Essay by Eric Worrall
In Coober Pedy, white people live in comfortable dugouts, while Aboriginals swelter on the surface. But is this really a climate change racial divide?
In the Australian outback, climate change widens the racial divide
Story by Michael E. Miller
COOBER PEDY, Australia — From her front door, Sonya Crombie can see the sandstone hills where White men carved up the land in search of opal and then stayed, turning their mines into elaborate underground homes insulated from the desert heat.
But when Crombie’s air conditioner broke in November just as the scorching summer was about to set in, the ailing 60-year-old Aboriginal woman had no tunnel in which to take refuge. As the temperature in her state-run house topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Crombie struggled to breathe. Emergency workers flew her 500 miles to a hospital.
“I nearly died,” she said. “This heat can kill you.”
…
Belowground, the town’s mostly White residents live in “dugouts” — bought, sold and expanded in certain neighborhoods — where the temperature stays in the low to mid-70s and electricity bills are modest.
…Aboveground, Aboriginal people, who make up 17 percent of the town, swelter without air conditioning or rack up enormous electricity bills. Crombie owes the district council almost $11,000, largely from using her now-broken air conditioner. Records show that 76 account holders, many Aboriginal and indigent, owe a total of $350,000.
…
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-the-australian-outback-climate-change-widens-the-racial-divide/ar-AA1BdLc9
This has got to be one of the most fake climate stories I’ve ever covered.
I’ve never been to Coober Pedy, but I’ve been to Broken Hill in the summer, which has a similar climate. That place is hot. The satnav holder on my windshield melted in the desert sun.
But in winter temperatures in Coober Pedy are mild, with top temperatures in the high 60s or low 70s.
Why don’t the aboriginals have their fair share of dugouts?
Most of those dugouts started as mine shafts, miners searching for opal. The white people didn’t steal mineshafts from the aboriginals, they dug the mineshafts themselves, or used their own money to buy underground homes from those who built them.
I’m not expecting a 60 year old with ailing health to dig through a multiple tons of solid rock, but their younger and more athletic relatives could easily dig a few dugouts for their parents and grandparents, or dig homes for themselves and let the grandparents stay in the hotter months. Coober Pedy Summer daytime temperatures are insufferable, but as soon as you get a few feet underground temperatures drop dramatically, maintaining a comfortable 23-25C (73F – 77F) all year round.
The fact young people aren’t helping their distressed elders says more about social breakdown in the aboriginal community than climate change.
Let’s hope younger aboriginals take the initiative and start taking care of their old folk. You never know, while digging new homes they might even find a bit of opal.
Click here for an interesting article on the history of Coober Pedy.
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So how did the aborigines manage before the white guys moved there?
My first thought too. Their ancestors came their 40-60,000 years ago.
Oh, I get it climate change! It’s 2° hotter now!
Something doesn’t make sense. Al Gore said that the earth is millions of degrees hot below the surface.
The Sun is millions of degrees deep within it.
They struggled. Without beer and weed, the conditions can be harsh, mate!
They did not live to be 60yo and frail before Europeans settled on the continent. In fact back in 1788 there were very few humans aged 60 and above anywhere.
The median age in the USA in 1820 was 16.7 years. I would expect Australia to be even lower and aborigines were not even considered part of the population..
This story is more about the high cost of electricity in Coober Pedy, which is hybrid wind/solar/diesel. It is where Australia is headed.
The real blame is squarely at the feet of Baron Florey for his work on anti-bacterials. Penicillin and similar treatments has enabled most of us to live to be old and frail.
The low average age in the past is likely linked to childhood deaths, disease etc. Longevity in those who survived childhood was not that uncommon.
(16.7 sounds very low, is that correct or is that marriage age?)
Childhood disease and childhood accidents. If you survived those, then the next hurdle was childbirth for women and accidents for men. If you survived all that, you just might make it to old age.
Median means half of the statistical group are above and half below. Median is not mean or average.
Yes, however, 16.7 still sounds too young.
I was about to ask where you got the information from and then I found it.
You’re correct, I’m wrong.
The legal age for marriage was ten.
They were nomads Bob.
They had the sense to move around according to seasonal conditions.
My thoughts exactly … they periodically visited the area when conditions were favorable (winter) … rather year round.
I saw the first season of ‘Alone; Australia’, set in brutal SW of Tasmania – where the participants and show runners paid tribute to the Tasmanian Indigenous that lived in the area.
There is scant evidence that it was occupied between 25000 BCE and a brief period during the 1800’s (probably as a result of colonization).
.
