Nails in the Coffin

Took the kids protesting today, as part of the “Give a Dam” protest against raising the wall of the Warragamba dam - planned in order to put more money in the pockets of developers who want to build on the Nepean/Hawkesbury flood plain. Which of course comes with no consequences other than inundating 4,700 hectares of native bush land, threatening 48 species, destroying Aboriginal sites including burial sites - and wiping out the creation/Dreamtime areas of the Gundangarra people.

Oh, and UNESCO have come out with strong concerns about the proposal; as the Mountains is a World Heritage site, they’re pretty interested.

But who cares, right? Because developers need money.

This coffin was built to symbolise the Blue Mountains, and there was a bag of forty-eight nails, to represent the forty-eight species of plants and animals threatened. We (well, forty-eight of us; one being the mayor of the Blue Mountains, and one the Labor MP for the Blue Mountains) symbolically put those nails in the coffin. With a bit of encouragement, here's my lad getting up there.

In front of a news camera, mind you, which I didn't notice until I looked at the photo later.

Nailr; Flickr.