I don’t know whether many of my compatriots have ever heard of a NSW rural township named
Breeza. Here’s a wonderful photo of the Breeza landscape from
Ian Stehbens:
Breeza is surely one of the loveliest names you could possibly imagine for a hot flat place out on the Liverpool Plains. One imagines sea breezes floating in magically from the distant Pacific! I heard this name constantly during my childhood, because my grandmother
Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964] was born in nearby
Quirindi and brought up in Breeza, on a sheep station named
Currabubula. What fabulous place names! If you’ve got a map—or, better still, Google—you’ll find that the municipalities named Breeza and Currabubula lie in the middle of a triangle whose corners are Gunnedah, Tamworth and Quirindi.
I’ve just published (through
Gamone Press) a family-history book,
They Sought the Last of Lands, presenting pioneering stories of my Australian ancestors.
If you’re interested, I invite you to click
here to download the chapter in which I speak of my grandmother from Breeza.
Now, some of the few remaining flimsy threads that tie me to my native land are about to be destroyed forever. A Chinese company named
Shenhua has apparently received approval from the NSW state government to build a gigantic coal mine on the agricultural lands of the Liverpool Plains near my ancestral township of Breeza. Astounded and shocked by such a scenario, I hardly know what to say.
Australia is selling off to China
the lands and spirits of her pioneers.
The souls of my ancestors.
Click
here and
here for press stuff on this unfolding tragedy.
Meanwhile, as usual Down Under, where life is casual, nobody seems to give a coal-mine fuck. Is our Australian people really as
apathetic and indeed pathetic as that? Yes, no doubt. I would love to be contradicted...
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق