Defiant Geraldton mayor pushes on with tree planting

Mayor orders planting of trees at different location after original planting was stopped when local Indigenous representatives expressed concerns about the event’s links to Queen Elizabeth.

City of Greater Geraldton Mayor Shane Van Styn. Picture: 9 News

The mayor at the centre of a controversy surrounding Western Australia’s new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act has gone ahead and ordered the planting of hundreds of trees at another location – only this time the new site actually contains Aboriginal cultural heritage.

Geraldton mayor Shane Van Styn told The Weekend Australian the hundreds of saplings originally scheduled to be planted at a burnt-out piece of bushland had been quietly planted in recent days inside a river catchment area.

A week ago, Mr Van Styn said the town’s planting of trees at Wonthella Bushland Reserve had been abandoned after a local Indigenous family expressed objections. While he said the council had stopped due to fears they could breach WA’s new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which came into force at the start of the month, the family has said its objections were due to the connection of the planting to Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee.

WA Premier Roger Cook and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Tony Buti said during the week that the planting should not have been stopped by the act.

The original site selected for the planting was not listed as an Aboriginal cultural heritage site, although the new location is registered.

Mr Van Styn said while there was still a lot of uncertainty over how the new act would operate, he felt the council had taken sufficient steps to protect itself from any legal backlash.

“I’m going to rely upon the word of the Premier,” Mr Van Styn said. “The Premier himself is on the record, and the minister for Aboriginal rights is on the record, saying that we should go ahead with tree planting. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

WA’s new Aboriginal heritage laws, designed as an update to the 50-year-old legislation that had allowed mining giant Rio Tinto to push ahead with its detonation of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters, have been the subject of intense debate in recent weeks.

The Juukan Gorge in Western Australia. Picture: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation/AFP

While glad that the trees had been planted, Mr Van Styn said he was confused by the government’s comments that the original planting should not have stopped despite the objections from some local Indigenous representatives.

“Here we have the Premier and the Aboriginal Affairs Minister saying we should have disregarded the knowledge-holders. I thought the whole purpose of the rewrite was to listen to them,” he said.

The laws, which the government says streamline the previous heritage laws and do not broaden the range of activities captured by the heritage provisions, apply in various levels of intensity depending on the scale and type of proposed activity.

The planting, Mr Van Styn said, had been done with the blessing of local Indigenous knowledge-holders and with care not to breach the specific levels of ground disturbance that would mean the planting would need to comply with the act’s more onerous tiers.

“Given the fact all the families said ‘we would like to plant trees in our reserves’, we went ahead and did it. We just made sure we didn’t dig down more than 50cm or remove more than 4kg of dirt,” he said.

The trees were planted as part of a federal program for the queen’s platinum jubilee.