Yet, Tasmanian Palawa claim it as their own on the basis of ‘continuous’ occupation
They managed-
From the sands of time, the Pintupi Nine were thrust into the glare of the modern world – ABC News
When Anglos rolled up at Sydney Cove in 1788 with steel tomahawks and axes it was like whitefellas viewing the reciprocating piston engine and dreaming of the possibilities and here we all are more or less.
What a shameless white-guilt narrative! Thanks Eric for redirecting the criticism properly.
If white man lives houses it’s privilege and racism,
if white man lives in holes it’s privilege,racism and climate and someone is still being discriminated.
I wonder when the day was that people who have been digging holes in Australia for 50K years
unlearned digging holes?
Was it when the first white men arrived or when the ice age scare switched to global warming in 1983?
They had 40-60,000 years to make dugouts as stone age people did in Cappadocia. No excuses. Seems to me they had not entered the stone age but were pre-stone age … should we call it stick age?
The good old days before SUVs, but we got around okay!
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.fYtmp6r-zpVXP_0lmeliYQAAAA?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain
I think stones came before sticks.
Prior to the white man, how many aircraft were available to fly the “This heat can kill you” sick and injured to a modern hospital where “I nearly died” turned into ‘They saved me from dying’?
No recognition of the benefits from the ‘white man’, only faults for not accepting their chosen way of life with its harsh living conditions.
Australian aboriginals have been ‘sweltering’ for more than 40,000 years ffs
Nah that extra 1.5 degree the white man made on a 40 plus day is killing them 🙂
In fact in Australia the 1.5C warmer is in August on a blistering 20C day.
You have to always distinguish between a temperature reading and a temperature anomaly. Most temperature increase in Australia is in winter. There is little to no increase in summer.
Australia has just survived the hottest summer on record. How many new maximum temperature records were set? – answer nil. Marble Bar did not get within 4C of its record.
Thanks Rick.
This is a point that needs more clarification. If we were given a breakdown of the claimed temperature increase by month and find it is predominantly in the winter or cooler months then it makes absolute nonsense of the annual average bandied down by the alarmists and how much this has increased.
Outstanding. I’ve been saying this for quite sometime. ΔT tells you nothing about the actual absolute temperature it occurred at. All the large ΔT’s could occur at 0°C and you’d never know.
Does a decision to dig an undergound heat refuge dugout in Australia require regulatory review and approval, including a mining permit?
Probably a ‘your’ing permit.
Now there is the funny thing in some areas it requires Aboriginal heritage approval … ironic
Ha ha!
I’m surprised they haven’t kicked up a stink about it upsetting some sort of made up serpent or other apparition. I suppose the specific waterway that it resides in doesn’t pass by that area, although the serpent seems to dwell in almost every other depression in the land, and can only be appeased by huge financial compensation, or something.
Coober Pedy council is at fault for not providing and maintaining adequate housing. All that talk about duty of care in the climate activist law suits a few years ago established this. The council has failed, so no one will be held accountable. Instead, there will be multiple rounds of race baiting and envy based hate sessioning.
As with the Grenfell tower fire in UK, the problem is conceptual. “Free” housing is cheap housing, and more expensive in every sense over the long run. Stockpiling the indigent will always fail, especiall applied as a stopgap.
The cure for low income housing isn’t to supply cheap hovels, it is to raise income. Can’t do that from Marxist theory.
China seems to have figured out out how to raise income well using Marxist theory. Just make cheap good products and sell them to the rich countries. That should do it!
Like Stalin, under Xi China set up a fascist economy based on slave labor. Indigenous Australians would fare even less well under such a system, but their income wouldn’t be an issue.
Lots of people live in caves in China … several million
Traditional houses around Gansu are Mediterranean style built around a courtyard.
The courtyard is dug into the ground and the rooms are dug off that.
I’m betting that indigenous Australians wouldn’t have made good workers.
You misspelled ‘slaves’
story tip: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/if-climate-change-doesn-t-stop-this-will-be-our-world-in-2050/vi-BB1om0P5?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=dce5a9f29a0240059ff084bb4a3b8303&ei=7#details
Funniest thing you are ever likely to see pushed. The iceberg a23a hasn’t melted in 45 years but enough ice is going to melt in 25 to do that.
If you watched the documentary “Water World”, narrated by Kevin Costner, you’d know how true the article in the Misleadia really is.
You’re a bad man for finding fun in a future disaster.
Hmmm… You got a downvote from a sarcastically deficient reader, so I upvoted.
We need to prepare!
We need to build hobbit holes on top of Mount Everest now!
