Tiffany Ko: I know you have a background as a journalist and an author, and you’re interested in Indigenous policy and equity, but how would you describe yourself and your work?

Paul Cleary: That’s a tough question. I suppose I am really interested in issues around justice and equity. One of the interesting things about resources – as in minerals and oil and gas – is that they tend to lead to quite strange behaviour by the people developing them. There’s a lot of greed involved, and that often means the people that should be benefiting the most – you know, the traditional owners or people living in developing countries – do get a raw deal.

So, my interest in this really began when working in East Timor in the early 2000s, around those negotiations between Australia and East Timor which then led to the espionage and all the dreadful stuff that went on. That followed through to looking at impacts on farmers in places where there’s high value agricultural land and the impacts they have.

For traditional owners as well, particularly in the Pilbara, it’s really stark because you’ve got an area where literally trillions of dollars of wealth have been extracted in just the last 20 years alone, and yet the people who should be benefiting are actually made worse off. So that’s what really drives my interest in this as an issue.

Tiffany Ko: In the acknowledgements you said Title Fight came about in your discussion with ANU professor Bob Gregory, who posed the question: ‘Why are there no black ‘sheiks’ in Australia?’ Could you tell us more about that?

Paul Cleary: That was the start of my doctoral research, and I decided to focus on the Yindjibarndi. Initially what got me going was, I remember very clearly the first time I had a conversation with Michael Woodley, who was the CEO of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation at the time, and I was on the telephone. I was in Sydney and he was in Roebourne, and I remember it like it was yesterday. It was such a powerful conversation. He was just so determined and just had such a strong voice. I remember putting the phone down and leaning back into my chair and saying, ‘Wow.’ That guy is really something, you know? He really is pretty extraordinary.

And then about a year later when I travelled to Roebourne and interviewed some of the older people across the community, and Ned Cheedy was one of those amazing interviews as well. That’s what made me really want to focus on the Yindjibarndi, ‘cos I could just get that sense of their strength and their resilience. It really came across, and that really got me hooked on wanting to spend ten years following their battle, blow-by-blow.

Tiffany Ko: For me, reading Title Fight was really confronting because I’m based in Karratha and I know of, or have met the people you mention in the book. To know that this is happening ‘in our backyards’ is disquieting.

I think it’s great that you’re shedding light on what has actually happened and is currently happening between big mining companies and traditional owners. It can be a bit confusing to follow when the media isn’t necessarily portraying all the facts.

You said you spent ten years following their battle. Can you tell us about your research process?  

Paul Cleary: I did some trips to the Pilbara and mainly to Roebourne and Karratha, starting off about ten years ago. I talk about one of those interviews at the very beginning in the prologue, interviewing Ned Cheedy just a few weeks before he passed away. I also talk about interviewing some of the people that were part of the community that split away, the Wirlu-murra people, so I covered the ground in doing that to get an idea of where people were coming from.

One of the interesting things is that for some people to be engaged in a battle with a mining company – and I don’t blame them for this. You might think that they threw in the towel, but then there’s a history of people being bossed around by station owners and all sorts of developers in their region. In a way some people have kind of ‘thrown in the towel’, but what was interesting as a contrast is to compare that to the position of the group led by Michael Woodley, who was just so determined to fight and to stand up for themselves.

Just looking across the Pilbara, there’s been a number of other groups that haven’t been able to stand up and take on a big powerful mining company. So, I think that’s what made the case of the Yindjibarndi so really extraordinary. It was such a powerful thing for them to do, to fight a company like Fortescue and really to do it initially on a shoestring budget. At the start they didn’t have any money at all. They were relying on pro bono legal advice – and just the scale of the contestation – I did an estimate of the number of pages and words of legal and tribunal decisions and it’s close to 700,000 words of judgement.

One of the things I did with this book was to ‘mine’ – excuse the pun – those judgements and some of them are quite extraordinary. I think particularly the Federal Court and the Hon Justice Steven Rares did a great job of teasing out the evidence and really understanding where people were coming from. I think showing a great deal of respect to traditional belief and knowledge along the way was a really good part of the research process.

Tiffany Ko: And did you know, when you started, that you wanted to write a book about this?

Paul Cleary: It just sort of evolved. I didn’t really know if there was going to be a book but as time went on, I narrowed it down to be my main focus of my doctoral thesis. When this went all the way to the High Court and then they got the decision in 2020, that was the moment when I said, ‘This has got to be a book.’

