Mt Warning was officially opened as a National Park on 3rd August 1929 by Hon Francis Boyce the NSW Attorney General. He rode to the summit with his wife to attend the festivities. The mountain was dedicated to all Australians forever.
To commemorate that event we held a celebration of the 95th anniversary of the opening of the park on August 3, 2024. Amongst the speakers was Harry Creamer ex NPWS anthropologist. Harry spent the early part of his career interviewing Aboriginal elders about their cultural knowledge in NSW in the 1970s and 1980s. These elders still had ties to deep Aboriginal culture. They never indicated Mt Warning was a place the public couldn't access. He has a vast knowledge of Aboriginal Heritage. His reports have been omitted from heritage studies used to lock the public out of Mt Warning and he has been thus far ignored by the media. His voice deserves to be heard.
Thankyou Harry for your honesty and for sharing your knowledge. I hope NPWS pay attention.
Below is the text of Harry's speech. You can also view the speech on Youtube, please share far and wide.
MT WARNING RALLY SPEECH – HARRY CREAMER - 3 AUGUST 2024
Friends – I acknowledge the traditional owners, the Ngarakwal / Nganduwal clan, and any Aboriginal people at this rally. I recognise local state MP Janelle Saffin and mayor of Tweed Chris Cherry. If councillors Brinsmead and Owen are here I thank them for attending.
When I was working as the first anthropologist with National Parks I had the privilege of recording sites with Auntie Millie Boyd. She knew her traditional culture which included the Tweed Valley, and could sing the Wollumbin song, in language. I spent 39 years with National Parks, 14 as the anthropologist, and I still feel a responsibility and connection to the elders I worked with and their descendants; a commitment to my profession of anthropology; and a continuing connection to National Parks and Heritage NSW.
Three reports came out of my work with Millie, but all have now been omitted from the official record. The reason is that my work with Millie supports what anyone who knows the long history of this issue will admit - the old people never said the track should be closed, it is a recent invention. I’ve never been asked for my advice and never been given access to any reports so I cannot know everything. But for the past year I’ve examined archives, read the literature, gone over research on the Sites Survey in the 1970s and 1980s, applied the best-practice methodology we developed, and spoken with former National Parks staff. From all this, I’ve drawn some conclusions based on the ‘balance of probabilities’.
I’ve documented my findings in a paper totalling 24 000 words. National Parks has it all, marked ‘Confidential’. I’m being careful with this information and want to avoid it getting into the wrong hands. However, I’ve made sure the Minister for the Environment has it because she will be making decisions on the future of the national park and the Summit Track. I am not being paid. I’ve also had a look at the Wollumbin Aboriginal Place Management Plan, available online. The Plan was adopted under the Coalition government - it was not signed off by Labor Minister Sharpe, but she now has responsibility for it. In my opinion, it is a problematic document. Nevertheless I do not think the authors of the Plan, or National Parks or Heritage NSW, acted with anything other than in good faith, believing all they had heard, seen, read, and then wrote, to be true and in the best interests of Aboriginal people. It is simply that they got it wrong in some respects and for that reason the Plan needs urgent review.
There are many criticisms to be made but again I can’t go into detail, just to say that it makes no reference to the provenance of the information it relies on (where it came from and how), it says nothing about contrary claims, fails to acknowledge the true Keeper of the Mountain Millie Boyd or other Aboriginal people, while paying undue attention to just one person, now deceased, a Widjabal man from Lismore; it reads like an ambit claim and despite a far-reaching scope of control, it never went on public exhibition to allow the wider community to have a say on this issue.
National Parks was right to declare an Aboriginal Place above 600 metres but the Management Plan does not confine itself to these gazetted boundaries, instead basing its claims and counting sites in an area of approximately 225km2 which it calls ‘The broader cultural landscape’. The Plan gives the impression that traditional knowledge about Mt Warning is still widely-known and there are lots of sites on it. Actually there is one, maybe two at most, known traditionally-significant sites within the actual Aboriginal Place, plus some interesting stories which can and should be shared.
