Twiggy (23 page)

By August 2013,
under Forrest’s direction, Fortescue had awarded $1 billion in contracts for its mines to Aboriginal businesses, a move some believe is helping to create an emerging breed of indigenous entrepreneurs. The 102 contracts, awarded to fifty-two Aboriginal businesses, cover services such as catering, cleaning, waste management and camp administration across Fortescue’s operations in the Pilbara. To
be eligible for a contract, a business had to be at least 25 per cent owned by an Aboriginal person or group. Of the contracts awarded, more than 80 per cent went to Aboriginal businesses that were at least 50 per cent Aboriginal-owned. Brian Tucker, from the Nyiyaparli people, described winning one of the contracts as the biggest thing that had happened to his people since mining started in the
Pilbara. “We want this contract to be the first of many,” he said. “We want to have a future where we decide what’s best for our people. We want to provide sustainable jobs to our people in our country and hopefully this will change communities, people’s lifestyles and the environment.”

In 2011, the company reached a novel agreement with the Njamal people of the Pilbara that will make them
the managers of a mine that could one day produce 100 million tonnes of magnetite, a lower-grade form of iron ore. The joint venture will allow the Njamal to protect their cultural sites and earn revenue from providing transport, camp-building and other mining works. They won’t receive royalties for the minerals that are dug up from their land, but they hope the initiative will build indigenous
capacity, create jobs for their children and break the cycle of despair.

One of Australia’s best known indigenous academics, Marcia Langton, was once critical of the way mining companies treated Aboriginal people. In 2010, she contended that the disparity in living conditions between towns like Karratha and Roebourne was being exacerbated by the mining boom. But by 2012, Langton had modified
her thinking, arguing that the industry was leading a revolution that was empowering Aboriginal people and including them in economic life. She had also become an admirer of Forrest and took a seat on the advisory board of his Australian Employment Covenant, the body designed to find 50,000 jobs for Aborigines.

Langton also launched a blistering tirade against “the Left” who, she said, clung
to the notion of the blackfella as a “noble savage”. “Whenever an Aboriginal group negotiates with a resource extraction company there is an unspoken expectation that no Aboriginal group should become engaged in any economic development,” she said. “They only tolerate Aboriginal people living on their own land as caretakers of wilderness, living in poverty and remaining uneducated and isolated.”

Michael Woodley has a vastly different viewpoint about the way his fellow Aborigines have been recruited into the mines. He argues that because many of his people feel such a deep spiritual connection to their country, they do not want mining jobs that involve ripping up the land. Many have other interests, including attending university and working in other industries, that they would like
to pursue, but instead they are being lured into high-paid mining jobs.

Woodley is deeply critical of what he regards as Forrest’s condescending belief that Aboriginal people cannot be trusted to manage significant amounts of money. He insists he will never agree to a deal with Forrest unless he pays a royalty of at least 0.5 per cent to the Yindjibarndi. With Fortescue planning to produce
60 million tonnes a year from the Solomon mining hub, such a royalty could amount to $50 million a year if iron ore prices remain high. And that is just the starting point: Fortescue has discovered more than 3 billion tonnes of high-grade ore at Solomon and plans to lift production well beyond 60 million tonnes over the coming years.

Woodley argues the Yindjibarndi are intelligent enough
to manage the money for themselves. He points to safeguards that have become standard in native title agreements between miners and indigenous groups, including the use of trust structures administered by professional managers and the creation of special funds that can be drawn on only by future generations. “They think we will piss it up the wall,” Woodley says. “That’s a silly notion of what
someone did some time back. We value how money operates and we will establish a trust structure to take care of the next generation. We have 1000 people so we need to look after them, we have to make sure they’re in good health and the kids go to school. We can help ourselves.”

An example of Forrest’s hypocrisy, according to Woodley, is the deal Fortescue struck with billionaire Kerry Stokes’s
Iron Ore Holdings in 2012, which involved a cash payment of $20 million and a royalty of between 2 and 5 per cent on iron ore shipments made from one of Iron Ore Holdings’ Pilbara deposits. The deal was later abandoned, but in Woodley’s eyes it proved Forrest was prepared to pay industry-standard royalty rates to dig up Stokes’s land while offering the Yindjibarndi a relatively minuscule amount
to mine at Solomon.

