When Captain Cook, jumped from the longboat, stuck the Union Jack in the sand and the sailors gave three cheers for the King, the natives watching from the sand dunes would have had no idea what that ceremony meant.

For thousands of years the land had been held by custodianship rather than ownership. In Central Australia where I lived for a bit, Aboriginal people will tell you: “This is my country, this land belongs to me.” Or they might say, “I belong to this country”. It’s a two-way relationship and a profoundly different way of relating to the land.

To gain ownership and control of a tract of land by staking a claim, paying a fee or signing a contract is the way of the settler. More recently is has become the method of the resource extractor.

The first European settlers got a real bargain with this land. A few axes, blankets, flour and some alcohol in exchange for the largest island continent on the planet. It was a very one-sided deal but the natives were powerless to stop the invasion and takeover of their land.
And it’s happening again.

A new wave of invaders are spreading across the land but no flags are needed now. Claims are staked by global positioning satellite devices, deals are struck by email and funds moved in by investors using netbank.

Towns are springing up, railway tracks to the sea are being laid, rivers are being diverted and vast quantities of ancient resources are being loaded into ships and carted away.

Of course there are still trinkets for the new-settler ‘natives’ to amuse us and keep us quiet. The very latest gadgets for this and doodads for that, in a never-ending spiral of updated features.

But it’s as poor a deal for us as was the 1770 deal for the original Australians.

The new colonial financiers are taking our land’s resources away and paying us far less than the true worth. Overseas, these resources are converted to manufactured goods which are then sold back to us at far more than they cost to make.

The tragedy here, apart from the depletion of our national estate, is that real wealth is created by the country that manufactures products, not the country from where the raw materials originate.

Australia is in the midst of a resource ‘boom’ and yet our personal, household and national debt is steadily increasing. From belonging to the land to belonging to the bank in just over two hundred years!

Mining can make or break this country. At its best it supplies the world with raw materials to sustain industrial production. At its worst it’s a free-for-all feeding frenzy of investors looking for a fast buck.

By the time the iron ore is dug, the coal spewed into the air, the warranty expired and the consumables have failed, it will be too late.

By then the atmosphere will be ‘tipped over’ and all our precious water might have fallen into a longwall fissure and disappeared.

We belong to the land, but the government belongs to us. Let’s use our assets wisely.