Current exploration drilling in the conservation park is limited by State Government restrictions backed by the Shire of Toodyay and conservationist groups.

The nearby farmland find is estimated to be worth billions of dollars at today’s prices.

Chalice told the Australian Stock Exchange last month that it had started seeking business partners to enter into formal agreements to mine and process millions of tonnes of Julimar ore over the next few decades.

The company’s share prices rose by nearly 17 per cent to $7.49 at the close of trading at the end of last month after rising steadily from $5.96 over the previous fortnight.

The stock exchange granted Chalice’s request for a share trading halt on Monday March 27 pending the company’s announcement next day.

The Chalice statement said that drilling on private farmland south of Julimar Road had increased the size of its known deposit to three million tonnes.

A further 27km of forest north of Julimar Road was “effectively untested” due to low-impact drilling constraints imposed by the State Government last year.

The three-year-old discovery consists of palladium, platinum and gold which sell for up to US$1800 an ounce on the world market, and nickel, copper and cobalt worth US$10,500 to US$72,000 per ton.

Chalice is touting it’s discovery as a leading new global supply of “green metals” to power electric vehicles and reduce carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.

The discovery will also generate millions of dollars in aditional State revenue from mining royalties in what the company describes as a “long-life” project.

Chalice told the stock exchange there was “enormous growth potential” on the private farmland it now owns – and in the Julimar State Forest further north.

More than 1000 sampling holes had been drilled to a depth of 800m on Chalice-owned private farms south of Julimar Road.

A further 100 test holes had been drilled on a 10km stretch of State forest on the northern side of Julimar Road.

Chalice told the stock exchange that only seven per cent of the ore body is located on private farmland to the south, while the rest – which is largely untested – stretches 27km north through the forest to Dewars Pool.

“While we already have a tier-1 scale deposit which has the potential to underpin a world-class, long-life green metals project, the resource base is expected to grow,” Chalice said.

“Our multi-pronged exploration campaign will therefore continue over the coming months as we work to unlock the full potential of the 30km-long Julimar complex.”

“The Julimar project is favourably located with access to established road, rail port and high-voltage power infrastructure nearby, plus access to a significant drive-in drive-out mining workforce in the Perth surrounds.”

In a separate statement to The Herald, a Chalice spokesperson said that “any mining will require strict government approvals and will consider environmental and social impacts”.

The statement referred to “decades of mining” with “open pit and underground mining scenarios continuing to be considered”.

“Low-impact exploration drilling is continuing within the southern portion of the State Forest,” the spokesperson said.

“While initial results have confirmed the prospectivity of the region at depth, no economic deposit has yet been identified in the area, and there is no certainty that mining will ever occur in the forest.”

Conservationists have been lobbying the WA Government to upgrade the forest from conservation park to national park status to protect it from mining.

Concerns have also been raised about the large volumes of ground water likely to be needed to mine and process millions of tonnes of ore in the coming decades, as well as the environmental impact of large-scale industrial air pollution and noise.

The Stirling Terrace medical centre is owned by the Shire of Toodyay, which has spent the past five months looking for replacement doctors amid a nation-wide shortage of country GPs and the closure of other regional medical centres.

The Wheatbelt Shire of Quairading recently offered more than $800,000 to attract a doctor to that town.

Toodyay Shire CEO Suzie Haslehurst said the shire-owned medical centre in Stirling Terrace would re-open with two doctors and a nurse practitioner.

She declined to publicly disclose the value of the new Toodyay medical centre contract on gounds of commercial confidentiality.

A start date was set at nine weeks from March 23 when the contract was signed.

Ms Haslehurst said the Wheatbelt Health Network (WHN) had agreed to transfer Toodyay patient records to Dr Lawal free of charge to enable his new medical team to offer local continuity of service.

The new contract included a requirement to provide Toodyay residents with ancillary medical services such as physiotherapy, pathology and podiatry.

The centre had previously been used by the Wheatbelt Health Network for free.

WHN Chief Executive Officer Catherine Milliner declined to say if patient records for Northam consultations after the Toodyay closure would be transferred back at no cost.

Dr Lawal said he was looking forward to returning to work in Toodyay.

He said the Alma Beard Medical Centre would re-open for a minimum of four days a week, starting with two doctors.

“High-level” talks were underway to restore local pathology services, and he was also negotiating with a “couple of physiotherapists” for Toodyay.

A current housing shortage in Toodyay made it difficult to attract suitably qualified staff and he was looking to acquire local property to help accommodate that need.