Yes, Wollumbin is important in Aboriginal culture, but not as important as the Plan makes out. The main importance, as measured by what most Aboriginal people actually know and care, is that it is a central landmark seen from afar. As one Aboriginal person interviewed for the 2001 report puts it, ‘Wollumbin is a spiritual beacon to us’.
In my professional opinion, many of the sites claimed to exist in the Plan are either not in the Aboriginal Place, not sites at all, or have been invented. I am not alone in this. As far back as 2000 when this saga began, another Widjabal man from Lismore warned authorities that claims being made in relation to Mt Warning were ‘a modern day invention’. National Parks and their consultants took no notice so here we are today, with a Management Plan that makes Mt Warning look like some hitherto undiscovered Shangri La of Indigenous spirituality, knowledge and beliefs.
We could ask, does it matter what story is told or who told it? Will any story do as long as it adds to the importance of a site? And does it make any difference to decisions made about how to manage an Aboriginal Place or an entire national park? Well yes, it does matter. National Parks says it is basing the decision to close the Summit Track entirely on the Management Plan and the reports, not on any wish to close it because it was becoming too difficult to manage – one of those legacy tracks put in by old rangers now long gone, or in this case the Murwillumbah community in 1908. If that really is the case, the evidence must be absolutely beyond doubt, which as I see it, it is not.
Exclusion and secrecy are not values we uphold in our society, yet they are the foundations of this plan. I am calling for a review of the Plan to make it clear what is the real known and remembered detail on sites and traditions passed down the generations, and what is invented or imagined. Truth-telling must go both ways.
I’m a whistleblower. Whether it’s war crimes, foreign espionage or bank fraud, the response is always the same. They circle the wagons and give anyone seeking the truth a big run around! That is what’s happened to me and is why I am now speaking out for the first time. As we know, power is rarely shared, it must be taken. It’s time for residents of the Tweed Valley to have a say. I call on Council to hold a referendum at the September elections, asking residents if they want the Summit Track to re-open, on conditions of respect to Aboriginal people and benefitting them with job opportunities and income from booking fees. This happens at many other Aboriginal sites across NSW – why shouldn’t it happen here?
I call on Minister Sharpe to follow her predecessors in the Wran and Carr Labor governments. Neville Wran saved the NSW rainforests, this national park being one of the World Heritage places his government protected for all Australians, for all time. The Minns Labor government is biting the bullet on some pressing issues. This is one of them and the Minister must show she is also a reformer and order a review of the Plan by external experts, with the opportunity for public input.
Having said that, I received an email from the Minister’s office which says, ‘the Minister is continuing to listen to the views of a range of stakeholders to ensure all stakeholders are appropriately consulted’. So I urge you to find time to contact her by Googling, ‘contact nsw minister for the environment’ -
https://www.nsw.gov.au/nsw-government/ministers/minister-environmentheritage
The more submissions she gets from us, the better. I also call on Minister Sharpe to cancel the previous government commitment to hand back title of all national parks and reserves to Aboriginal organisations. While this sounds like a good idea it will cause a heap of distress as arguments rage and conflicts arise, just like this one. I grew up working for National Parks when the government slogan was ‘Parks are for the People’!
Many Aboriginal sites are open to the public and allow visitors to appreciate their beauty and meaning, and they also have some spiritual significance, like Wollumbin. No one wants to take that away. A respectfully-conducted system of guided walks to the summit, avoiding the one or two known sites somewhere up there, and allowing visitors to respect and learn about Aboriginal culture and enjoy what nature has given us will not take that away.
As one resident of the Tweed Valley told me: I support the trail staying accessible, but only in a regulated way so that not too many people go up and do so mindfully, not overcrowding or having people running up and down in lycra and fit-bits pushing everyone else aside.
To which I say hear, hear!
As the Irish playwright and novelist George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything’. Change your mind Minister. Change your mind National Parks. Change your mind the Wollumbin Consultative Group.
Thank you.
Note: this speech was recorded by a member of the Save Our Summits group at the rally. It is on Youtube –
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