood-damaged gravel or another slightly longer route, but with only 15 clicks of good dirt.  We chose the latter and set off with slightly confusing directions that worked for maybe 30 kilometres.  We then passed a sign for Collarenebri and although I was pretty sure we should have kept going, we opted to take the road that was clearly marked to our desired destination.  It got us there but we traversed 90 kilometres of very patchy gravel to do it. Some parts were quite good, but numerous times, out of the blue, we crashed over small washaways and giant potholes.  We were pretty worried about what we would find inside the van when we stopped.

We debated camping somewhere along the way, but we eventually rang the caravan park and arranged to come in late and pay them next day.  I could see us arriving at 9.30 or so, but once we hit the bitumen, we could speed up and we arrived around 7.30.  I was pretty shattered after a tad under 600 kilometres of very taxing driving.  Particularly around and after dusk, we were driving on challenging roads, looking into the sun and it was only during the final bitumen stretch that I felt confident of arriving safe and secure on that day.  It took all my concentration for several hours and I was not up to doing much when we parked the van in our allotted space well after dark.

We set up and Heather cooked a delicious meal utilising some of our pre-prepared food and we crashed into bed and slept the sleep of the dead.  Despite all the trauma, it had been a good day and there had been heaps of birds close to the road late in the day if I had only been able to take my eyes off the potholes to look at them.

23 April

We have always liked Lightning Ridge – so named because the original Lightning Ridge (about 7 or 8 kilometres out of the current town) was a place where a shepherd sheltered from a storm 100-odd years ago, only to have 80 of his sheep, his dog, and himself killed by lightning.  I think that justified them moving the town to a different site!  It is a very strange secretive place, quirky and quaint, with a history of murder and mayhem as miners and prospectors tried to steal each other’s claims, bonanza finds, and secret deposits.  Even today, nobody sells their finds themselves – they use an intermediary who is sworn to secrecy so nobody gets to discover who the real seller is or where he/she may have found his stash.

It has been a wonderful week but one broken up with so many activities that I don’t think I can describe them all – but I will start with the real reason we are here.

In 2019, we were in Lightning Ridge and visited the home of the Australian Opal Centre.  The Centre is devoted to the promotion of opals and opal mining but is also heavily engaged in collecting and preserving opalised fossils.  This was a completely new concept for us, but we discovered that opal is formed in 100-million-year-old rock buried underground around here.  Some of the opal is precious opal (beautiful reflective colours that catch and refract the light in glowing spectacle) and much more of it is potch (opal, but non-precious, because it does not reflect the wonderful colours of precious opal).  Some of the opal is simply opalised rock, but some of it is opalised fossils and there are occasional opportunities for newbies like us to search through bags of rock retrieved from mines in the area looking for these fossils. Many of the miners also collect fossils and many are donated to the Centre’s collection but there is often a conflict between selling their finds to put food on their table and the warm and fuzzies of donating them.

We thought it would be fun to go on one of the Digs (we don’t actually dig, just search what others have dug) but the 2019 Dig was already fully subscribed. We booked for the 2020 Dig, but that was cancelled/Covided so we tried for 2021 but that was also Covided.  But we made it this year and it was great.

Our main task was to search through bags of rock looking for treasures – and we found lots – a record haul, surpassing the finds of any previous dig.  We didn’t find any dinosaurs – our biggest finds were perhaps 2 centimetres long, but they all add to our growing knowledge of that age – and it certainly gave us a thrill to be the person who found something that has not been seen by anyone for 100 million years.  It really was exciting.  So, what did we find?  Everyone found something, but I found some bivalves, numerous bone fragments, a piece of a turtle shell and lots of pieces of plant material (the Centre seems less interested in the flora, but they certainly get excited by seemingly tiny fauna fossils).  Other people also found similar items as well as a complete vertebra from a prehistoric crocodile (and a scute – thought to be one of the triangular protrusions on his back), a few finger and toe phalanxes, some yabbie buttons, pinecones, pine stem, Plesiosaurus teeth, seeds and fruit, gastropods, and lots of as yet unidentified bone fragments.  The biggest thing I found (and I don’t recall seeing other finds much bigger) was a bone fragment almost two centimetres long and one centimetre across.  It had flattish ends and had been broken longitudinally and I could see all the internal structure where the marrow would have resided all those millennia ago.  It was almost translucent and a pale apple-ish green colour.  Any of our more important finds were individually bagged and labelled so if they ever go on display, the finder’s name will accompany the artifact.

We probably spent close to 3 days in total sifting through bags of tiny stones looking for the occasional opalised fossil.  It looked quite funny seeing us all hunched over with magnifying glasses or peering at a tableful of stones 5 or 6 centimetres in front of us.  Lots of chatter and suddenly someone would command the floor to announce their latest find – many of which turned out to be fake news anyway.

I would have happily spent more time in the shed sorting stones, but they had us out exploring the area too.  We had several lectures about opals, fossils and the Centre in particular, but we also went down one mine and visited about 5 others where we watched the above-ground processes and sometimes sorted through piles of tailings looking for potch or colour – or anything else of interest.  We had one excursion to a gravel pit just to look for pretty stones – I don’t think they expected us to find any opal there, but it was a nice opportunity to just look at and collect as many pretty pebbles as we wanted.

Photography was pretty much banned.  Some participants photographed their own or other displayed fossils/opals but photography outside the shed was discouraged because miners are very cautious and secretive, and something might appear in the background of a photo that helped a competitor (or thief) to identify where valuable opals might be found or stored. Murder is sometimes the name of the game!

