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Around 40 anti-coal activists from the group Rising Tide brought Newcastle’s coal terminals to a standstill for five hours today.
The group is thought to include all three Hunter residents opposed to the coal industry.
The Rising Tide banners were highly visible because they were perched high atop an enormous pile of coal. This makes the advertising perhaps the most carbon-intensive in human history.
The activists demanded the state set a carbon price, which it did at $550 each.
Police removed the protesters from the coal facility and issued 32 of them with fines. How different it would have been 200 years ago, when they would have been arrested and sent to coal facilities in Newcastle.
Rising Tide hopes to end Newcastle’s dependence on coal and promotes a future in which the city’s main export activity is watching the Hunter River flow into the sea.
Coal has been part of the Newcastle story since it was deposited deep beneath the city in the Carboniferous Period. At the time, protesters fought to keep the valuable hydrocarbons from building up, but were thwarted by the vested interests of the city’s powerful geological-pressure industry.
The region was explored in 1797 by Lieutenant John Shortland. Shortland named the river he found after 80s art-funk sensation Hunters & Collectors. Perhaps the explorer was inspired by 1989’s “When the River Runs Dry”, although music historians note that, since it flows into the sea, the lower reaches of the Hunter would never run dry. “When the River Runs Dry” also post-dates Shortland’s discovery by more than 190 years.
Today when we think ‘Newcastle’, we think coal exports, but it wasn’t always like this. In 1804, the new settlement’s name meant coal exports in the sense of coal being exported from Britain.
Today, Newcastle’s Port Waratah is at the centre of Australia’s multi-billion-dollar coal export industry, which supplies 28 per cent of the global market. Thanks to Port Waratah, Australia is not only the “Saudi Arabia of uranium”, we’re also the “Saudi Arabia of uranium” of coal.
Police deployed this specialised piece of machinery to remove the protesters from the coal stockpile and load them into waiting paddy wagons.
