Videos submitted to the federal court by the Environmental Defenders Office in its bid to stop Santos's Barossa gas pipeline west of the Tiwi Islands have been released, showing evidence involving what the judge called "confection".
The videos, published by the ABC Friday, show a cultural mapping exercise of which Justice Natalie Charlesworth was scathing.
The federal court judge dismissed the case in January 2024 and ordered the not for profit legal group to pay Santos $9 million in costs.
The judge found some of the EDO's consultants engaged in a "subtle form of coaching" of Tiwi Islands witnesses, and that the cultural mapping exercises involved a degree of "confection or construction" and were "so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on them".
A later review by the Commonwealth's environment and energy department found the EDO did not breach the terms of its federal funding agreement.
Justice Charlesworth said consultant Dr Mick O'Leary was shown in some instances "to encourage and hint at the informants … as though 'memories' were being prompted by the exercise", the ABC reports.
One of the videos shows an EDO lawyer annotating a map with a pencil after a Tiwi informant says "to the sea".
Justice Charlesworth wrote in her judgement that "the informant says nothing to the lawyer about where that line should begin or (critically) where it should end".
"Most concerningly, I consider that Video 39 depicts what could only be described as the EDO lawyer drawing on the map in a way that could not, on any reasonable view, truthfully reflect what the Tiwi informant had said," she wrote.
Santos constructed a 262-kilometre Barossa gas export pipeline in the Timor Sea in 2023.
The case began when a group of Tiwi Islands Traditional Owners, with the EDO acting on their behalf, pursued an urgent injunction to pause the project arguing a "significant new environmental impact or risk" was not covered in Santos's environmental management plan, which had been approved by the federal government.
The Traditional Owners argued the pipeline's route would disturb an ancestral being known as Ampiji the rainbow serpent and a songline belonging to the Crocodile Man.
They also argued the underwater area may contain archaeological artefacts from human activity on the land during the Ice Age before sea levels rose.
The legal bid was defeated in January last year.