Dr Lawal said he was married with three children.

He had worked for a year as a GP in Toodyay until last November after doing similar work in Northam the previous year.

He was currently living temporarily in Northam but planned to buy a house in Toodyay.

Dr Lawal said he had also worked in Tasmania for four years after studying medicine at Lagos in Nigeria and working for three years in UK hospitals.

He was also working as a senior instructor with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and had spent the past 10 years teaching surgical trainees, junior emergency doctors and other GPs interested in emergency medicine.

“I love country medicine, which is why I am pleased to return to Toodyay,” Dr Lawal said.

“I’m hoping also to attract medical students to Toodyay to see if they like working in the country and to train as future country doctors.”

Toodyay Shire CEO Suzie Haslehurst said the shire’s planning department was seeking further advice from the State Government.

Mr Maddox rebuilt a culvert crossing on Boyagerring Brook which passes between his front gate and country home.

He said an earlier creek crossing flooded in winter, preventing safe vehicle access.
Mr Maddox also installed a bore-fed fountain and scenic pond to attract birdlife when the waterway runs dry in summer.

He said silt was a problem.

Mr Maddox told two State investigators who interviewed him at the site in February that he did not know Boyagerring Brook was protected by Aboriginal heritage law.

Mr Maddox was later charged under WA’s Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972.

The State alleges that Mr Maddox “altered and/or damaged Avon River Heritage Site ID 15979 without either the authorisation of the Registrar of Aboriginal Sites or the consent of the Minister”.

The Aboriginal heritage site includes tributaries such as Boyagerring Brook.

A prosecution “statement of facts” describes the site as “having mythological value and is the Waugal’s home”.

“The Waugal is a mythical serpent,” the prosecution said.

“It is believed that any alteration to the Waugal’s home could scare it from the water, causing the water to dry up and cause harm to the surrounding environment and people.”

However, Section 62 of the Act states that “it is a defence for the person charged to prove that he did not know and could not reasonably be expected to have known that the place or object to which the charge relates was a place or object to which this Act applies.”

Mr Maddox has claimed repeatedly that he did not know that Boyagerring Brook was covered by Aboriginal heritage law.

There was standing room only at the back of the Northam Magistrate’s Court at 10am on Monday March 20 when Mr Maddox was summoned to appear before the bench.

The public gallery was filled with about 25 of Mr Maddox’s Toodyay supporters, including staff from his real estate business.

He earlier told The Herald that a conviction could bar him from selling real estate and put seven people out of work.

Magistrate Donna Webb said she disliked seeing such a big crowd in her court and moved the case to near the top of a long list to enable her to deal with it quickly.

Mr Maddox was represented by Northam lawyer Bernadine Heiderich who sought an adjournment to enable her client to get further legal advice before entering a plea.

Magistrate Webb adjourned the case to Monday April 17 after a WA Heritage Department lawyer agreed to the new hearing date via audio link from Perth.

After the brief hearing, Mr Maddox was joined by a big crowd of supporters outside the court for an interview with an ABC Wheatbelt radio news reporter.

Mr Maddox repeated his claim that he did not know that Boyaggering Brook was protected by Aboriginal heritage law when he built the creek crossing, fountain and pond on his property.

A few metres along the trail, Elvis points to a spot on the opposite side of the river – Goomalling side, he says – where his mother and father used to camp.

“Matthew and Cyndy were babies, I wasn’t born yet,” he says.

“Woodartjis (little hairy men or spirit people) were calling to Cyndy, and Mum said she saw her crawling out of the tent.

“Mum grabbed Cyndy by the leg and pulled her back in.”

Elvis’ mother, Frances, was born in 1930.

Her grandfather James Gillespie, buried at Toodyay Cemetery, was of part Scottish ancestry.

James milked cows for Ted Hayes and lived to be 109.

In his later years James lived in a cottage which has since fallen down and is sadly now just a pile of rubble opposite the turn-off to the Toodyay District High School.

Frances, who now lives in Northam, was born in the era of Auber Octavius Neville, WA’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, or as he is still referred today by Aboriginal people, ‘Neville the Devil’.

During Neville’s reign of terror, from 1915 to 1945, any light-skinned Aboriginal child was at risk of being forcibly removed from their parents, placed in a distant mission, and forced to abandon their traditional language and culture.

As part of the children’s ‘education’ girls were trained to be domestic servants and the boys to be farm workers.

WA’s south-west missions were at Roelands, Moore River, Mogumber and New Norcia, 90km north of Toodyay.

Conditions were pitiful and the corporal punishment severe.

