With tensions in the environment and culture, circling back in regional New South Wales, one woman has made a commitment to redefine the Australian Indigenous heritage protection objective. Wiradji of Blayney Aboriginal Elder Nyree Reynolds is now taking a lead in the campaign to save the holy song lines, waterways, and generations of ancient knowledge. Her Section 10 application out under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act was national headline news and provided long term protection of Belubula River.
A Life Rooted in Country, Storytelling, and Creativity
An Indigenous woman, Nyree Reynolds grew up in Wollongong and has lived in Blayney more than 30 years, referring to it as the valley of the Bilabula–the Wiradjuri name of the river that runs through her people’s country. Besides being an Elder, she is also a visual artist and teacher who enables people to learn more about Wiradjuri culture by telling its stories through painting, workshops, and participation within the community. She imbues her work with profound spiritual connection to land and the rivers that she refers to as the lifeblood of people.
Reynolds has provided art education to the disadvantaged groups in society such as revered adults, young people, and individuals in rehabilitation units. She has had national and international exhibitions where her pieces have been displayed, and she has received several local awards, including being selected as Blayney Woman of the Year 2018.
Protecting Sacred Waterways: The McPhillamys Mine Challenge
Recordings under the Section 10 application of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act were implemented on a bold step in 2021. On behalf of the Wiradyuri Traditional Owners Central West Aboriginal Corporation (WTOCWAC), she presented an argument to the New South Wales Land and Environment Court claiming that a tailings dam to be used in Regis Resources $1 billion McPhillamys gold mine will destroy a sacred cultural site: the origin and springs of Belubula River. According to her, it was these waterways that are the foundation of Wiradjuri songlines, their traditions of ceremonies, and identity.
Reynolds identified the location as tellings of songlines of ancestors and claimed that nobody has a right to destroy this country and the stories that it bears.
A Landmark Win: Federal Minister Declares Heritage Protection
A Section 10 declaration successfully issued by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek in August 2024 and repeatedly ratified by the government in July 2025 safeguarded the most vital sections of the Belubula River. This decisive action actually made the planned tailings dam impossible to build, in its original location, and it questioned the feasibility of fully expanding the mine project in the future.
It was greeted with applause and tears in a meeting of Wiradjuri elders. Although diagnosed with mesothelioma (cancer) in 2020, Reynolds rose to the occasion to speak to the crowd in an elegant style: “We stayed on our songline, told how it was, country and mob.” The ruling was applauded because it not only marked a legal success, but it was also a cultural triumph.
Regis Resources had argued that there are other dam sites, but supposedly indicated that the project was unviable, but this aspect gave a clear indication that development in Aboriginal heritage law situations had turned a corner.
Cultural Legacy: Art, Advocacy, and Intergenerational Leadership
The battle was not only a legal one to Nyree, but it was also a continuation of her fight as an artist and educator whose main aim was to transfer cultural knowledge. Using storytelling and workshops she incorporates traditional lore into visual art to promote a connection with ancestral beings but also to care for Country at the same time. We can, in the case of her painting Reclaiming Her, contrast the figure of a young Wiradjuri girl strolling through ancestral land with the nodes of postcolonial resilience, environmental dignity.
To the Indigenous community both in its immediate vicinity as well as internationally, the leadership of Reynolds can be considered a landmark shift- the combination of lived-experience, spiritual responsibility, art united to safeguard heritage and on the largest possible scale.
Broader Significance: Heritage Law and National Policy
This ruling in the application of Nyree Reynolds indicates an expanding indigenous managed heritage protection. The federal government has been under increasing pressure to enhance Section 10 protections ever since the Juukan Gorge scandal in 2020. The case of Reynolds has come to be regarded as a trial run of reform of the law as well as the community-based participation models.
In their turn, the supporters of mining and exploration have threatened with the so-called sovereign risk, as such last-minute heritage objections, even after state and federal approvals are no longer acceptable to investors. Bigger divisions between perceptions of economic development and Indigenous rights are brought to light by the argument.
The Road Ahead: Healing Country and Uplifting Voices
The ruling gives Nyree Reynolds and the Wiradjuri community more than security, it gives them hope. And well to be sure–The old people and our people would be proud–Said she herself. Her voice has demonstrated the way spiritual values, heritage affiliation, and law systems can coexist and preserve the nation.
The question is now how to make sure that we can have an ongoing observance of heritage protections, make sure that young Indigenous voices become leadership voices, and that there should be a process of development that reflects a genuine involvement of First Nations voices.
Final Reflections
Nyree Reynolds is an artist, an activist, a custodian and a visionary. Her solution to the problem of meeting cultural practice with the demands of federal law was a triumph, which sounds long after the Belubula River. Her narrative highlights an invaluable transformation in the heritage context of Australia where the law is Indigenous knowledge, and that Country means everything, including life itself.