It had been difficult to get publishers to get on board with this, because a lot of them were concerned about the legal risk, particularly writing about a company like Fortescue that people knew were quite litigious. Thankfully my publisher Black Inc., who had published my previous three books, committed to this one because they could see it was such an important story. They were willing to take a risk.

Tiffany Ko: I’m glad they did. This sort of segues into the next question I have for you. Since you cover such contentious issues, I was wondering if you came across any challenges while writing or researching Title Fight.

Paul Cleary: One of the challenges was that Fortescue were really breathing down the necks of the Wirlu-murra people, who were the breakaway group. In one instance, the FMG funded consultants that were orchestrating things made a complaint to my university and to the editor-in-chief of The Australian over an interview I conducted with a Yindjibarndi Elder – it was funny because the complaint even got this lady’s name wrong – and you could see from them doing this that they had sat this person down immediately after our interview and forced her to divulge everything that I had asked of her.

I got the sense that that was quite stressful for her. Our interview was quite amicable, but then to be sat down and to have to then give a blow-by-blow account…that was something that I found a little bit difficult to deal with because you could just see that anything I was doing was having an impact on individuals as well.

Tiffany Ko: Wow…that would have been really hard.

Paul Cleary: Yes, but that lady in particular, we’ve remained really good friends. I was in Roebourne recently, and I gave her a hug.

Tiffany Ko: Oh, that’s so lovely!

Paul Cleary: We’ve always remained really good friends even though that was quite an awful moment.

Tiffany Ko: Well, I’m glad you’ve remained really good friends. What were some of the joys you had when writing and researching and interviewing for this book?

Paul Cleary: Well one of the real joys I think was interviewing one of the great Elders of the Yindjibarndi community, Ned Cheedy. That was absolutely a privilege and I just loved writing that part of the book. I spent a lot of time going over it and really slowing it down. There was just the two of us talking and to really give the reader as much insight as possible into who the man was and what he had to say, that was really a joy in a sense to be able to write that passage.

I think the other thing I found as well which I mentioned earlier, with some of the legal judgements, there’s some really beautiful material in there and I really loved writing some of those passages. There’s one in particular that I quoted at length; it was Hon Justice Steven Rares’s quote – the evidence of the Yindjibarndi woman Tootsie Daniel, where she talks about going on Country and camping out and talking about how, during the night if you were really lucky, you’d get what’s called a ‘jowi’, which is like a spirit coming to you, and you wake up in the morning with this spirit. She talks about going out on Country with her husband and getting a jowi, and just how wonderful that was. To reflect as much as possible the spirituality of the Yindjibarndi people – it was a really good thing to be a part of that.

Tiffany Ko: That’s so beautiful. Did you speak to the opposing side during your research?

Paul Cleary: Yes I did, I spoke to a number of people from the Wirlu-murra group. There were some of the older women who I interviewed and some of the men who were quite critical in all this, in giving their views into where they were coming from. A couple of guys were just a little bit older than Michael, so it was pretty important to have that perspective.

With Fortescue, in the early days when they were just trying to get this going, I was backgrounded by some FMG people, and it was pretty extraordinary just some of their views and the things they would say. They actually said things like, ‘The company doesn’t have to pay anything at all to Aboriginal people for impacting on their land,’ and they were being generous by offering these crumbs.

Tiffany Ko: That’s awful.

Paul Cleary: Yeah, to hear some of their views was just pretty…extraordinary. That was the early days. With the book, I did put in a request to interview the Chairman Dr Forrest, but they didn’t come back to me on that. But they did actually answer most of my questions and they were reasonably professional about that so that was good. That was pretty positive.

Tiffany Ko: Definitely. Knowing the facts was quite shocking when I was reading Title Fight, because it is true that what I see in the media is a focus on the ‘good’ that mining companies do by giving job opportunities and funding education programs, so to really understand what’s going on in reality is quite shocking. When writing this book, did you come across anything that was surprising?

Paul Cleary: I do talk about this meeting that FMG orchestrated, where they literally staged a meeting that looked like a community meeting, and they had polling booths in three places; Roebourne, Carnarvon, and Perth. They had security and all this stuff, and it was all done by Fortescue – except you wouldn’t have known that. And so, I described it as something that the CIA would do in a developing country or something like that, and I kind of thought people may think that this description was a bit extreme, but the editor and the publisher totally stood by it because it was a fair comment. It was just incredible the way they were able to orchestrate things to that degree.

Tiffany Ko: Out of pure curiosity, I was wondering if you were at any of the meetings that were mentioned in the book? I know there’s quite a few different ones throughout the years.

