The Wallarah 2 record shows something far more consequential than a mining company consulting an Aboriginal organisation.

Wyong Coal publicly promoted Guringai Tribal Link Aboriginal Corporation as representing the “traditional owners” of the Central Coast, funded programs created through that relationship, awarded scholarships under their agreement, assisted the development of a Guringai-branded environmental business, and received in return a public relationship that could be presented as Indigenous engagement around one of the region’s most controversial coal projects.

On 10 August 2015, Wyong Coal proudly announced that it had signed a Mutual Advancement Covenant with Guringai Tribal Link Aboriginal Corporation, or Guringai TLAC.

There was nothing hidden about it.

There was a media release.

There were posed photographs.

There were handshakes.

There was Wallarah 2 branding.

There were promises of employment, scholarships, business assistance and training.

And, most importantly, Wyong Coal publicly described Guringai TLAC as representing “Guringai and the traditional owners of the Central Coast land” (Wyong Coal, 2015).

That claim deserves particular attention today.

The supposed GuriNgai traditional-owner narrative subsequently became deeply contested by Aboriginal people, communities and organisations across the Sydney, Central Coast and Hunter regions. In 2020, seven Local Aboriginal Land Councils jointly advised the NSW Premier that claims extending “Guringai” traditional ownership into Northern Sydney and the Central Coast should be rejected. The letter recorded that the Awabakal and Guringai native title application had been discontinued in 2017 after the State indicated it would contest the claim because of an absence of credible evidence supporting connection to the claimed areas. In 2022, Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council separately stated that it was unable to validate the claimed Guringai as traditional owners of the Central Coast and expressed concerns about the legitimacy of their claimed cultural authority (Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, 2022; Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council et al., 2020). (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

Yet years before those institutional challenges became widely known, Wyong Coal had already placed the claimed GuriNgai identity prominently within its own corporate Aboriginal-engagement narrative.

And the relationship was not superficial.

Wyong Coal did not merely “consult” Guringai TLAC

Mining proponents are required to consult Aboriginal stakeholders in relation to cultural heritage. Participation in archaeological assessment, by itself, says very little about whether an Aboriginal organisation supports a development.

The 2015 arrangement went substantially beyond that.

Wyong Coal stated that it and Guringai TLAC had spent several months developing a three-year Mutual Advancement Covenant. Five funded program areas were established: apprenticeships, Aboriginal business start-up assistance, mentoring, a “Guringai Green Team”, and tertiary scholarships (Wyong Coal, 2015).

The agreement also promised a minimum target of 10 per cent Indigenous employment once Wallarah 2 became operational (Wyong Coal, 2015).

That qualification matters.

Some of the promised benefits were structurally connected to the future operation of the coal mine.

This was not simply cultural heritage consultation about what should happen if excavation encountered an Aboriginal site. It was an institutional relationship designed around educational, commercial and employment opportunities arising alongside the Wallarah 2 project.

Wyong Coal’s Community and Environment Manager, Peter Smith, described the agreement as a positive outcome and said the company had worked with “Tracey and David at Guringai” for months to establish enduring benefits.

Tracey Howie, presented by Wyong Coal as Guringai TLAC’s Chief Executive Officer, was equally enthusiastic. She said the agreement would provide education, training and long-term employment and would increase awareness of Aboriginal culture, identity and heritage throughout the local community (Wyong Coal, 2015).

There was no ambiguity in the corporate presentation.

Wyong Coal was publicly treating Guringai TLAC as an Aboriginal traditional-owner organisation, and Guringai TLAC was publicly entering into a mutually beneficial partnership with the company.

The value flowed in both directions

The expression “Mutual Advancement Covenant” is unusually revealing.

Wyong Coal provided access to programs, funding, scholarships, employment pathways and business development.

What did Wyong Coal receive?

At minimum, it received the capacity to publicly demonstrate that the Wallarah 2 Coal Project was working cooperatively with an organisation it described as representing the traditional owners of the Central Coast.

That had obvious reputational value.