Children removed from their families were sometimes chained to their beds by the neck, strapped to beds and whipped, or made to hold bricks and whipped or deprived of food if they dropped them.

A plaque at New Norcia’s Benedictine Monastery apologises “for the physical, emotional and sexual abuse suffered in this place”.

Frances was light-skinned and risked being taken, so her father – also named James – kept the family safe by “keeping moving”, always one step ahead of Neville the Devil.

James junior had a horse and cart and was an itinerant worker.

“Grandfather worked everywhere, picking potatoes in Harvey, and other farm work,” Elvis remembers.

James junior took his family “all around” through Julimar Forest, Bindoon and Bullsbrook, and then through Guilford.

His daughter Frances was born under a tree near Narrogin on the way to the country of her mother’s people, the Wadendi from the Busselton region.

Elvis’s father Eric, a Yued man, was not as lucky as Frances.

He spent time as a child in the harsh New Norcia mission under the strict ‘care’ of the Benedictine monks.

Elvis’s paternal grandfather, also Eric, spent time in jail for staging protests to have his children released from the mission.

Eric junior was a woodcutter who cleared land for farmers and later worked for the Toodyay tannin factory.

He and Frances met near the Roelands Native Mission Farm at a time when Aboriginal families feared the oppressive regime of Neville the Devil and mission punishment for being ‘Aboriginal’.

Elvis’s parents tried to fit themselves and their children into ‘white’ society.
He attended Toodyay Convent, as did Frances, played football for Toodyay Football Club and attended dances at the town hall where he remembers being a very popular dance partner with the white ladies.

Elvis still loves dancing – it is part of his traditional culture – and he recalls big groups of Noongar men gathering in Northam to dance The Stomp, a 1960s dance craze that was banned by some shire councils.

Elvis was born in 1958 when Aboriginal people weren’t counted as part of the Australian population.

Those in WA were barred from voting in state or federal elections and most were paid only minimum wages, if any at all.

It was not until the nation’s historic 1967 referendum that Aboriginal people gained the same citizenship rights as other Australians.

Elvis’s father, Eric Moody junior, was the first Aboriginal person in Toodyay to buy his own home, in Goddard Street.

Elvis’s relationship with the Avon River as he grew up was more a practical one, spearing cobbler from the riverbank for food, diving for turtles, digging up jilgies from the riverbank and scooping up fresh water for drinking.

The river was also a refuge and a playground.

Elvis says he has always felt a special connection to it and was devastated when the Avon was bulldozed in the 1950s and ’60s as part of the ‘River Training Scheme” to prevent flooding, which he says ruined it.

When I ask Elvis about the Waugul or Rainbow Snake, he says he didn’t really learn about the Dreamtime Spirit until he was an adult.

Elvis married a Koori woman, Narrelle (dec.) from Narromine near Dubbo in NSW.
The couple and their six children spent many years working at Coolgardie’s Christian Aboriginal Parent Directed School.

Elvis and Narrelle were house parents and one of Elvis’s duties was to drive the students back to their remote communities at school holiday time.

He learned about Aboriginal lore, culture and Dreamtime stories from spending time with full-blood tribal men in remote communities.

In recent years, Elvis’s family in Northam has been involved with the establishment of that town’s Bilya Koort Boodja Cultural Centre next to the Avon River and a revival of local Noongar language.

Elvis is a bowel cancer survivor and has returned to his hometown of Toodyay to settle down.

He spends his time walking the river, carving emu eggs, painting fantastic art, making didgeridoos and tapping sticks, and illustrating children’s storybooks.

He makes frequent trips to Coolgardie, where his work is exhibited for sale at Judumul Art Centre, to yarn with full-blood Aboriginal people.

WA’s Protector of Aborigines – Neville the Devil – had a vision for the future of full-blood Aboriginal people.

Like many others of that era until the 1950s he believed they would die out from lack of food, as their traditional food sources were being denied to them.

The idea was “half-castes” would “assimilate” into white society and Australians would eventually forget that Aboriginal people ever existed.

But the world’s oldest living culture has defied the odds and survived as a proud nation with its own distinct languages, art, beliefs, traditions and identity.

This includes beliefs in ancient spirits such as the Waugul that created our natural waterways in the Dreamtime and which welcomes all of us to our country.

Elvis says “Kiya Wanju, Bilya Koort Boodja – welcome to the country of my ancestors, the river, the land, the heart”.

His book Where Wild Emus Roam is available at the Shire of Toodyay Visitor Centre in Piesse Street.