NSWNMA members were recognised at the NSW Environment Awards for their campaign contribution to stop a major gas project that threatens to contaminate the Great Artesian Basin.

The Santos Narrabri Gas Project would see 850 gas wells constructed on 95,000 hectares of farmland and state forest in the Pilliga Forest in northern NSW.

“The Gomeroi [the traditional owners] have been fighting gas projects and Santos for over a decade now, and their voice wasn’t being respected by Santos or by state and federal governments,” says Damien Davis Frank, an RN at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.

“Australia hasn’t learned from its past of colonisation and destruction of Aboriginal land and Aboriginal voices.”

Damien is part of a group of nurses who have travelled to the Pilliga to form an alliance with Gomeroi leaders, environmental groups, other unions such as the Maritime Union of Australia, and the Country Women’s Association, to stop the project going ahead.

The ‘Standing With Gomeroi’ campaign, co-ordinated by Unions NSW, won the Jack Mundey Award at this year’s Environment Awards, hosted by the Nature Conservation Council of NSW.

Members of the campaign include another nurse and NSWNMA member Matthew Shields, a Gomeroi man and a registered nurse and midwife.

Damien says his motivation to join the campaign was because of the “stark environmental damage” that will result if the project goes ahead. “Not just on Gomeroi land, but all over Australia”, by tainting the Great Artesian Basin, an aquifer that services communities all over the country.

“And all of us will suffer from the incredible emissions that this project is going to create. Climate issues are health issues, and I think it is one of the biggest health challenges we are going to be facing in the coming 20–30 years,” said Damien, who also works as an Aboriginal chronic care coordinator.

AN IMPORTANT SITE OF BIODIVERSITY

Covering half a million hectares of temperate eucalypt woodland, the Pilliga Forest is the largest native forest west of the Great Dividing Range. One of the most important sites of biodiversity in eastern Australia, it is home to threatened birds, including the glossy black cockatoo, grey-crowned babbler, and mammals such as koalas, the squirrel glider and black-striped wallaby.

Earlier this year the campaign against Santos’s gas project won a small victory when the Federal Court ruled the National Native Title Tribunal erred in 2022 by not taking into the public interest the question of climate change when it gave the $3 billion project the go ahead.

But the battle continues, Damien says, and the NSWNMA and other unions have resolved “to stand on the ground with the Gomeroi if a time comes where roads need to be blockaded to prevent this devastating mining project going ahead, if all other avenues fail.”