The Island

On Groote Eylandt, off the NT's Arnhem Land coast, a fine dust coats the houses and cars. Community members say it could be putting their health at risk.

"And it is very intense. "The health and wellbeing of those living in Angurugu, Alyangula and the broader Groote Eylandt community is extremely important to us." "So you may not be able to necessarily believe the numbers exactly but you can see where the pollution is bad and where it's high, and the absolute correct response to this is to get something on the ground to understand what's happening so it can be rectified." Where does that information go?" "In the case of the NT, we don't have ground observations," he said. He is calling for an investigation into whether some of these high fine-particle readings could have been caused by the loading of particularly fine manganese dust called "fines" at the South32 port loading area at Alyangula. "Having lived in Japan, I was quite aware of some of the air pollution issues that they face there, and I noticed on Windy.com there were these very strong plumes of PM2.5 emanating from Groote," Mr Nathan said. "We are worried about the future of our children, so we'd like them to do more testing and we'd like to know what positive programs they can put in place to stop this dust," she said. The mining company helped pay to seal roads, changed its mining schedules and moved stockpiles, and said it was using watering trucks to reduce dust on its mine site. "[South32] say they do monitor the dust, and they have equipment in the community to see how much is coming in, but we don't get told the results. "I went to clean my mother's house and the dust is so thick, people are using Gernis to clean their houses." "When you fly over the island, when you look at your community, all you can see is black dust on the roofs," she said.

Residents on an island off south-east Queensland are set to have essential services like power, gas and water cut off indefinitely over claims of unpaid ...

"There's lots of elderly, there's disabled people, there's sick people, so you know, it's a real concern about where they're going to go and what they're going to do," Ms Angel said. "We're in the middle of this huge game of Monopoly between the creditor and the debtor," Ms Angel said. Couran Cove Island Resort, on south Stradbroke Island, is home to a mixture of permanent residents and holiday home owners who are obliged to pay levies to their body corporate to access the services that are otherwise commercially unavailable.