In March 2016, Wallarah 2 explicitly used the Guringai TLAC agreement in its submission concerning the Draft Central Coast Regional Plan under the heading “Strengthen the economic self-determination of Aboriginal communities”. The company highlighted the Mutual Advancement Covenant as evidence of its Aboriginal community engagement and economic contribution (Wallarah 2 Coal Project, 2016). (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)

This is where the relationship becomes particularly important.

Guringai TLAC did not merely receive opportunities from the mining company.

Its asserted Aboriginal identity and asserted status as a traditional-owner organisation became something the mining company itself could deploy.

The relationship could help Wallarah 2 say, in effect: we are not simply proposing a coal mine, we are working with Indigenous people, supporting Aboriginal employment, funding Aboriginal education, assisting Aboriginal businesses and engaging people presented as the traditional owners of the country concerned.

Whether deliberately conceived as such or not, this is precisely how Indigenous endorsement can operate as social licence.

Wyong Coal helped manufacture public legitimacy

Look carefully at the language of the original media release.

Wyong Coal did not cautiously describe Guringai TLAC as one registered Aboriginal party among several.

It described the organisation as representatives of:

“Guringai and the traditional owners of the Central Coast land”

(Wyong Coal, 2015).

The company’s background notes went even further, declaring:

“As traditional owners of the coastal land on the Central Coast”

before describing Guringai TLAC’s cultural heritage, educational and language activities (Wyong Coal, 2015).

Those words did more than describe an organisation.

They conferred legitimacy in the eyes of anyone reading the release.

A mining company was reproducing as fact a proposition about Aboriginal traditional ownership that relevant Aboriginal organisations would later explicitly reject.

That is one of the most important aspects of this history.

The non-Aboriginal GuriNgai phenomenon did not become institutionally credible through self-promotion alone.

Its claimed authority was repeated by councils, consultants, companies and other institutions.

Every repetition strengthened the appearance that the claim must already have been verified somewhere else.

Wyong Coal became part of that process.

The company did not establish traditional ownership. It had no capacity to do so.

Yet its publicity presented the question as already settled.

Then came the scholarships

The Mutual Advancement Covenant did not remain an aspirational press release.

Wallarah 2 subsequently advertised and awarded tertiary scholarships under the Guringai TLAC agreement.

In 2016, Rachel Kulk received a Wallarah 2 scholarship while undertaking a Bachelor of Science.

In 2017, Kyle Howie received a $10,000 scholarship while studying archaeology and Aboriginal studies.

In 2018, Tahlia Robinson received the tertiary scholarship while studying psychology.

Wallarah 2’s own December 2018 newsletter explicitly described Robinson’s scholarship as having been made possible through the Mutual Advancement Covenant between Wyong Coal and Guringai TLAC and photographed her alongside Wyong Coal management and Tracey Howie (Wallarah 2 Coal Project, 2018). (Wallarah 2 Coal Project)

GuriNgai.org has previously examined the relationships between several recipients and Guringai TLAC’s membership and leadership. Those relationships deserve continued scrutiny, particularly in assessing how opportunities publicly promoted as benefiting the wider Aboriginal community were actually distributed (Cooke, 2023). (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

The broader point, however, does not depend upon proving favouritism.

The documentary record establishes something more fundamental.

Wyong Coal money and resources were now flowing through a formal agreement negotiated with an organisation being publicly represented as the Central Coast’s traditional owners.

A coal company helped create a “Guringai Green Team”

Perhaps nothing captures the contradictions of the relationship better than the Guringai Green Team Scheme.

Under the Mutual Advancement Covenant, Wyong Coal agreed to fund training through TAFE or other providers toward establishing a Green Team that would operate commercially in environmental projects and land management (Wyong Coal, 2015).

The symbolism is extraordinary.

A coal project helped establish a GuriNgai-branded environmental and land-management enterprise.

The same asserted identity that gave Guringai TLAC standing within cultural heritage consultation could therefore be developed into commercial environmental work, assisted by resources emerging from an agreement with the coal proponent.

GuriNgai.org’s earlier investigation records that this initiative subsequently contributed to the development of the Guringai Green Group (Cooke, 2023). (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

Today, related GuriNgai enterprises continue to advertise cultural heritage, cultural education and land-care services under assertions of descent and connection to “Wannangini GuriNgai Country”. (Wannangini)

This makes the Wallarah relationship more than an historical curiosity.

