A cancer-stricken farmer has been fined $2,000 after being found guilty of breaching Western Australia’s Aboriginal Heritage Act by building an access bridge on his own property.
Tony Maddox, 72, concreted a crossing over Boyagerring Brook, a tributary of the Avon River which runs through his farm in Toodyay near Perth in 2020, only to be charged by the state’s Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage three years later for altering a “culturally sensitive site”.
The prosecution claimed in his February 2024 trial that Maddox’s construction work on the bridge and a small adjoining artificial lake had disrupted the mythical rainbow serpent, a mythological being the Noongar people claim is associated with the waterways in the region.
Maddox, who pleaded not guilty saying he had never heard of the Act and had not damaged the site, was then forced to wait a year for the decision handed down in the Perth Magistrate’s Court on Monday, ABC News reported.
Magistrate Andrew Matthews ruled that while the bridge work did not cause significant damage, the site had been altered, and rejected Maddox’s defence that he didn’t know he needed ministerial approval.
He gave Maddox a spent conviction, a fine of $2,000, and ordered him to pay $5,000 in costs, a decision which the local real estate agent described as “unbelievable” outside court.
Maddox revealed in December that he was suffering from blood cancer and having chemotherapy every three weeks, and two months before that slammed the courts for repeatedly adjourning the case.
“This is the 7th adjournment since February this year. Absolutely unbelievable. If this is not complete incompetence then what is. There can only be two choices either guilty or not guilty. It cannot be that hard,” he wrote on social media in October.
“I have asked official permission to dig some more silt out of my silt trap back in May this year and am still waiting for a response, so imagine if we had to ask if we could cross the creek to harvest our crop. It would be next winter before we get an answer!
“They definitely need to alter this legislation to allow us all to farm without impediment from an overzealous department.”
Maddox bought the land in 2013 and told the court he checked all conditions on the property. Then after building a home on the site in 2019 he used a concreter to seal the crossing a year later when it was damaged by flooding, removing a build-up of debris at the same time.
Prosecutor Lorraine Allen said on Monday she hoped the decision would “deter people from destroying or altering aboriginal heritage”.
During the trial indigenous man Rod Garlett testified that the waterway was linked to the rainbow serpent, which was the “creator” of his tribe.
“Today our people are snake people for the river land for my mother’s people,” he said.
Garlett also claimed that according to aboriginal people the Avon River’s tributaries were like blood vessels in the human body, saying ” if your vein is blocked you become sick, your body doesn’t work” and testifying that all sites were connected and had been for 65,000 years.
“It’s about life, it’s about mother earth. It’s about a living, breathing entity that we live on today,” he told the court.
The case was seen as a test of Western Australia’s cultural heritage laws and whether any change to a supposed aboriginal spiritual site constitutes damage under the Act.
In January last year the Federal Court ruled against an indigenous man who tried to stop gas giant Santos from building a pipeline near the Tiwi Islands off the Northern Territory because it would anger two “ancestral beings” – a rainbow serpent and a crocodile man.
Header image credit: Tony Maddox (Facebook).
