Miners right, an editorial

Miners Right an editorial

Obligations of Fossickers

Respect graziers right to conduct their business on their lease.
Do not litter
Do not light fires
Fill all your holes.

Access to land is the biggest problem facing individuals engaged in fossicking. Fulfilling our obligations will make it easier to gain entry to fossicking areas. It is just common sense to act with courtesy.

Due to increased population in North Queensland it is only logical that there will be increased pressures on the environment and regulations will only increase. Unfortunately the good ol' days of being able to go anywhere unhindered are well and truly over. Conflict and confrontation with grazing lease holders is not an uncommon experience for many fossickers. Partly we are ourselves to blame but mostly it is our legislators that have failed us. If you do not make allowances for fossickers in the rules, you will get trouble.

Good news at last, March 2010. The road to Maytown is open now! It seems that past difficulties with the grazier have been overcame. It is totally legal to visit Maytown without being harassed. Cooktown Shire Council have opened the White's Creek track from the bitumen all the way to Maytown and on to Palmerville and Chillagoe. This will be of great benefit to all and a boost to local tourism.

Palmer River - Access to Maytown

The problem of access to the Maytown area has been an ongoing drama now for too many years to remain unresolved.

I believe that the Cook Shire Council has examined and resurveyed the road for the purpose of re-gazetting. Submissions have been made to the Queensland Government but it does come down to compensation and legal costs. Resumptions of land can be costly.

Expect a long protracted wrangle between the parties involved. In the meantime, us the public, are being denied natural justice. Express your disgust, lobby a politician today.

Miners Right the situation in Queensland

Whether you use a metal detector to look for gold or a gemstone and mineral fossicker, it is getting harder and harder to gain access to land to engage in this activity. Fossicking is a healthy and popular Australian pastime that has been strangled almost into oblivion by successive governments and bureaucrats. This story is repeated in all states of Australia.

First a historical perspective ..

Eureka (a shame that the symbol of the Eureka flag has been hijacked by left wing political groups)

The Eureka Stockade gave us rights and privileges bestowed by Queen Victoria back in 1853. The most important item that resulted from that rebellion was the Miners Right. The premise was and still is that the crown (Commonwealth) owns all mineral rights and has the right to dispense leases and Miners Rights on all crown land occupied or unoccupied. This legal document gave us the right to access land (like old gold fields) to engage in prospecting or fossicking for minerals and gemstones.

The Miners Right was taken away from us in 1989 with the introduction of the Mineral Resources Bill. The Miners Right was a very powerful and useful document that helped regulate mining and prospecting in an orderly manner for more than 150 years. It is a belief in some quarters that the removal of the Miners Right was done illegally. But with fashionable rewriting of history in recent years it seems almost impossible to reverse this unjust removal. Back then the government had this cute little discussion paper called the "Green Paper" that had invited input from concerned parties. The poor old prospector and fossicker was unfortunately drowned out by the big end of town. Utterly shafted. Suddenly with the Miners Right gone we had no rights of access. We were blocked by vindictive lease holders that tried to criminalise our attempts at doing what we had been doing legally for over 150 years.

The Qld Govt stuffed up big time!

The Miners Right was replaced with the Prospecting Permit that has greatly diminished rights. Access to land previously enjoyed for generations was removed overnight.

Just to think that over a hundred years ago, in Nth Queensland, prospectors like James Venture Mulligan, Christy Palmerston and others were legends in their own time. They helped to make the north what it is today. Most northern towns like Cairns and Port Douglas owe their existence to mining and exploration.

Here is what Professor Manning Clark wrote in his book "A short history of Australia" on the subject of gold and the diggers of 1853,

... They were beginning to talk of the three great grievances of the diggers: the licence grievance, the land grievance, and the political grievance. They complained that it was beyond their capacity to pay the licence fee, and that the police were unduly severe and tyrannical when searching for unlicenced persons. Diggers without licences were treated like felons, marched along the highway in charge of the mounted police, exposed to the gaze of the populance, and if unable to pay the fee, put into a cell with thieves, horse stealers, lags and murderers amidst filth and vermin.

Do you see some similarities? It seems that not much has changed.

The new mining act encourages illegal activity because most access to fossicking areas has been taken away and the usual refusal of grazing lease holders to grant permission. Where are we supposed to go?
The creation of additional national parks and heritage areas locking up more land creates more pressure. More pressure that is clearly increasing tension and ill feeling.

All types of excuses are used to deny access. We have been immobilised by saying that a few wrong doers spoil it for the majority. What a lot of nonsense. Laws and regulations have always been in place to deal with this. Our justice system is based on the notion that we are all innocent till proven guilty. All sections of the community have a small percentage of law breakers. Let the law deal with it. Don't just ban everything because it is the easiest thing to do. We all use the land for various recreational purposes and we don't want to be divided against each other. We demand a fair go.

Most topographical maps still show mineral fields or goldfields. If they do exist, they must be made accessible to the public. These lands cannot be equated or compared with your average suburban block but are mostly crown land and rented out as a long term grazing lease. So long as we do not interfere with the pastoralists grazing business, we should have access to this land via a Miners Right.

The Queensland State Government is at it again and wishes to reclassify State Forests as "Protected Areas" and so excluding fossickers from these areas. We are talking about 460,000 hectares of land that will be lost. At present fossicking is allowed with a regulatory fossicking licence. Thousands of fossickers from this state and other states of Queensland as well as from overseas will be affected.