We also had some night-time activities.  One night was a Dig Dinner at the Bowling Club – excellent food and all laid on for us – we just bought our own drinks.  Immediately before we ate, we had a great presentation by Phil, a palaeontologist on the Dig with us.  That was one of the best presentations of its sort I have heard – it really brought a little part of prehistory to life for me. Another night we all had big serves of delicious home-made soup with buns and were then shown a film called ‘Spark’ about opals, mining and Lightning Ridge – a bit long and it repeated quite a bit that we had seen in previous lectures – but it was followed by an overfill of potatoes roasted in the coals of a barbeque – and we had more of them for breakfast next day.  (That was very nostalgic, recalling teenage camps where we roasted potatos into charred boulders in the coals of a far too hot campfire.)  And another night, we looked after our own meal but gathered at the Club for an Opal Trivia competition – three teams that ended up with the scores of 55, 54.5 and 54 – our table came a miserable last, partly because they wouldn’t believe me when I told them how to structure a limerick – one of the other parts of the competition.  I wrote one on my own that has been picked up and may eventually be printed in the Newsletter, but our table submitted a rambling piece that bore no resemblance to a limerick and we lost points for that.  But making as many words as possible from a strange collection of letters won us an extra point or two because my vocabulary almost doubled the efforts of the other tables.  All a lot of fun with a long and very interesting discussion afterwards about the Centre’s huge building project and the ways they might fund the big deficit that the Covid-inspired increase in building and material costs has created.

Sunday was rather wet, but we went out early in the day to the local Market.  There was a huge volume of jewellery, predominantly opal, on display, but with a variety of other things too.  We went there primarily to get breakfast and we each enjoyed a huge bacon and egg roll, but they only took cash.  We have not used cash for at least two years and we even had to raid our parking money coins to make up enough to pay for our brekky - and thern had nothing left to purchase anything else at the market anyway.

[terefah]

i know we’re all struggling right now and i don’t expect anyone overseas to prioritse this over the needs of their immediate communities but if you’re able to donate to australia’s fire and wildlife rescue services, as well as to rural and indigenous communities who need access to clean water, it would really mean a lot

NSW RURAL FIRE SERVICE

QLD RURAL FIRE BRIGADE ASSOCIATION

WILDLIFE RESCUE EMERGENCY FUND

WATER FOR COLLARENEBRI AND GOODOOGA

like the PM fully refuses to acknowledge that lib/nat policies wrt energy and emissions have exaccerbated australia’s ecological instability beyond belief. the fires have been burning for a month now and the gov’s strategy is to send thoughts and prayers and say it’s disrespectful to argue about climate change when people’s homes are burning. like YOU DID THIS! YOU CUT 40MIL FROM THE NSW FIREFIGHTING BUDGET! these cunts have blood on their hands and i’m so scared for the future

[curiositymine]

Collarenebri, in northern New South Wales, Australia, missed out by 'that much' on having its own railway station. Instead, the planned line was cancelled nine miles from the town. In this video, we explore Pokataroo, the end of the line, and discuss what might have happened if the line had been completed to its planned terminus.

[datuizm]

“Through FIRE Fighting In Resistance Equally, there's been an ongoing relief effort providing water to communities on Gomeroi country. For those that aren't caught up to speed, predominantly Blak towns such as Walgett and Collarenebri (and many more in the region) are copping the brunt of man-made climate change as it devastates the Murray-Darling River Basin. Pre-invasion systems of care for the environment have been sabotaged by capitalist, colonialist exploitation at the hands of agribusiness and mining in a relatively brief amount of time. Now, people are left to live off of nothing but noxious bore-water as a result of this slow attempt to kill the land in the name of profit. FIRE has been leading efforts to keep people alive during this crisis while the government - on all levels - has done little to nothing. Now they are in a position where they can provide a more sustainable solution: water filters that ensure people will have access to drinkable water in their own houses yet again. The struggle to break the grip of capitalist and colonialist interests on Gomeroi country (and across the continent) will continue, but it is vital we act immediately to keep people alive. All settlers must pay the rent one way or another, and this is an action we urge everyone to get behind. If you are able to give more, please do. As climate crisis quickly worsens across the continent and across the world, it is Blak sovereignty that still holds the key to defending against exploitative structures threatening to push us all towards catastrophe. Always was, always will be - Aboriginal land!” - Anticolonial Asian Alliance

[leanpick]

Hectares of NSW koala habitat destroyed

Hectares of NSW koala habitat��destroyed

Koalas have lost more than 5000 hectares of habitat in northern NSW since laws which protected native vegetation were axed, a report has found.

The report by wildlife conservation group WWF and the NSW Nature Conservation Council found since the repeal of the state’s Native Vegetation Act in 2017, the rate of native bushland clearing in Moree and Collarenebri has nearly tripled.

The NSW…

[pbhhill]

New alternator - job done 🖒 It's a sleepy little town - good knowing you - on the road again S.A. hopefully before Xmas 😂😂😂🎅🎅🎅🤶🤶🤶 (at Collarenebri, New South Wales)

[thewondermentofillustration]

Daryl Lindsay - Untitled (Dancers)

pen and brown ink over pencil

Daryl Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria. Daryl was a jackaroo near Collarenebri and later served in the war in France. In England he became a medical artist for the Australian Imperial Force. His brothers included artists Sir Lionel Lindsay, and Norman Lindsay.