Paul Cleary: No, I wasn’t actually [though] I kind of feel like I was. There is a video of one of them which is quite extraordinary. That’s the one in 2011, it’s called FMG Great Native Title Swindle. That’s quite realistic and you feel like you’re there. But no, I was actually watching this from Sydney while it was happening all the way on the other side of the country.

Tiffany Ko: Well, it seems like you were there from what I was reading so that’s why I asked the question! That goes to show how well-connected you are to the community to know all the different aspects of the case and the different perspectives. Is that level of orchestration common in what you’ve seen in other places or companies?

Paul Cleary: I don’t know if it’s that common. I think normally if a company is involved in something, they would declare it. Maybe smaller mining companies would not but normally the practice is that you would declare it.

It’s interesting because I interviewed Senator Pat Dodson about this and he argued that all these inducements that go on should be banned and should be made illegal. It’s a really good comment actually. It happens not just with Aboriginal people but with non-Indigenous people as well. There’s all sorts of bribes and things given out by companies ahead of getting an approval. They ‘do things’ for the schools and the hospital and the community, and they’re really just trying to bribe people.

Tiffany Ko: Wow, that’s just so awful. I’m still reeling from what I read in Title Fight to be honest. I’d say my knowledge was just scratching the surface. What was it like working with the different communities here?

Paul Cleary: I found that people were pretty open even though they’ve had a tough time with whitefellas. It was great that they would sit with you and tell their stories even though it was a difficult moment in the communities. I’ve been going to Roebourne over ten years and I can say that it has changed for the better – things have really turned around. For example, the Old Victoria Hotel being changed into the Ganalili Centre. I was at the opening of that and it was pretty amazing. 

Tiffany Ko: That’s so great. What was the reception after your book was first published?

Paul Cleary: I haven’t had any really negative feedback which is great. I haven’t had anything where anyone’s said you’ve got this all wrong. One big concern I had was that the Wirlu-murra people really wouldn’t like the book and I think it was really important along the way to really make it clear that the Wirlu-murra people aren’t bad people at all. They’re not selling out their community, they just had a different view – a view of ‘we couldn’t win’, basically. And they had a view about Native Title, that it was not going to deliver or hasn’t delivered for Aboriginal people, so why should we bother? And so that was pretty important to make sure that I didn’t demonise the Wirlu-murra people.

But the best thing about it all is that the Yindjibarndi people as a whole really liked the book, and it’s been selling in very large numbers from their art centre in Roebourne, which I’m very happy about. It was nice. I was in Roebourne recently and I was walking in town and saying to people, ‘Hi, I’m Paul,’ and they go, ‘Oh, you’re the writer! You wrote the book!’ So that was actually really nice.

Tiffany Ko: I can imagine! I have been seeing a lot of positivity surrounding Title Fight on social media. Have you talked to many of your readers about what they think?

Paul Cleary: I’ve had really great feedback from readers. It’s been terrific actually and I’ve had people contacting me via the publisher asking, ‘What can we do?’ and ‘Is there something we can do to try to make a difference?’ And you know, I say go and contact your local MP and the minister, and tell them just how unfair this is.

Tiffany Ko: What do you hope future readers will take away from your book?

Paul Cleary: I think readers will hopefully understand how unfair Australia can be in relation to First Peoples. And that we’ve got such a long, long way to go in terms of Australia becoming a ‘fair go’ country for people who go back 60,000 years.

I mean there’s a lot of rhetoric at the moment about Native Title and how great it is, and maybe a lot of people are going to be feeling good about having a voice and that sort of thing, but you realise on the ground and particularly in these places like the Pilbara where just so much wealth is being extracted, the impact on Country and people’s cultural heritage is just immense.

I think that’s a big part of it, that people will hopefully take away and realise, because there is a lot of good PR about mining and jobs and things like that, but I find that this is the dark side of all that.

Tiffany Ko: So, sort of an ending question for you – where is Title Fight going next, and what are you working on next?

Paul Cleary: I’ve been in discussions with a screenwriter who’s looking into developing the book into something that might be more historic, because the history is really interesting. I do have a little bit of it in the book going back to the 1860s. So there’s potential there.

I am sort of thinking about where I might go next and that sort of thing. I think particularly this whole strand of economic justice and the idea of the resource curse – that people living amidst vast resources can be in fact left worse off as a result of the development – is just so unfair.

Tiffany Ko: What you do is so admirable! Thank you so much Paul, it was so nice to finally meet you.

Paul Cleary: You too. Thank you.