Rum Jungle, Northern Territory



Rum Jungle or Unrungkoolpum is a locality in the Northern Territory of Australia located about 105 kilometres south of Darwin on the East Branch of the Finniss River and it shares a boundary with Litchfield National Park. It is 10 kilometres west of Batchelor.

The joint Traditional Owners of this area and the Kungarakan and Warai peoples and their rights to this land are recognised in the Finnis River Land Claim which was granted in May 1981.

The European name for this area derives its name from an incident in March 1873 when the teamsters of John Lewiss who were carting stores between Southport and Pine Creek, tapped a cask of rum and shared it with local miners from the nearby John Bull goldmine. After they drank together they woke up to find that one of the teamsters had stolen 750 ounces of gold from the miners, along with their horses, and had disappeared. Searches for the thief lasted for a number of months until the teamster and the gold were found. The name was first used when reporting the death of Patrick Flynn in November 1873.

One notable early resident who arrived in the area in 1909 was Nellie Flynn and her family; Flynn lived there until the 1970s and was a well-known identity in the area.

It is best known as the site of a uranium deposit, found in 1949, which has been mined.

History
The first European person to travel to the Rum Jungle area was George Goyder in 1869; on this trip he noted an unidentified copper-like green ore in 1869 at "Giants Reef", which was later "rediscovered" and identified to be torbernite. This discovery received minimal attention at the time and other Europeans and Chinese people began occupying the area, especially after the discovery of gold in the 1870s; prospectors also occasionally mined copper and other minerals on a small scale.

These new arrivals exposed the local Aboriginal people (the Kungarakan and Warai) to a variety of illnesses and disease including smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis. Aboriginal people were also subjected to trauma including the sexual exploitation of women, forced migration and massacres.

One such massacre was the Stapleton Siding Massacre in July 1895 when 80 Aboriginal people were killed following the distribution of poisoned damper. Joe 'Pumeri' McGuinness was told the story by his mother Alngindabu, who survived the massacre, and said of it: "The majority of the tribe (Kungarakany)... about one hundred people, became victims of poisoned damper... at a railway siding known as Stapleton... weed-killing powder... was supposedly mistaken for baking powder and added to the flour in preparing damper. Those who ate the poisoned damper became violently ill before their death." This was one of at least three poisoning incidents suffered by the Kungarakan people.

Uranium mining
In April 1948 a notice was published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette that the Government was offering rewards for the discovery of uranium ore in Australia and offered a reward of £25,000. This reward was offered due to an increased need for uranium during World War II and it was the United States and Britain that had identified Australia as a potential source.

In 1949, John Michael "Jack" White discovered torbernite in old nearby copper shafts. White was a buffalo shooter, crocodile hunter and prospector who held a small farm in the area with his Aboriginal partner (their name has not been shared). He recognised the uranium ore from a color pamphlet that had been produced as part of the announcement for the award and he delivered his samples to the Mines Branch in Darwin on 13 August 1949 and was later able to collect the full reward. News of this discovery was published throughout Australia.

Work on developing the mine site began during the war as a project undertaken by the Allied Works Council but, to speed up progress, in 1952 the Australian Government funded the setting up of a mine and treatment plant to provide uranium oxide concentrate to the UK-US Combined Development Agency under a contract which ran from 1953 to 1962.

The mine was officially opened on 17 September 1954 and the event was attended by the then Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies who promised that "[t]he world will forget about atomic bombs and concentrate on using uranium for the benefit of humankind" while also talking about its importance in terms of the defence of Australia. On 13 September, days before the mine officially opened, four staff of the mine were killed when two trucks collided.

The mine was the responsibility of Commonwealth Government, through the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, was responsible for it, although management of it was on a contract basis by Territory Enterprises Pty Limited, a subsidiary of the Rio Tinto Group. Batchelor, a nearby town, accommodated most of the mining personnel and grew significantly at this time.

By 1959 the economically viable ore had all been extracted but operations continued, on a small scale until 1963, and work continued there until April 1971 as stockpiled ore from Rum Jungle and other sites around Australia (including from Eva Creek and Adelaide River) continued to be processed. A total of 863,000 tonnes of Uranium ore were processed and much was sold on the open market; some of this was also stockpiled and held in storage at Lucas Heights Reactor in Sydney.

Pollution and cleanup
The Rum Jungle mine closed in April 1971 and the 200 hectare site was abandoned. The Federal Government (which controlled the mine through its agency the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC), now known as Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) decided not to rehabilitate the mine site . The mining company Conzinc (now part of the Rio Tinto Group, which owns Energy Resources of Australia (ERA), operators of the Ranger Uranium Mine in Kakadu National Park) have consistently denied any responsibility for rehabilitation. This led to the mine becoming known as one of Australia's most polluted environments due to the oxidation of sulphides and the release of acid and metals into the East Branch of the Finniss River. The 1500 mm annual rainfall, along with the pyritic mineralisation in the area, created ideal conditions for such oxidation.