Hot work digging a dugout in any weather. Needs forethought and forbearance if you expect eventually to escape the heat
Yeah, because aboriginal people never had the time or opportunity to dig underground homes for themselves.
Oh, wait….
Ok, lets go back to before the evil white oppressors arrived, shall we?
Crombie didn’t know what an air conditioner was in November just as the scorching summer was about to set in, the ailing 40-year-old* Aboriginal woman had no tunnel in which to take refuge. As the temperature in her sandy hollow topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Crombie struggled to breathe. Nobody flew her 500 miles to a hospital that didn’t exist.
“I died,” she said. “This heat kills you without the modern civilization that we haven’t seen yet.”
You see? Those whitefellas are pure evil.
(*Yeah, not 60. The life expectancy wouldn’t have been that long back then.)
Wait, wait . . .
Didn’t the Aboriginals teach the white invaders how to dig holes?
Aboriginal culture goes back half a million years, according to one “Welcome to country” performer.
White men wouldn’t know anything at all without Aboriginal knowledge.
Or maybe after half a million years, the Aboriginals never worked out how to dig holes, grow crops, use the bow and arrow, or any of that sort of thing.
Who knows?
MF
You seem critical.
Let’s compare
Their economy is very stable, they don’t pay taxes, unless the white people interfere there is always food, they don’t have bankers crashing their economy out of pure greed. Fuel costs are zero, they don’t dig big holes and sell the contents, their intergenerational education remains constant. etc etc
How is it in your desert, sorry suburban environment.
Have a wonderful day
Yup. No housing. No transport. No healthcare. No education. No beer. No weed.
A veritable paradise.
FWIW
Have a read of “Romancing the Primitive: the myth of the ecological aborigine” by William J. Lies
Bloody keyboard – LINES!
Speaking of life expectancy.
New Study Finds The Post-1980s Warming Trend Has Improved European Life Expectancy
The problem is the house.
That’s why they don’t like them.
“The white people didn’t steal mineshafts from the aboriginals,”
No but they did steal the land on which to dig the mineshafts. And they evicted the aboriginals from their land and stole their children along with multiple massacres. Pretending that 200 years of racism and oppression doesn’t have a measurable effect today is just nonsense.
My uncle is aboriginal, worked hard all his life for the CSIRO, currently owns a fortune in property in Brisbane. All his kids are well adjusted professionals.
Somehow this 200 years of oppression didn’t mess him up.
Nomadic people don’t adhere to any concept of “ownership” of the land. They just move on when their situation becomes too uncomfortable to stay. This might be due to pollution, temperature, neighbors, food, or just desire. In most cases, the population density is so low that “ownership” would be impossible to sustain, due to lack of measurable boundaries, measurements, or documentation. No one “stole” the land. It wasn’t owned in the first place. Blaming the people that established an ownership process is simply foolish.
A slight edit to your comment is appropriate Izaak, viz –
” . . . 200 years of racism and oppression
doesn’t have a measurable effect todayis just nonsense.”“Romancing the Primitive” goes into this in depth
Sonya Crombie will be pleased to know it’s not a racist problem-
Heathrow Airport closed all day after fire causes giant power outage
Just ooh and ahh with the fan club Sonya as the cavalry are coming to change the weather-
‘BYD officially releases flash charging battery with ultra-high voltage of 1000V, ultra-large current of 1000A and ultra-large power of 1000kW.’
Electric car can charge up to 250 miles of range in just 5 minutes
I would be extremely wary of a 1000A charging lithium batteries.
The internal heat generated during recharging seems to position such a system for high risk of thermal ignition.
But, but, but… how can this be? Aren’t Aborigines, like all noble savages, completely in harmony with Nature and Mother Earth, able to survive for thousands of years in the wild unlike the White Man who couldn’t survive five minutes without his Planet-destroying apparatus?
Or his “Smart Phone?”
Different mines, different areas, different temperatures at different depths.
Virginia City, NV. “The deposits were large, situated in poor, unconsolidated ground, were exceedingly deep and full of scorching hot water and bad air.”
Tombstone, AZ. Mine tour. “You go to 100 feet below the surface, and the temperature is sixty-five degrees year round.”
Personal: Lighting Ridge, NSW, Christmas day, 1959. Comfortable at a 45 foot depth.
It’s a pretty fair bet that Ms Crombie’s house was provided by either the Federal or State government, at great expense. They could possibly build less appropriate houses, but would have to really work at it.
Prefab houses built on concrete slabs ,with flat roofs and no eaves or verandahs are absolutely ideal in inland Australia. That seems to be Departmental thinking, anyway.