This exposé critically examines how a coalition of settler-led groups—including the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), Save Kariong Sacred Lands, Save Kincumber Wetlands, and My Place Central Coast—has mobilised environmental rhetoric and pseudocultural authority to oppose the land rights and development initiatives of the legally recognised Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council (DLALC). Central to their efforts is the deployment of fraudulent “GuriNgai” identity claims, which have been repudiated by all legitimate Aboriginal Land Councils in the region.
While these groups publicly frame their actions as grassroots conservation efforts, the report demonstrates that they function as an interconnected settler network with shared leadership, messaging, and ideological aims. Figures like Jake Cassar (CEA founder), Lisa Bellamy (activist and political candidate), and Vicki Burke (My Place coordinator) form the leadership core of this network. Through orchestrated protests, political campaigns, and strategic use of sympathetic media platforms (such as Coast Community News and The Point), they have constructed an alternative cultural authority designed to displace Aboriginal decision-making on Country.
These campaigns repeatedly target DLALC’s lawful developments—such as affordable housing at Kariong and a proposed supermarket at Kincumber—branding them as threats to “sacred land.” However, this sacredness is redefined through settler spirituality and pseudoarchaeology, not Aboriginal law or custom. Forgotten Origin, a blog operated by Steven and Evan Strong, promotes conspiracy-laden narratives involving Atlanteans and Egyptian hieroglyphs. These narratives, while scientifically debunked, have been used to justify protest actions and discredit Aboriginal heritage assessments conducted under proper cultural protocols.
The media plays a critical role in manufacturing legitimacy for this settler resistance. Coast Community News and The Point regularly amplify the voices of unrecognised “GuriNgai” figures, such as Tracey Howie and Colleen Fuller, while downplaying or omitting the voices of DLALC and other recognised Aboriginal leaders. By using emotionally charged language, imagery of “mother trees,” and romantic tropes of guardianship, these outlets cast settler activists as the rightful stewards of Aboriginal land.
Legally, this movement constitutes a direct threat to the integrity of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (NSW) and the emerging Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2023 (NSW). By promoting unverified custodianship and creating a “shadow consultative regime,” settler activists pressure councils and state agencies to engage with individuals and groups that have no legal standing. This violates the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (UN General Assembly, 2007) and displaces rightful Aboriginal governance with settler-endorsed proxies.
Jake Cassar is identified as a central architect of this strategy. Through his bushcraft business, activist leadership, and political grooming of candidates like Lisa Bellamy, he cultivates a persona of cultural allyship while actively undermining Aboriginal land rights. His collaborations with GuriNgai impostors and strategic use of media enable him to occupy a proxy-Indigenous position in the public imagination, despite lacking any recognised cultural authority. His campaigns are marked by a pattern of anti-Aboriginal mobilisation: they routinely challenge the legitimacy of DLALC and deny the right of Aboriginal communities to exercise economic self-determination on land lawfully returned through struggle.
This convergence of environmentalism, conspiracy, and settler identity fraud culminates in what the report terms an “epistemic sabotage.” The fabrication of heritage claims, substitution of legitimate Aboriginal voices with false custodians, and the weaponisation of media and political influence represent a coordinated effort to recolonise not only land, but cultural authority. Under the guise of conservation, the settler alliance reasserts control over who speaks for Country, who is recognised as Aboriginal, and what cultural heritage “counts.”
The report concludes that these campaigns are not benign expressions of local concern, but part of a broader settler-colonial strategy to destabilise Aboriginal sovereignty. It offers concrete policy recommendations: enforceable penalties for identity fraud, exclusive consultation with recognised Aboriginal entities, rigorous identity verification in media and education, and funding for Aboriginal-led narrative reclamation. Reconciliation, the report argues, cannot proceed while settler groups misappropriate Aboriginal identity to undermine Aboriginal governance.
Bungaree.org 
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