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Something strange is going on near Toodyay, about an hour north-east of Perth.

Among the properties that dot this Wheatbelt landscape, along with Avon River and its tributaries that flow towards the Indian Ocean, we find that a serpent has the ear of the Government of Western Australia, and is quietly telling it how to define good and evil.

Yes, this is a metaphor. There is no actual, physical serpent present (in this case). But the Rainbow Serpent, one of the more widely known features of various indigenous mythologies, has now been used twice in the past month as the central reason for a farmer and a local council both to be found guilty of breaking the law.

The farmer, Tony Maddox, was charged after constructing a bridge to replace a pre-existing crossing over a creek on his property. The magistrate in that case ruled that while no significant damage had been caused to the site, it had been altered, and Maddox was fined $2,000 along with having to pay a further $5,000 in court costs.

The local council, the Shire of Toodyay, was charged after employing contractors to urgently repair waterway crossings without approval. Like with Maddox, it was ruled that the contractors, on behalf of the Shire, had not damaged the sites but had altered them, which the magistrate said was “not trivial”.

But one would expect that doing minor work to pre-existing waterway crossings, as both these cases are, would only matter if the site had received material damage in some way, which neither of these cases did. So, what’s going on?

Sheer Insanity

You may be aware that in 2023, a controversial piece of legislation called the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act was passed through the Parliament of Western Australia. But, if you are aware of it, you may also know that it was repealed less than six months after being passed, because it was so controversial.

However, that legislation was actually an amendment to the pre-existing Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972, which was felt to be deficient after Rio Tinto was adjudged to have acted within the law after blowing up a cave in Juukan Gorge in 2020. The 2023 legislation was meant to shore up protections for ‘culturally significant’ sites across the state, but ended up causing confusion due to the amount of power it may or may not have given (due to the wording of the legislation being unclear) to ‘relevant bodies’ to block actions of landowners and local governments.

Despite assurances at the time from Premier Roger Cook that farmers would be “the least affected by these laws”, the original legislation from 1972 was already seeing an uptick in prosecutions for farmers, and farming communities were naturally the most concerned that the updated legislation would come down on them even harder, despite the incident that caused it having nothing to do with farming.

The general confusion over the new legislation was what led to it being repealed not long afterwards, and yet the prosecutions have continued.

Why? Because of the increasing acceptance of the Rainbow Serpent and other such pagan mythologies as not being mere stories, but actual, material facts that need to be worked with in order to comply with legislation.

The point of the Aboriginal Heritage Act was to preserve sites of cultural significance to indigenous cultures in Western Australia. But in the 1970s, this was taken from a modernist perspective of reality. It was about preserving cultural artefacts for all Western Australians to appreciate, like rock paintings or places of special natural beauty, with a particular story attached to that specific location. As time has worn on, and the modernists have been replaced by the post-modernists – for whom historical fact and fantastical fiction are much more malleable – the definition of ‘cultural heritage’ has continually expanded.

Myth

Against Maddox, the prosecution called Rod Garlett of the Ballardong tribe to give evidence. The ABC quotes this evidence as follows:

“If your vein is blocked, you become sick, your body doesn’t work,” he said. “That slow water that comes from tributaries are places where mothers would give birth to children … they are places for ceremony.”

He said the waterway was linked to the Wagyl, highly significant in his cultural beliefs.

“He was our creator… today our people are snake people for the river land for my mother’s people,” Mr Garlett said. He said it was difficult to separate the different categories of sites, such as ceremonial and spiritual, as they are delineated by the existing Aboriginal Heritage Act.

“They are all connected, and they have been for 65,000 years,” he said. “It’s about life, it’s about mother earth. It’s about a living, breathing entity that we live on today.”

The ‘evidence’ against Maddox was that of a pagan myth, and through this interpretation, the entire Avon River and every small creek and brook that flows into it is now, in essence, untouchable.

The case against the Shire of Toodyay shows this even more clearly. Again from the ABC:

Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage prosecutor Lorraine Allen said the works in the Avon River catchment disrupted the Waugul, a rainbow serpent central to Noongar Dreamtime, and therefore needed consent from the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and the Registrar of Aboriginal Sites, which the Shire of Toodyay failed to do.

The prosecution’s statement of facts said any alteration to the Waugul’s home could scare it from the water, causing it to dry up and causing harm to the surrounding environment and people.

Notice how the Rainbow Serpent’s presence is presented as a fact. The alterations made to the waterways through repairing pre-existing structures might “scare it from the water,” and on this basis, the Shire of Toodyay had broken the law. Never mind that the alterations to the site clearly had no impact on the flow of the river, or that the Rainbow Serpent is not actually the creator God or, indeed, even real.

Maddox and the Shire of Toodyay aren’t being punished by the government for harming the environment, but for messing with supposed spiritual forces. And so Western Australians, thanks to the zealousness of certain parts of their government, now live under a kind of pagan law. The ancient lie of polytheism is alive and well under the guise of ‘preserving culture’, even though census data from 2016 shows that less than 2% of ATSI people reported following traditional polytheist belief.

The truth, believed by many ATSI people and other Australians too, is that God of the Bible is the creator of the universe, and He does not live in the Avon River (or any other body of water), nor can he be scared from his dwelling place by anything. He created humans to have dominion over the world, to steward it, protect it, and use it for good.

Maddox and the Shire were both exercising their rightful dominion in a positive way (Maddox even argued that his works had improved the brook’s flow and created a home for 120 ducks). Creation was not harmed by their actions. Contrast this with the Juukan Gorge site, which had actual archaeological significance regardless of any supposed spiritual significance, and yet the same law found its destruction was legal!

So now a pagan superstition is trying to prevent good stewardship from taking place along the Avon, and the WA Government is acting as a kind of priestly class for a false god, asserting that people must ask them for permission to take actions, for otherwise the god will be upset.

Western Australians pushed back strongly enough against the law change that tried to establish this in 2023 – now it’s up to them to do it again, and force the WA Government to change the law once more, this time in favour of truth.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.