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Now the tricky bit.  LDO has to get “community support”, what to do?  Well you roll up into the council chambers for a briefing, dragging with you some state development officers who have just been made aware of their intentions and as is part of their brief they must try and facilitate a way “forward” – I mean you can not have “state development” stop development now can you?  The council is like 2 year olds being shown shiny objects (more jobs, diversification of income, more growth), most agree what a sterling idea.  Alas the process LDO was trying to sneak through hit a rather substantial snag – public outcry.  Once the community became aware of the proposal the wheels of motion to cull this ridiculous concept was sent spinning.  Even I have written to the paper (in fact the first!), but since my little public rant, my little effort has been swamped by public marches, prime time news stories, and masses of electronic correspondence to help stop the mining of coal in Margaret River.

 

Poor old LDO – they had promised to individually talk to the landholders this month, but they now realized that they would put their hands into a hornet’s nest.  They hastily threw up a website and foolishly presented pictures and images that were farcical and maps that had been doctored (I will get to that).  In fact I had been contacted in June so as to have a meeting with LDO – they never contacted me again and expect they never will.  The meetings they had planned were curtailed to 2 days, and they did not respond to most of the locals request to see them – we only went because 4 groups of landholders were cobbled together at a single location so as such were forced to talk to us. It did not go well.

 

They bought no maps, no plans, no information, and not so much as a pen – but oh the promises, oh the platitudes.  It was shocking to believe these were mining professionals; it was even more shocking to believe that OUR council fell for their song and dance act.  The misinformation put forward in their discussions are as such:

 

• Drilling the shafts will be straight forward and shown to be possible

• They do not expect any significant ingress of groundwater, even though they will mine to the “contact of the coal with the sands”

• Groundwater will not be contaminated

• They know the areas which are faulted underground and will avoid them

• The coal is low gas and that it provides no risk

• They will mine under the Margaret River, but even with no monitoring bores within 2 kilometres (!!!), they see “no impact at all on the river”

• Everything is just conceptual, but they know enough to plan out a mining schedule and methodology without presenting it to us.

 

But the grand-daddy fib of them all

 

• They had no idea on how the aerial photograph (the map above), that they are using was manipulated to remove all the vineyards, paddocks, houses, olive groves, infrastructure in the region.  In fact the manipulation is such that you would have as a guess that no-one lives there at all.  Our dam is in (as is lot 21’s above us) – but where is our vineyard, our house?  In fact they have removed 6 vineyards and 2 olive groves.  Imagine giving this to all the residents via their website, of whom you are trying to get their “goodwill”, such a doctored and clearly distorted image? It reeks of ineptitude and incompetence at all levels – and they want to mine around us?

 

So post these discussions with LDO, what has happened?  Well the pressure from the local community and newly formed “No Coal!tion” group has meant that the council has done a u-turn for the good of the community and has come out unanimously against the mining proposal.  The wine association has put out a strongly worded release, rejecting the idea outright with high profile wine makers and owners dousing the idea as idiotic.  Continual pressure at all levels of politics has ensured that even the state Premier Colin Barnett is very circumspect, and you get the feeling if he was given the right reasons from the right people this proposal will be blown out of the water with the Premier being given 3 cheers from all the locals (in our vineyard hopefully!!) as the photo opportunity of the year.  We now await LDO to submit their mining proposal to our Environmental Protection Authority – as soon as they do we can comment and insist on the level of scrutiny expected of such a government department.  In a way the LDO submission will be a circuit breaker and give the government the “project” to stop – we can heartily support the process.

 

I am not anti-mining, I support it and all the good it does for the world.  But if that mining is done without the communities support, without sound environmental management, developed through misinformation and deception, and does not benefit ANYONE except the owners and a few short-term employees then it is a sham and should not proceed.  LDO who represents the “faceless men” are presenting a sham and should be stopped by all means possible.

 

If you would like to learn more about this fight against evil (J) then join the No Coal!tion group which is tirelessly held together by Brent Watson and his family located at the end of Osmington Road – he is very energetic and pro-water and pro-Margaret River (and so am I, but possibly less energetic).  

 

 

Cool end to winter...

 

The last month of winter is always a tricky one to predict weather wise. Sneaky spring weather patterns flow in from the west and this leads to warming trends and little rainfall. So at the start of the month when we had 4 beautiful spring-like days I thought we were in for a shaky start to the season.  But on 12-13 August, 75mm of rain poured down, nearly filling the dam and brought with it quite a cool change for the following fortnight.  No major rain has occurred since, and we have had winds from all directions which indicates that the weather itself is undecided on what it should do.

 

The numbers for the month and last year’s figures are provided below:

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August 2010:     

Avg Maximum Temp          16.7°C

Daily Max recorded            20.8°C

 

Avg Minimum Temp             6.6°C               

Daily Min recorded               1.6°C

 

Rainfall:                               113.0mm

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The maximum temperature range is a little warmer in comparison to last year, but the minimum is quite low, giving the impression that it was a cool month.  Rainfall is ~20mm less this year in comparison to last, and this puts us in a large rainfall deficit for the year to date (Total rainfall in August 2009 was ~800mm, where as in 2010 the total to date is ~550mm), and it is unlikely we will have substantial rains in the months ahead (and nor do we want them, especially during flowering).

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August 2009:      

Avg Maximum Temp          16.2°C

Daily Max recorded            18.7°C

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Avg Minimum Temp             9.0°C

Daily Min recorded               3.1°C

 

Rainfall:                              134.6mm

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Off to France …

 

As discussed at the start of this monthly report I will be in Bordeaux for vintage during September / October and hopefully seeing a great bordelaise vintage unfold before me.  It is exciting as this will provide the platform for eventually building our own winery at the vineyard, and the principals and practices that it will entail.  I still have a few odd jobs to knock off before I go to the international airport – liming and mulching being the major ones, but I have a reasonable window of opportunity to complete them.  I hope to get a monthly report out while in France but I can not guarantee this, so do not get too worried if I go AWOL next month.

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As always if you have any queries about what’s been written or about wine in general, do not hesitate to contact us either by email or www.twitter.com/bluepoles and we’ll do our very best to answer any question.

 

Cheers

 

 

Mark Gifford

Blue Poles Vineyard