Heath Joske stood up in a conference room in Stavanger, Norway, with a piece of paper shaking in his hand.
Beside him on stage, the corporate directors of Equinor, a multinational oil company, and in the crowd, shareholders waiting their turn to ask about dividends.
“I’ve come from the opposite side of the globe,” he told them, “To represent my son, my wife, my family, surfers and fishermen and communities all over Australia.”
Then he told the suits what the Great Australian Bight means to him. How it’s his place of work, where he goes to play, and where he takes his family. “It’s everything,” he said. “We see your plans to drill in the Bight as a direct threat to our culture and identity.”
He finished by reading out somebody else’s letter. An indigenous bloke from Cactus, whose grandfather’s ashes had gone into the water the year before, thrown off the cliffs with a bit of wattle on a freezing morning.
“His name was Whale, because he never got out of the water. I didn’t know his real name till I was about 10 years old. I don’t want my grandpa covered in oil.” Then Heath sat down, and for a moment nobody said anything.
I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about the ocean and I still get a lump in my throat thinking about that speech.
A year earlier I’d had no reason to be in that room. It was 2019, I was living in Sweden, working for a cleantech investment fund by day and moonlighting as a surf journalist for Nordic Surfers magazine. Back home, Belinda Baggs, Heath, Sean Doherty and a growing crew of surfers were raising hell about a Norwegian oil company that wanted to drill in the Great Australian Bight. Through the magazine I’d fallen in with the crew at Patagonia Europe, who were trying to mobilise Nordic surfers around the same fight, since it was their national oil company doing the drilling. Somehow, I became the Aussie on the ground.
That’s how Heath and I ended up touring Norway together, running paddle outs in fjords, sitting down with local surf communities, and finishing up at a shareholders’ meeting about as far from the Bight as you can physically get.
Eventually, it worked too.
BP walked away from the Bight in 2016, Chevron followed in 2017, and Equinor pulled out in 2020, not long after that AGM. Three retreats from Big Oil, and Belinda and Johnny Abegg started Surfers for Climate off the back of this fight and everything it taught us about what surfers can do when they show up en masse.
But here’s the dodgy bit.
Even though the companies walked away, and the drilling permits were cancelled, the zoning remained the same. The permission for another company to come in and apply to drill the same patch of ocean has been sitting there ever since, waiting for whoever fancies their chances.
Wins like Fight for the Bight don’t come around often. They take years of effort by lots of organisations, trips to international shareholder meetings, heaps of paddle outs, and even then (if you’re lucky) all you get is a reprieve, not the ocean protected long term. Until now.
This month, there’s a once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s marine parks happening, and the Great Australian Bight Marine Park is one of the areas being looked at. Even better, this process is open for public submissions, closing 30 September, which means everything we send them goes to the minister.
What most people don’t know about the Bight Marine Park is that at the Head of the Bight, where southern right whales come to calve every winter, mining is already banned outright. The problem is everyone assumes that protects the entire park, but it doesn’t. Keep heading out and the zoning changes, and the mining ban stops. Four old oil exploration permits used to sit directly over the park, with more than 5,000 square kilometres of ocean where mining’s technically still allowed. So while the companies have walked, the zoning hasn’t budged.
For once, the ask is simple: extend the existing mining ban from the whale nursery through the rest of the park. It’s one change inside a review that’s already happening and it’d shut the door on Big Oil. And this won’t impact local fishos, commercial or recreational, who fought alongside us against Equinor in the first place. The only thing it stops is drilling.
We’re not the only ones in this. Surfers for Climate is part of the Great Australian Bight Alliance, and there’s a cross-party trio of senators, Andrew McLachlan, Karen Grogan and Sarah Hanson-Young, backing stronger protection from Canberra. McLachlan’s actually gone further, calling for the whole 800,000 square kilometre basin to come under mining exclusion.
We’re used to environmental wins taking years, if not decades. We still want World Heritage for the Bight, but this review will protect it while we wait, so we made a film about it. The Great(er) Australian Bight Marine Park, narrated by Simon Baker, and featuring Craig Anderson, Belinda Baggs and Dave Winchester, shows why this place is worth saving: 300 kilometres of unbroken cliffs, 85% of marine life found nowhere else, and a few waves too. It premiered in Canberra on 9 September, in front of the senators and MPs we needed to support this, and you can check it out now.
Watch the film (there’s heaps of sick waves) and then follow the link to the submission form. Submissions close on 30 September, and we’ll deliver every one to the department. It takes less than a minute, so jump on it, because quick action like this is rare.