Every state in Australia has its own legislation and laws covering mining prospecting and fossicking. Outdoor recreational activities are many and varied, from 4WD, camping, fishing, horse riding, bush walking, gemstone and gold fossickers and others. The authorities are not looking after us because we are fragmented and don't speak with a common voice. This has to change.

Queensland must have the most restrictive mining/fossicking regulations of any state in Australia. It is bordering on criminal that such unjust regulations exist. What were the politicians thinking?

The many problems encountered by small miners an

The way forward is to have an even handed approach that does not favour certain sections of the community.

Miners help to dig nation out of debt

Miners are digging Australia out of its trade deficit woes. A surge of the nations value of exports of coal iron and minerals is helping reduce the trade deficit.

Here we go again

The Queensland State Government has introduced the "Wild Rivers Bill". This landmark legislation was introduced into State Parliament by the Natural Resources Minister Stephen Robertson.

The "Wild Rivers Bill 2005 is the first legislation of its type and the most comprehensive at preserving wild rivers in Australia.

This bill has the potential of stopping all recreational activities on rivers in any part of Queensland.

Mayors "wild" about river Bill (Cairns Post September 19, 2005)

Problems with accessing a historic track to Maytown and concerns over proposed laws to have so-called "wild rivers" declared for conservation have prompted the Mareeba and Cook shire councils to lobby the State Government.
Mareeba Mayor Mick Borzi and Cooktown mayor Bob Sullivan have requested they and Local Government Association of Queensland president Paul Bell meet Premier Peter Beattie to "strongly object" to the Bill. Mareeba councillors have agreed to support their Cook colleagues in objecting to the Wild River Bill as it would "hinder recreation and necessary economic development activities" in both shires.
The two mayors are also preparing a submission on the denial of access to parts of the Chillagoe-Maytown track.

Hodgkinson Goldfields - Metal Detecting - Camping

Only with permission from from the Grazier. A fee may be applicable. Two weeks advance notice required. Fossicking licence is required. PHONE 07 4093 5957 for permission.

Klaus Colani invented and patented the first PI detector on the 12th November 1961 ?

THE CAPE YORK LOCK OUT

BY RICK HUCKSTEPP

For the last two decades I have made fishing and boating my livelihood, writing and photographing for a variety of magazines and publications around the country and overseas. Encroaching over regulation by state and federal governments in the form of marine parks had me worried about the future of my career and as most of these marine parks are political 'thank you's to the green movements in return for their preferential votes to get bums in seats after a marginal win at an election, I decided I had to fight politics with politics. I joined the Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party (AFLP) and am a past secretary of that burgeoning organisation.

I was recently asked to address a protest meeting at Crosswell Hall in Cairns in relation to the fraudulent declaration of the Coral Sea Heritage Marine Park and you may read my address on my website www.huckfish.com.au I spoke next to Senator Ron Boswell a staunch campaigner for the recreational industry, Warren Entsch a retired federal Liberal MP, Don Jones of Marine Queensland, Rob Erskine a local tackle shop manager, Mike Mansfield, AFLP senate candidate in the next federal election (which is just around the corner and most likely around March) and fishing magazine stalwart, John Mondora.

During the lead up to this meeting which was attended by over 500 people, Wayne Bayne, secretary of the AFLP stumbled on some scary and well hidden information and subsequent enquiries reveal that the date for the handing up of submissions in relation to a 'blanket world heritage listing' of Cape York was closed at the end of November! Wow, another one that both governments have slipped under our noses! Google 'Cape York World Heritage Listing and you will see some of the debacle unfolding.

Also check this link for more news on this fraudulent theft of our freedom to the wild.

http://agmates.ning.com/forum/topics/cape-york-world-heritage

So what does this mean? Well to a fisherman it will mean a total lock out of coastal waters out to three nautical miles offshore. The eastern side of the Queensland coast is already stitched up with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park which comes up for review in 2011 and believe me when I say 'brace yourself!' We are going to get shafted yet again when that review is put on the table (no science involved of course but the state and federal governments will plead different). The western side will be locked up to complete the heist. For traditional aboriginal owners it will mean life and those of future generations, spent on benefits as they will no longer have the potential to expand their horizons into tourism or sign off on any mining as they have done in the past. The grey nomad who has dreamt all through their working life of taking their new in retirement 4WD north to the Tip of the Cape will be faced with a 'Go Back Wrong Way' sign at the southern border of the Heritage Area. They won't miss it and will not need their specs to read it either. The signs will be the biggest visual polluters on the Cape.

To the fossicker and hobbyist gold prospector it will mean the blanket lock out of some of the world's most productive gold fields in the Palmer River region. While the southern border of the proposed Heritage Area seems to be around Lake Land, north of the Palmer River, history will tell you that borders are most effective when they are put on some visual geographical occurrence such as a river. Look at the River Murray flowing between New South Wales and Victoria. The green groups and the governments who are in bed with them will see this as an excellent opportunity to bring the border south to lock us out of more land.

At the Crosswell Hall meeting Warren Entsch spoke at length regarding this. He is well versed in the situation and is a retired grazier from that part of Queensland and I give him the credit for bringing this serious issue to our attention.

So, you won't wet a line, make your own tracks or dig for that little speck of yellow stuff.

And don't think you will get a permit easily just to drive through. You see that is why it is called an 'area', not a 'park'. Parks are where you are allowed to be!

If you do nothing else at the next federal election, remember this letter and these issues and vote for what is left of your recreational freedom and that of those that will follow you.

And tell your local politician his or her job might well be left hanging in the political balance at the next election, should they not support what is left of our right of access to 'The Lucky Country.'

If it cannot be grown, it must be mined ......