Reviewed by Angela Wauchop
“Like addicts on the world’s biggest bender, we are burning through our children’s and our children’s children’s inheritances so fast it should make our heads spin, yet nobody talks about it.”
Adani, Following Its Dirty Footsteps: A Personal Story is the latest non-fiction work by Australian author and investigative journalist Lindsay Simpson. Meticulously researched and passionately written, the book presents the reader with uncomfortable and problematic facts about the Adani Group and its undertakings. The Adani Group is India’s largest multinational port operator, trader and importer of coal. Adani proposes the construction of Australia’s largest coalmine—north of the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland. The proposed ‘Carmichael Coalmine’ would extract thermal coal from deep underground, never previously mined due to its remote outback location.
Simpson presents the hard facts about Adani. Apparent from the very beginning of the book, the facts are indeed dirty—filthy, even. This book resonated with me as a former resident of the coal port town of Gladstone. So did the filth. For ten years, I noticed a layer of coal dust on everything in Gladstone, even inside the house. If I ‘Spray-and-Wiped’ the kitchen benches, a film of dry black grit would be back the next day. The author notes that Gladstone, ‘Once a farming and tourist town, [is] now branded far and wide through journalistic headlines as a poisonous relic of industrialisation’. Sadly, the book reveals that the Galilee Basin, the Great Barrier Reef and eventually, the entire planet are likely to follow suit.
Clear and concisely written, the book offers a large amount of information on every page. Yet it is easy to understand, and I found it helpful and refreshing to have everything spelled out for me. The reader does not have to be an expert to appreciate and delve into the confronting depths of this important book. In fact, almost every page reveals a new lie, atrocity, embarrassment or scandal involving the Adani Group—a group, Simpson asserts, that has left a trail of destruction and apathy in its own beloved India. Diseased cattle, coal dust-coated plants, black-spotted fruit and abandoned crops are just few of the footprints left by the multinational corporation on its poverty-stricken home soil.
As a layman, I noticed the factual and concise nature of the book meant the use of many abbreviations throughout, such as acronyms and initialisms. They were a minor distraction, yet were a necessary feature of such in-depth and expertly-presented research. The expertise of the author is also evident in her noteworthy ability to ‘read people’. I often marvelled at Simpson’s observations of the body language and words of politicians and other key players in the Adani debate. It drove home the fact that sometimes it is not what you say but what you don’t say that is the most telling.
Lindsay Simpson presents a confronting insight into current struggles against climate change, not only in Australia but the whole world. Adani, Following Its Dirty Footsteps: A Personal Story raises questions about the power of the individual and entire communities to make a difference: ‘At the last moment my concerns evaporate. It seems churlish to have been considering not participating. I am overwhelmed by the importance of what we are here to do.’