An initial attempt to clean up Rum Jungle was made in 1977 following the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry (1976 - 1977), which led to the setting up of a working group to examine more comprehensive rehabilitation. A$16.2 million Commonwealth-funded program got under way in 1983 to remove heavy metals and neutralise the tailings. Of the damage to the Rum Jungle area the Commissioner of the Inquiry, Justice Russell Fox stated:

"[Rum Jungle] represents to many people, not least of all the Aboriginal people, an awful example of what should not be allowed to happen."

After mining, the area suffered elevated gamma radiation, alpha-radioactive dust, and significant radon daughter concentrations in air. These levels were so high that in the late 1980s it was decided that something had to be done. Radiation protection standards were being revised, so that the levels of pollution would now be officially recognised as unsafe for human health. As a result, a supplementary $1.8 million program to improve Rum Jungle Creek South waste dumps was undertaken in 1990.[citation needed]

One of the main environmental impacts of uranium mining is the creation of large volumes of radioactive mine waste (tailings) which are left behind on the site. The major radioactive component of these tailings is uranium-238, which makes up over 99% of what is naturally occurring uranium, and is not very radioactive. While figures concerning the half-life of an isotope are often presented as meaning the element is more dangerous, in the case of Uranium-238 being 4.47 billion years, the opposite is in fact true: half-life is the time in which half of a collection of an element will decay, and produce a radioactive particle, ergo, the longer the half-life, the less radioactive the element. In 2003, a government survey of the tailings piles at Rum Jungle found that capping which was supposed to help contain this radioactive waste for at least 100 years, had failed in less than 20 years. The Territory and Federal Governments continue to argue over responsibility for funding rehabilitation on the polluted East Finniss River. Contamination of local groundwater has yet to be addressed.

Rum Jungle Lake
One of the principal problems associated with rehabilitating the Rum Jungle Creek South (RJCS) open cut mine was that the area was converted to a lake after mining ceased; this is known as Rum Jungle Lake. It is considered to be the only water body in the Darwin region not infested with crocodiles and, after the mines closure, it quickly became very popular with locals and Darwin residents as a recreation reserve including activities such as swimming, canoeing and scuba diving. In November 2010 swimming was closed to the public after a series of recordings showed low levels of radiation; after testing by the Environmental Research Institute it was decided that the site was safe and it was reopened in October 2012. As of June 2024 the Coomalie Community Government Council released a community survey regarding planned further rehabilitation works on the lake.

Brown's Oxide Project
In December 2001, Compass Resources lodged a Referral under the EPBC Act with Environment Australia (which is now DEH). That document referred to the proposed development of a large-scale mining project, the Browns Polymetallic Project, that would produce lead, cobalt, copper, nickel and silver over a project life of at least 15 years. As indicated in the 2001 Referral, Compass considered that the Browns Polymetallic Project was a 'nuclear action' under the EPBC Act, on the basis that the project could be considered to include rehabilitating a facility or area in which mining or milling of uranium ore has previously been undertaken.

Compass suspended its work on the polymetallic proposal in 2002 when low metal prices caused the withdrawal of Compass's financial partner (Doe Run).

In 2005, Compass lodged an application for a much smaller project focusing on cobalt, nickel and copper mining. Because this project, the Brown's Oxide Project is much smaller than the polymetallic project proposed previously, Compass is in a position to progress it on its own.

The Northern Territory Government has completed assessing this project and Marion Scrymgour MLA, Minister for Natural Resources, Environment and Heritage in the Northern Territory Government has advised that she has concluded that the Browns Oxide Project as proposed in the Public Environmental Report and subsequent documents "can be managed without unacceptable environmental impacts"

Kon Vatskalis MLA, Minister for Mines and Energy, announced this approval as "good news" during question time in the Northern Territory Parliament on 4 May 2006. To ensure the environment is managed properly, this approval and its recommendations is subject to final review by the Commonwealth Government under a bilateral agreement between the Northern Territory Government and the Commonwealth of Australia. Pending final Commonwealth approval, the project is set to be in production by early 2007.

While the project is located near the old Rum Jungle mine, the Browns Oxide Project is targeting copper cobalt and nickel—not uranium. Nonetheless, Compass acknowledges that at some future point it would be interested in mining uranium at the nearby Rum Jungle site (over which it holds a lease). Any proposal to mine uranium would require a totally new application and environmental assessment as a separate project.

Geology of the region
The major uranium prospects of Brown's, Intermediate, White's, White's extension and Dyson's occur northwest of, but parallel to, the northeast trending Giant's Reef Fault. Ore deposits occur in Precambrian carbonaceous slate and graphitic schist of the Lower Proterozoic Brooks Creek Group. Structurally, the deposits are within a sheared anticline on the southern flank of a granite dome. Primary minerals include chalcopyrite, bornite, bournonite, pyrite, and uraninite. Oxidized ores include azurite, malachite, pseudomalachite, iron oxides, torbernite, saleeite, and phosphuranylite.