Title Fight: Shortlisting for Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2022

Judges’ comments

In the past 20 years Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest has been associated with Aboriginal reconciliation, jobs for young Aboriginal workers, welfare reform and the cashless welfare card and now Green Hydrogen. Forrest, his Fortescue Metals Group and charitable Minderoo Foundation have waged a relentless public relations campaign through the Australian media.

Now journalist Paul Cleary tells the other side of the story of the Fortescue miracle. In ‘Title Fight, How the Yindjibarndi Battled and Defeated a Mining Giant’, Cleary details the tough-minded tactics used by Australia’s richest man to exploit the iron ore resources of Western Australia’s Pilbara region by strong-arming Native Title holders and claimants. Fortescue Metals Group’s Pilbara operations pay royalties about a tenth of those of its Pilbara rivals, Rio Tinto and BHP. But things have not all gone Fortescue’s way. It ran into a 30-year-old, grade six educated traditional owner of the Yindjibarndi people, Michael Woodley.

Financially and legally outgunned, Woodley led his people to victory over Fortescue Metals Group in a gruelling 13-year battle that culminated in a High Court ruling in 2020 supporting the 2017 Federal Court judgement by Justice Steven Rares finding in favour of the Yindjibarndi. Lawyers are now negotiating a settlement expected to run to hundreds of millions of dollars. Long before the national outcry over Rio Tinto’s destruction in 2020 of the Juukan Gorge, Woodley was fighting to defend his people’s spiritual connection to the Pilbara. And he won.