If you travel the red dirt tracks deep inside the Pilliga Forest on Gomeroi traditional land, you may come to a large cleared area where Santos, the gas company, has constructed a massive well pad. It is called Dewhurst 43. To provide access to Dewhurst 43 for heavy vehicles, road base has been placed on a creek crossing which is adjacent to a Gomeroi Cultural Heritage Site. This road base has been washed approximately 30 metres down into the creek bed and polluted the site indicating a “material harm”.
This creek crossing is on Whirlybrook Trail and the creek is called Mt Pleasant Creek, one of numerous second-order tributaries of the Namoi River and is the site where archaeological consultants OzArk discovered a hammerstone artefact and recommended that Santos add the site – labelled Mount Pleasant Creek IF-1 – to its Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Site Register. The code “IF-1” signifies a site where an isolated find was noted, in which case the management recommendation should include avoidance with a no-go buffer.
According to the gas company’s own Narrabri Gas Project Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Plan, material harm to a significant Aboriginal location is harm that involves actual or potential harm to the health or safety of human beings or to the environment that is not negligible, or results in actual or potential loss or property damage of an amount, or amounts in aggregate, exceeding $10,000 such loss including the reasonable costs and expenses that would be incurred in taking all reasonable and practicable measures to prevent, mitigate or make good harm to the environment.
Whether Santos ever followed the advice of its archaeologists and added the Mount Pleasant Creek site to its Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Site Register where all known significant sites are supposed to be recorded, we may never know, as the Site Register is not publicly available in full.
We also saw what appear to be grinding grooves and an ochre pit which were not observed in the Oz Ark Pre-Clearance Report but we think deserve the attention from Traditional Owners and independent archaeologists to verify.
Consent condition B53 of the Narrabri Gas Project provides that Santos must ensure that the development does not cause any direct or indirect impact on identified heritage items, of which the Mount Pleasant Creek crossing is one. Consent condition A1 provides that Santos must implement all reasonable and feasible measures to prevent and, if prevention is not reasonable and feasible, minimise any “material harm” to the environment that may result from the construction, operation or rehabilitation of the development.
Complaints have been lodged with the regulators and the company.