The connection between the Jarrah Forest, the submarine base, and the data centres is not metaphorical. It is the three pillars of AUKUS, made material in a single city. Pillar III strips the forest to supply aluminium and gallium to the other two pillars, gutting environmental and water security.

Daniel Garlett is a Noongar cultural educator and community advocate who has spent decades opposing logging, mining, and large-scale land clearing in Western Australia’s forests and catchments. He lives here because he says he cannot live anywhere else. The quiet, the canopy, and the smell of damp earth after rain are not amenities. They are conditions of life.