It forms part of the institutional and economic history through which the GuriNgai identity was converted into cultural authority, commercial opportunity and organisational permanence.

In 2017, the relationship became even more revealing

The strongest document in this entire history may be the March 2017 letter from Guringai TLAC director David Pross to the NSW Planning Assessment Commission.

Pross stated that Guringai TLAC had been involved with Wyong Coal since 2006 through cultural heritage studies, reporting and archaeological fieldwork.

He then described what the Mutual Advancement Covenant had provided since 2015: Indigenous apprenticeships, university scholarships, mentoring and assistance for Aboriginal businesses.

He emphasised that the agreement was intended to benefit the broader Aboriginal community.

Then came the sentence that strips away any attempt to portray the relationship as merely reluctant engagement with an unwanted development:

“We are well aware that such benefits can only emerge if the project receives development consent to move forward.”

That statement deserves to be read slowly.

The benefits produced by Guringai TLAC’s relationship with Wyong Coal were being placed before the Planning Assessment Commission.

And Guringai TLAC’s director explicitly acknowledged that those benefits depended upon the coal project receiving consent.

Whatever label one chooses to put on that intervention, it was not opposition to Wallarah 2.

It was not neutrality.

It was not simply archaeological consultation.

Guringai TLAC had acquired an institutional interest in benefits connected with the project’s continuation.

This is where the “protecting Country” mythology collapses

Real Aboriginal communities have the right to make difficult decisions about employment, development, heritage, land and economic survival.

That is not the issue here.

The issue is that Guringai TLAC was simultaneously asserting a far more consequential proposition: that it possessed Aboriginal cultural authority as the traditional-owner body for the Central Coast.

That claimed authority created value.

It created access to cultural heritage processes.

It created institutional recognition.

It created opportunities to provide Aboriginal cultural services.

And in the Wallarah 2 relationship, it created a platform from which an organisation claiming traditional ownership could negotiate with a mining company for apprenticeships, scholarships, business assistance, environmental contracting opportunities and employment targets.

Wyong Coal, in turn, amplified the traditional-owner claim.

This was a mutually reinforcing arrangement.

Guringai TLAC supplied Indigenous legitimacy to Wyong Coal’s community narrative.

Wyong Coal supplied institutional legitimacy, resources and public visibility to Guringai TLAC.

That is what makes the phrase Mutual Advancement Covenant so unintentionally appropriate.

Both parties advanced.

But the claimed cultural authority was never something Wyong Coal could validate

The deeper problem emerged later.

The Awabakal and Guringai native title application was discontinued in June 2017. Federal Court material subsequently recorded that discontinuance, and later proceedings confirmed that the earlier claim no longer existed (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AIATSIS], 2022). (AIATSIS)

More significantly, Aboriginal organisations themselves challenged the territorial claims.

The joint 2020 letter from seven Local Aboriginal Land Councils told the NSW Premier that the discontinued Awabakal and Guringai claim had occurred after the State determined that it would contest the matter because of an absence of credible evidence supporting connection to the claimed areas (Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council et al., 2020). (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

Darkinjung’s 2022 assessment was equally clear. It said it could not validate the claimed Guringai as traditional owners of the Central Coast and expressed concerns regarding the legitimacy of the group’s claimed cultural authority and knowledge (Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, 2022). (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

None of this means Wyong Coal necessarily knew in 2015 that the traditional-owner narrative it was reproducing would later face such serious Aboriginal institutional challenge.

But it demonstrates the danger of corporations treating contested Aboriginal identity claims as settled facts.

Wyong Coal did exactly that.

The photographs now mean something very different

In 2015, the photographs were supposed to communicate partnership.

Sang Seob Park shaking hands with Tracey Howie.

Park seated beside Howie.

David Pross standing behind them.

Everyone framed by Wallarah 2 Coal Project branding.

The images were intended to tell a simple story: a coal company and the “traditional owners” working together for Aboriginal advancement.

Eleven years later, they tell a much more complicated story.

