INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS EXPRESS OUTRAGE DJAB WURRING
INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS EXPRESS OUTRAGE
AT DESTRUCTION OF SACRED TREE
Earlier this year a mining company, Rio Tinto, destroyed ancient Aboriginal caves in Western Australia.There was such a public outcry "and criticism of Australia's cultural heritage laws that Rio Tinto's boss announced he would step down."
An article on the BBC News Australia site said "protestors have long camped at the site in Victoria to defend culturally significant trees including some where local Djab Wurrung women have traditionally gone to give birth."
In 2019, the article said, Aboriginal landowners "negotiated with the Victorian government to save around a dozen of the 250 culturally significant trees from destruction."
Activists who are independent of the original Aboriginal land group have remained at the site. They are trying to save more trees.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian newspaper (October 27,2020) headlined "The destruction of sacred tree on Djab Wurrung country has broken our hearts" Sissy Eileen Austin says, "The sounds of chainsaws will haunt us forever."
"It has been 862 days since the establishment of the Djab Wurrung heritage protection embassy to protect sacred womens country from the Victorian government's Western Highway duplication project in the states western district ."
"Country is who we are ...and what grounds us in all that we do as First Nations people."
Austin says the particular stretch where the expansion of a road is planned has birthing trees that are more than 800 years old. Thousands of generations of Djab Wurrung babies have been born in this country.
Sissy Eileen Austin is a Djab Wurrung woman and a member of the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria.
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