Coronation Hill is a sandstone outcrop within

Kakadu National Park Kakadu National Park is a protected area in the Northern Territory of Australia, southeast of Darwin. It is a World Heritage Site. Kakadu is also gazetted as a locality, covering the same area as the national park, with 313 people recorded liv ...

in the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

. The area had been briefly mined for uranium at

El Sherana El Sherana is an abandoned uranium mine in the Alligator Rivers, South Alligator River Valley of the Northern Territory, Australia. The deposit was discovered in 1954 by a United Uranium NL exploration team, led by Joe Fischer, with a ground rad ...

in the 1950s and in 1988 proposals for new mining of gold were made. When mining was proposed in 1988 the area existed as an excised zone of Kakadu National Park and was added to it after the proposal was defeated.

Political importance

The Australian Government established the Resource Assessment Commission to provide a report to inform best decision making about new mining in the area. Environmental, indigenous rights and social campaigns fought against allowing mining. Opposed environmental campaigns came from many organisations including the Kakadu Action Group founded by Lindsay Mollison, part of the

Australian Conservation Foundation The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) is Australia's national environmental organisation, launched in 1965 in response to a proposal by the World Wide Fund for Nature for a more co-ordinated approach to sustainability. One high-profil ...

. After some years of community debate the proposal was vetoed, despite internal disagreement, by then Prime Minister,

Bob Hawke Robert James Lee Hawke (9 December 1929 – 16 May 2019) was an Australian politician and union organiser who served as the 23rd prime minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991, holding office as the leader of the Australian Labor Party (A ...

, in a Cabinet Meeting in May 1991. His actions in Cabinet that day were regarded as some as important in his ultimately being replaced later that year. The area was added to the park as part of its stage 3 inclusions. The decisions made with respect to Coronation Hill helped inform further decisions about other proposals to mine in Kakadu including rejection of a uranium mine at

Jabiluka Jabiluka is a pair of uranium deposits and mine development in the Northern Territory of Australia that was to have been built on land belonging to the Mirarr clan of Australian Aborigine, Aboriginal people. The mine site is surrounded by, but no ...

in the mid 1990s.

References

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