They document the moment when a major commercial proponent publicly helped validate a contested GuriNgai traditional-owner narrative.

They document an organisation claiming cultural authority converting that status into material and institutional opportunities.

They document a mining company presenting that relationship as evidence of Indigenous benefit.

And they document how quickly an invented or inadequately scrutinised cultural authority can become normalised once sufficiently powerful institutions begin repeating it.

This was not simply a coal deal

The lasting significance of the Wyong Coal relationship is therefore not the dollar value of a scholarship.

It is not a traineeship.

It is not a Green Team.

It is not even the 10 per cent employment target.

The greater benefit was legitimacy.

A corporate media release described Guringai TLAC as representing the traditional owners of the Central Coast.

A mining company’s newsletters repeated the relationship.

Scholarship announcements repeatedly attached the Guringai name to Indigenous opportunity.

Corporate photographs placed Guringai TLAC leadership alongside senior Wallarah 2 management.

A major-project submission presented the agreement as evidence of Aboriginal economic self-determination.

Then a Guringai TLAC director wrote to the Planning Assessment Commission emphasising benefits that depended upon development consent.

A contested identity had entered the machinery of government, cultural heritage, corporate social responsibility, education, employment and environmental services.

Once that happens, institutional repetition starts doing the work that historical evidence should have done.

The organisation appears legitimate because the coal company recognises it.

The coal company assumes it is legitimate because consultants and agencies engage with it.

Other institutions see those relationships and assume somebody else must already have checked.

And eventually the accumulated paperwork itself begins to masquerade as proof.

That is how institutional laundering of cultural authority works.

Wyong Coal did not establish who the traditional owners were

It merely behaved as though the question had already been answered.

That distinction should now be impossible to ignore.

The 2015 media release should therefore be preserved as more than an embarrassing historical document.

It is evidence of how the non-Aboriginal GuriNgai project acquired credibility.

It shows how asserted Aboriginal identity could be translated into corporate partnership.

It shows how corporate partnership could then generate resources, visibility, networks and further institutional recognition.

And it shows how a mining company seeking approval for a controversial coal project could simultaneously benefit from presenting a purported traditional-owner organisation as its Indigenous partner.

The resulting relationship was genuinely mutual.

Wyong Coal gained an Aboriginal-facing social licence narrative.

Guringai TLAC gained money-linked programs, business development, scholarships, employment pathways, corporate recognition and another powerful institution publicly repeating its claimed traditional-owner status.

The scandal is not simply that the non-Aboriginal GuriNgai dealt with a coal company.

The scandal is that an inadequately scrutinised claim to Aboriginal cultural authority became valuable enough to trade upon, and institutions such as Wyong Coal helped make that authority appear real.

The Wallarah 2 photographs should therefore be remembered for exactly what they document, a handshake in 2015 between a coal company and a modern corporation whose claim to speak as the traditional owners of the Central Coast would later be explicitly challenged by the Aboriginal institutions whose Country and authority those claims affected.

That is the history the publicity photographs did not tell.

References

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. (2022). Birban Local Aboriginal Land Council v Attorney-General of New South Wales [2022] FCA 144. (AIATSIS)

Cooke, J. D. (2023, August 31). “Greedy White Man’s Ways”: GuriNgai TLAC & the coal companies. GuriNgai.org. (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council. (2022, May 3). Submission regarding the Central Coast First Nations Accord. (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, Awabakal Local Aboriginal Land Council, Bahtabah Local Aboriginal Land Council, Biraban Local Aboriginal Land Council, Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, Mindaribba Local Aboriginal Land Council, & Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council. (2020, June 3). Joint correspondence concerning claims of Awabakal and Guringai traditional ownership. (A Long Con, Gone on Too Long.)

Wallarah 2 Coal Project. (2016, March 24). Submission on the Draft Central Coast Regional Plan. (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)

Wallarah 2 Coal Project. (2018, December). Wallarah 2 Coal Project newsletter, No. 33. (Wallarah 2 Coal Project)

Wyong Coal. (2015, August 10). Wyong Coal sign mutual agreement with Guringai Tribal Link Aboriginal Corporation.