Woodley also points out that billionaire Gina Rinehart receives a 2.5 per cent royalty from Rio Tinto for every tonne of iron ore mined by the London-based company in the Pilbara, a legacy of a deal negotiated by her father Lang Hancock, who pegged many of the original tenements. The agreement added hundreds of million of dollars to Rinehart’s fortune and gave her the
platform to start her own mining empire and ultimately become Australia’s richest person.

Forrest himself has refused to allow anyone else to use his own ancestral land at Minderoo without demanding high amounts of compensation. When a gas company asked for permission to use a small area of Minderoo for infrastructure to service a nearby plant, Forrest’s unrealistic demands (which ran to
tens of millions of dollars, according to those familiar with the talks) sank the proposal. In another example, Forrest’s private company launched a legal challenge against a sand mining company, Yarri Mining, that had applied to operate on Minderoo. Forrest argued in the WA mining warden’s court that Yarri’s operations would affect the viability of his pastoral lease and cause environmental damage
to the land.

The ideological clash between Forrest and Woodley came to a head at a rowdy and shambolic native title meeting in Roebourne in March 2011. In the lead-up to the meeting, Fortescue had supported – and some even claim initiated – the formation of a breakaway group of sympathetic Yindjibarndi people called the Wirlu-murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (WYAC). The members
of the WYAC had grown tired of what they saw as Woodley’s domineering style and his insistence on holding out against Fortescue. They wanted to do a deal to ensure their children would at least have jobs in the mines and a roof over their heads. Fortescue sweetened the deal for the newly formed WYAC by offering the group a $500,000 “sign-on fee”, as well as a $500 “sitting fee” for every meeting its
members attended.

Divisions within Aboriginal communities over such issues are hardly unusual. Across Australia, Mabo has left a complex legacy of acrimony and competing interests among traditional owners that has produced winners and losers. But this dispute, which has pitted vulnerable Aborigines against one of Australia’s wealthiest men, has been a particularly ugly episode. The Yindjibarndi
people of Roebourne, already overwhelmed with anguish, are now hopelessly split over the best way of preserving their cultural heritage while trying to ensure economic prosperity for themselves and future generations.

Based on edited footage made public by the YAC, the Roebourne gathering in 2011 appears to be a case study in how not to run a native title meeting. With his arm in a sling
after recent shoulder surgery, Forrest stood up in the town’s 50 Cent Hall and turned on the charm. He explained that he was a “local boy” who had been coming to Roebourne since he was two years old, and he wanted to improve the lives of the town’s Aborigines by mining on their land. “I’ve had one message I give and I’ve been giving ever since I became a businessman: the more you know Aboriginal people,
the more you love them,” he said.

Michael Woodley pleaded with the audience to reject Fortescue’s offer, arguing they would be handing over their traditional country in return for only $4 million a year for the rest of their lives. “The Solomon hub has about 3 to 4 billion tonnes of iron ore selling at $US180 a tonne. This guy makes $6 billion a year from our country and he wants to give
us $4 million cash. Now come on, we can’t be that blind and stupid. This is Yindjibarndi country and we need to benefit as well. We sign this thing and we are dead.”

Later, Woodley again approached the microphone at the front of the hall but WYAC’s lawyer, Ron Bower, who was controlling the meeting, quickly snatched it back. The meeting descended into chaos amid arguments over how it should
be run. At one point, the Yindjibarndi’s most senior lawman, Ned Cheedy, who was strongly opposed to a deal with Fortescue, implored his people to be quiet and listen to him. The frail elder said later: “I remember the old people saying we have always been one Yindjibarndi people, one camp. I remember Dad saying Yindjibarndi have never split.” Cheedy died a year later, aged 105, still desperately
sad over the loss of his people’s unity.

