IT’S been called “Australia’s Ark”, our own Galapagos, with 24 native species found nowhere else on earth. The animals are 10 per cent larger than mainland creatures, because they’re not scrawny from running for their lives.

They’re friendly, having never known predation from cats, foxes or dingoes, let alone hungry Aboriginal or white hunters.

Barrow Island, 100km off WA’s Pilbara coast, has since 1910 been listed as an A-Class reserve, among the most protected type of land anywhere. It is also home to Australia’s largest gas project, Gorgon, being built by American company Chevron.

Chevron talks of managing a new kind of Eden, where nature coexists alongside massive industry.

Naturalist Harry Butler, a consultant for Chevron, calls Barrow a “most remarkable place” that has not been subject to “the influences of the pioneers, the colonists, the farmers, the pastoralists, the city dwellers”.

It has however been subject to the influences of Chevron, which Forbes this year named the world’s 11th biggest oil and gas company. Butler says Chevron sets world standards for big mining in fragile environments.

Most important are the island’s remarkable quarantine procedures, including the shrink-wrapping and fumigation of pallets of incoming equipment, to stop mice, rats, snakes, insects and plant matter from making a break for it and starting new life on Barrow.

They even shrink-wrap and fumigate bulldozers.

“But for ordinary people, Barrow is a place where you can see what Australia was like before the coming of white men,” says Butler in a 2011 Chevron promo, that shows turtles and mud crabs but nothing of the giant LNG gas facility and port now approaching completion.

The problem is that no ordinary Australian can visit the American-controlled island.

Twice in the last 11 months, Chevron has denied requests from News Corp Australia to visit Barrow, to see first-hand the miracle of nature coexisting with big industry.

WA’s Department of Parks and Wildlife — who supposedly control the A-Class reserve, that is, more than 95 per cent of the 234sq km island — cannot help. They say any arrangements must be made with Chevron.

Passing sailors or fishermen are not permitted to weigh anchor and stretch their legs for fear of bringing invasive species ashore in their boardshorts and eskies. Local police confirmed that Barrow is off-limits to all Australians, except for the 3000 FIFO workers who live in a closely monitored world of no-go zones.

No work vehicle may leave the island’s 1200km of dirt tracks, all strictly speed-limited to save starry-eyed golden bandicoots, spectacled hare-wallabies and Barrow Island euros from becoming road kill — which happens often, according to the available road toll, because they are naive of the motor-car concept.

But the Chevron sparky who is told he may not bring his rod and lure to the island to “minimise the impact to fish” won’t complain that he must contain his leisure activities to the two swimming pools, cricket nets, tennis and basketball courts, soccer fields, golf-driving nets, bocce courts and putting greens.

He’s earning around $300,000pa for a 26-day-on, nine-day-off shift, and if he has to avert his eyes from one of the cute little hopping things that come by the dorms to say hello of an evening, he can live with that.

He knows he faces instant dismissal if he’s seen throwing the merest Twistie to one of them. He can’t even eat outside of a designated mess. That’s sackable, too.

Night lighting in the camps is dull orange in order not to disorient easily confused turtles; leftover food is frozen and taken to the mainland; drinking water is made from seawater. Sewage is buried, deep.

Prior to arrival on Barrow, workers are put through a privately run customs-style inspection of his or her belongings. Pockets are turned out, the undercarriage of runners examined, bags searched.

They’re looking for seeds or any personal food items that could turn into unwelcome plants, or the bloke who cannot stand to leave home his axolotl on his long shift.

Chevron is desperate to protect its reputation on the island, saying it has built “the world’s largest non-government quarantine initiative”. It’s hugely expensive — and is part of the reason for the project’s huge cost blowouts, which last year reportedly upped from the original $37bn to $54bn.

Worker gossip on the reason for the extraordinary quarantine measures goes like this: “Chevron is using Barrow Island to show that big industry can coexist on an A-class reserve to prove that it can manage drilling and extraction in other pristine areas such as Alaska, the Arctic and Antarctica.”

Piers Verstegen, director of the Conversation Council of WA, says it’s not scuttlebutt but sound business logic: “I think it’s well-accepted that’s the reason why Chevron is prepared to incur such significant added costs. It’s a long play that will improve their ability to have developments in sensitive areas.”

The company was not coy when asked about this, stating: “Chevron has proven that with proper management and the right workforce culture, developments the size of Gorgon and the environment can co-exist.”

Yet there are always breaks in any quarantine wall. Chevron and the WA Government refer to non-specific “critical breaches” and give little detail. Most assume this means mice, rats, buffel grass and other weeds.

A cat would constitute the most critical breach of all. So far no worker — the kind that anonymously tips off the Wilderness Society, unions and the Greens about dead animals and invasive weeds — has ever mentioned a cat.

“If a cat was found on Barrow Island,” a former FIFO told me, “that info would be harder to get out of Chevron than a list of ASIO’s current operations.”

There is admiration in the workforce for the sheer doggedness of Chevron’s quarantine blockade, where the future of the burrowing bettong — aka, the Barrow Island boodie — is treated straight-faced as seriously as billions in gas revenue.

“They’ve done a great job avoiding impact,” says the ex-worker. “But it’s massively impacted anyway.”

Robin Chapple from the WA Greens is the mosquito heard most often whining in the ears of Chevron and the WA Government over Barrow.

He remembers how in 2003 the Environment Protection Authority recommended against the Gorgon LNG expansion and how Premier Colin Barnett, then in Opposition, opposed Chevron bringing gas onshore to Barrow from its Jantz and Gorgon deep-sea fields, northwest of the island.

He wanted the gas piped to the mainland. Barnett said there was “no technical reason that the LNG plant — or, indeed, any future gas processing plants — needs to be on Barrow Island. An LNG plant is a helluva large plant.”

His views have since changed.

Chevron has been on Barrow since the early 1960s, when Caltex (owned by Texaco and Standard Oil, later known as Chevron) joined with Ampol to form West Australian Petroleum Pty Ltd (WAPET). Now Chevron runs the show.

Back in WAPET times, they pulled oil from the 400 or so “nodding donkey” land rigs, but these days those donkeys mostly pull saline water. Offshore gas is the game.

Chapple, who once worked reviewing environmental conditions on the island, recalls extraordinary measures to protect the island, back when Harry Butler was very hands-on (he’s now 85).

“They spent thousands of dollars tracking down one mouse,” says Chapple.

“It was seen running out of pipe that was being offloaded from a barge. They established a 300m perimeter, sent a group of people in who caught every animal they could, then fumigated the area and everything was killed.

“And they found that mouse and nailed it. Now we know there have been more ‘critical’ breaches in recent years. What they are, we don’t know, because they haven’t been able to provide the information.”

Some believe it refers to invasive buffel grass. It could be a rat, or two. Now, escapee beetles, rodents, snakes and seeds are harder to manage as work intensifies in anticipation of the arrival of the first gas coming ashore on Barrow, later this year.

Marsupials are being relocated to other remote islands and the mainland. This is part of Chevron’s requirement to undertake environmental “offsets” by starting new colonies in other places where they’ve disappeared.

With no independent observer permitted on the island, Verstegen says it remains “an open question” whether animals are also being shifted because they’re not coping under pressure.

In 2011, our sister paper, the Sunday Times, used Freedom of Information to reveal that more than 1500 animals died natural and unnatural deaths on the island between 2009 and 2011, several “mown down” each day by work vehicles.

It’s not the numbers that are shocking. It’s that you need to FOI a marsupial road toll on an Australian island.

paul.toohey@news.com.au