Aussies occupy drill rig to protest coal mining

6.02.12

One Aus­tralian activist has been released pend­ing sum­mons for ‘inter­fer­ing with a motor vehi­cle’ today after stop­ping drilling in Bac­chus Marsh. Paul Con­nor locked him­self  to the top of Man­tle Mining’s 8.5 metre-tall drill rig while hang­ing a ban­ner that read ‘No New Coal Bac­chus Marsh’. Anoth­er cam­paign­er, local moth­er Natasha Mills, also locked her­self to the drill rig at ground lev­el, sur­round­ed by a sup­port crew of 15 oth­er Quit Coal activists who occu­pied the drill site to stage a ‘pic­nic’, which fea­tured pro­duce from local farms.

‘We are eat­ing local­ly grown food to illus­trate what is at stake here’ said Mills, who is cur­rent­ly 7 and a half months preg­nant with her sec­ond child. ‘This project will destroy prime agri­cul­tur­al land, all for the sake of a quick buck and the burn­ing of brown coal, one of the most envi­ron­men­tal­ly harm­ful prac­tices pos­si­ble.

‘Mantle’s project has so lit­tle sup­port here among locals in Bac­chus Marsh that our May­or, our State MP and our Fed­er­al MP have all come out against it’ she con­tin­ued. ‘It’s just wrong, and we’re not going to let it hap­pen.’

The Quit Coal action drew a bar­rage of media atten­tion, with every major tele­vi­sion sta­tion in atten­dance. For a sam­ple of the media atten­tion, click on ‘dirty fight’ on the Ten News web­site here.

After 4 and a half hours chained to the top of the drill rig, Con­nor was cut free by Police from the Search & Res­cue squad with an angle-grinder. ’We need Vic­to­ri­ans to join this fight along­side us till we win it’ he said. ‘We can’t ignore the urgent warn­ings from cli­mate sci­en­tists that we need to move away from coal, and blind­ly seek to dig it up and sell it off over­seas. We have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to the world not to allow brown coal exports to begin, for the first time ever, here in Vic­to­ria.’

Because the site was on pub­lic land and they had not bro­ken any laws, the remain­ing Quit Coal activists occu­py­ing the site were not arrest­ed. They chose to com­ply with a police request and end­ed the protest peace­ful­ly, mind­ful that the police could oth­er­wise phys­i­cal­ly remove them fol­low­ing the move on order.

Man­tle also issued a state­ment say­ing that while they sup­port the right to peace­ful protest, our action will not affect their future oper­a­tions.

Quit Coal will see about that.

Videos and more at http://quitcoal.org.au/blog/