OPINION: The Yindjibarndi, in and around Roebourne in WA, are building businesses and revitalising their community.
has shown mixed results for traditional owners whose land has yielded trillions of dollars of wealth.
Warrie has spent most of his career with Aboriginal-owned businesses that contract to the mining industry.For the past nine years he’s worked with the Yindjibarndi-owned contracting business called Yurra, which means sun, and his work history reveals just what’s required to run mines in this country.
Like Warrie, Yurra has moved up the value chain, starting with as a landscaping and cleaning business before expanding into construction and securing major corporate and government work. Warrie says that although the company “is pretty big now, all the bosses know me really well from where I started”.The Yindjibarndi were able to start Yurra with the modest amount of money obtained from the Rio Rail tariff, which generated about $4 million to $5 million in revenue a year.
Mining companies have become some of the biggest employers of Aboriginal people in Australia, but many of them fly in from capital cities. Jobs are great, but what Pilbara communities want, and are entitled to, is long-term economic and cultural self-determination, which is what the Yindjibarndi model appears to be delivering.Bridget Taylor, an Oxford University masters student researching in the Pilbara, says there’s surprisingly little research about Aboriginal impacts from mining.
Various cultural projects are being funded under the Rio Tinto agreement, including the development of an App that will allow Yindjibarndi culture to be accessed via a smartphone, which could be used for cultural training of staff who interact with the community. It now operates as a business centre called the Ganalili, which means morning light. Roebourne no longer has a pub, and crime rates have more than halved in the past six years, down from 700 offences a year to 275 last financial year, according to WA police data.Advertisement
Melanie Jones, manager of the NWAHF wrote on LinkedIn recently that the project with the Yindjibarndi community was one of her proudest achievements.“Of all of the outcomes that the North-West Aboriginal Housing Fund has achieved, this is the one I am most proud of and that I think could have the broadest ripple effect.
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