ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the disproportionate impact mining has on Aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians represent the world's longest continuous living culture, and comprise about 2.5 per cent of the Australian population, although in Northern Australia, this percentage rises to about one third. Mining, and the processing of natural resources, carries social, environmental and health costs that are not fully accounted for by the mining companies. Aboriginal Australians are therefore disproportionately impacted by these industries due to mining occurring on or near their lands, by the imbalance of power relationships, social and legal disadvantage, and poverty. The chapter focuses on case studies that explore the specifics of the Indigenous experience of environmental injustice in a large inland city, Broken Hill, which has a disproportionately high proportion of Indigenous people, as well as two more remote case studies where industrial pollution is occurring on, or immediately adjacent to Indigenous estates.
