PRIME Minister Julia Gillard is poised to intervene to stop the federally funded Brighton bypass being constructed over a world-significant Aboriginal site.
Ms Gillard pledged at a Canberra meeting with key new Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie on Tuesday to try to find a solution to the highway route to ensure the banks of the Jordan River, where Tasmanian Aborigines lived for 40,000 years, are protected.
Mr Wilkie said he had decided to raise the Brighton bypass controversy as a matter of urgency with Ms Gillard in their first meeting since a Labor minority government was returned to power.
“The bulldozers are ready to move. I asked her to take a leadership role to see if anything could be done at this late stage,” Mr Wilkie said yesterday.
“I think she was surprised I raised it at our first meeting because the site is not in [my electorate of] Denison, but time is so short and this site is just so significant.”
Ms Gillard told Mr Wilkie she would contact Premier David Bartlett to try to resolve the impasse.
More than three million Aboriginal artefacts up to 40,000 years old have been discovered on the river’s western levee bank, an ancient find described by historians and archaeologists as capable of rewriting Aboriginal history in Tasmania and Australia.