Attempting to wind up the increasingly rowdy meeting, Bower called for a show of hands in an attempt to gain endorsement for the Fortescue deal. Woodley’s group walked out in protest and the motion was passed easily. Woodley claimed later that Fortescue had paid for hundreds of people from as far away as Carnarvon to be bused into Roebourne to back
the deal. He complained the meeting was illegal because there was no traditional owner register for participants to sign to verify they were from Yindjibarndi country. But the breakaway members of the WYAC said the meeting was valid and the outcome proved they now had the right to negotiate directly with Fortescue. After the vote, Forrest returned to the front of the hall to tell the remaining Yindjibarndi
he was “proud” of them for accepting him at his word. “I’ve seen what just money does for our Aboriginal people,” he said. “If you have the opportunity to have a real crack yourself, you’ll do as well as any white man every time.”

Fortescue has denied doing anything wrong, either legally or ethically, in the hardline way it has dealt with the Yindjibarndi. But the company has never shied
away from the fact that it was desperate to win approval to start mining at Solomon, and that it wanted to do so by spending as little as possible. In 2011, the ABC’s
Four Corners
program aired video footage of an earlier meeting between the company and the Yindjibarndi at which Fortescue’s land access manager, Blair McGlew, outlined his position. In what sounded like a none-too-subtle threat,
McGlew explained that Fortescue would take legal action if it did not get its way because it was “in a hurry, in a rush” to develop the Solomon project. He also told the meeting that Fortescue wanted to be the lowest-cost producer in the Pilbara and it would not “pay quite the same money” to indigenous group as other companies.

After the 2011 meeting, the story of the Yindjibarndi dispute
might easily have died away. But a lawyer for the WYAC who attended the meeting in support of Forrest, Kerry Savas, later resigned and claimed publicly that Fortescue had “created” the splinter group with the sole intention of enabling the miner to circumvent the obstinate Woodley and his YAC. “On the face of it, this was an Aboriginal meeting,” Savas said. “However, when you look at it closely,
it wasn’t. The table was set by FMG and they had prepared the menu as they wanted it. They wanted to get enough people there to defeat the YAC and they did. So it is unusual when it’s a corporation involved and they want to control the meeting to that extent, and to pay fees to people that are voting at a meeting where the outcome of that vote directly [affects] the company.”

Fortescue, however,
has always insisted the splinter group came to it for help, and that the funding it has provided to the WYAC is consistent with what occurs in the mining industry during all native title negotiations. The National Native Title Tribunal and the Federal Court have both backed Fortescue’s stance that it negotiated with the YAC “in good faith”, as it is required to do under the Act. By 2013, Fortescue
had started providing jobs and housing to its sympathisers in Roebourne and had set up a special training facility in the town. Although it did not have an indigenous land use agreement with the YAC, the registered native title body, the company was able to begin mining iron ore at Solomon because it had secured all of its approvals with the help of the breakaway WYAC. Michael Woodley, meanwhile,
was receiving nothing; Fortescue had depicted him as a man motivated only by money, who had lost the support of most of his community – suggestions the firebrand leader has strongly denied.

The messy fallout from the Roebourne meeting was highly damaging to Forrest’s jealously guarded reputation as a fierce advocate for Aboriginal people. When Woodley’s YAC posted the footage of the meeting
on video-sharing website Vimeo, it was viewed thousands of times in just a few days. Forrest’s lawyers then hand-delivered a letter to Vimeo’s New York office claiming the video was defamatory and demanding it be taken down. Forrest said he received death threats after the video went viral. “The reason why it got taken off Vimeo is because it did incite racial hatred and I did receive death threats,”
he said. However, the video was later uploaded to YouTube and has since been viewed on that site more than 20,000 times. Fortescue responded by posting its own video on YouTube that put forward the WYAC’s side of the story. The company took out advertisements directing people to the video, which it called “The true Yindjibarndi story”. It has since been viewed about 8000 times.

The video
of the Roebourne meeting sparked particular fury among those parts of the indigenous community that remain deeply suspicious of the motives of white Australia. The editor of the
National Indigenous Times
, Stephen Hagan, wrote in that newspaper after viewing the footage:

It’s the same old story of divide and conquer; a well tested and proven strategy of non-indigenous people when seeking
to wrestle control off traditional owners. In the early contact days of British colonisation the imperialists simply identified conforming traditional owners and adorned them with shiny metal breastplates and undertook business exclusively with them when it suited. Dissenting blacks were dealt with promptly, in most cases never to be seen again.