The curious case of the Burrup Murujuga
Words, voices and images: Connecting to cultures around the world
“Mediocrity does not see higher than itself. But talent instantly recognizes the genius”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Burrup Peninsula, or in local language the Murujuga, in the remote North West of Western Australia, contains an extraordinary collection of ancient rock carvings created by many hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people across the millennia.
We stood in our small and twisting valley, the ancient rocks piled high on either side of us, the hair on the back of our necks standing up in awe at what was in front of us.
There, peering back at us from deep time, a face, an image, probably the oldest representation of a human face on earth. There it was – carved in the rock before us, so many thousands of years earlier.
Our small party included Sylvia Hallam, the eminent Australian Archaeologist, Carmen Lawrence, Premier of Western Australia from1990 -1993 and Australia’s first female Premier and rock art enthusiasts, Robin Chapple (Western Australian Greens MP), Stephen Bennetts from the University of Western Australia and Ken Mulvaney from the University of New England, Armidale in New South Wales. We were on a trip organised by Jeannine Gan from the Friends of Australian Rock Art.
We stood in our small and twisting valley, the ancient rocks piled high on either side of us, the hair on the back of our necks standing up in awe at what was in front of us.
There, peering back at us from deep time, a face, an image, probably the oldest representation of a human face on earth. There it was – carved in the rock before us, so many thousands of years earlier.
Our small party included Sylvia Hallam, the eminent Australian Archaeologist, Carmen Lawrence, Premier of Western Australia from1990 -1993 and Australia’s first female Premier and rock art enthusiasts, Robin Chapple (Western Australian Greens MP), Stephen Bennetts from the University of Western Australia and Ken Mulvaney from the University of New England, Armidale in New South Wales. We were on a trip organised by Jeannine Gan from the Friends of Australian Rock Art.
So what is the Burrup Peninsula?
The Burrup Peninsula, or in local language the Murujuga, in the remote North West of Western Australia, contains an extraordinary collection of ancient rock carvings created by many hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people across the millennia.
The Murujuga, once an island, now forms a Peninsula as it was joined to the mainland by earth works to create road and rail access for industrial development. The Murujuga is part of the Dampier rock art precinct, which is made up of 42 islands, islets and rocks covering an area some 45 km in radius.
The rock art precinct represents the largest and possibly the oldest such precinct in the world. There are more than one million rock carvings. The area is beyond value, and as well as being of great archaeological, cultural and artistic merit, it is a storehouse of knowledge and memory. The place is of great significance to indigenous peoples of the region.
At the time of writing, the Murujuga was listed on the World Monument Funds list of the 100 most endangered places in the world. The Murujuga is recognised as a cultural and artistic achievement of global significance.
The Murujuga, is however, still under significant pressure from industrial development in the form of industrial infrastructure – factories and processing plants, infrastructure for extraction industries whose source of supply is distant from the Murujuga.
What is remarkable is that the rock art precinct on the Murujuga contains some of the hardest rock on earth and is surrounded by degraded pastoral land which is some of the flattest on earth, the latter perfect for industrial development and infrastructure. The major question therefore is why is the Murujuga being used for industrial infrastructure, given its enormously important and global cultural significance?
When the destruction first started the rock art was just bulldozed, no one knows how much, (Ken Mulvaney estimates that at least 10,000 engravings have been destroyed), now an attempt is made to save and relocate the rock art.
What eminent scientists around the world believe and what is critically important, is to ensure that as much of the rock art landscape as possible on the Murujuga stays intact. Moving the rock art essentially destroys its relevance in time and place.
As population pressure increases so does vandalism and the likelihood of theft. At the time of writing in 2007, the rock art remained largely unprotected and undocumented. A greater scientific effort is needed.
In early July 2007, the Australian Federal Government announced a National Heritage listing of parts of the Burrup Peninsula. Unlike World Heritage listing, National Heritage listing in Australia, does not provide protection for the site.
In an interview (3 July 2007) on the ABC radio (Australian Broadcasting Commission Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former Minister for the Environment and Water Resources at that time stated:
“The rock art along the archipelago tells a dynamic visual story about the formation of the landscape. It tells the story of the changes to the environment and the animals, the animals that populated this continent after the sea levels rose gives a real insight into the daily life of the Aboriginal people, from adapting to those significant environmental changes, and it shows the connections between the different Aboriginal groups”.
Dr Sylvia Hallam describes the precinct:
“The Burrup art is a monument to the spread of modern humanity, the first exponents of the symbolic and the sacred across the globe. It now sits amidst the incongruity of towering industrial installations spewing out flame, smoke and ammonia. Unique engravings are threatened, not only from immediate physical destruction…”.
The carvings that form the cultural landscape on the Murujuga and throughout the Dampier rock art precinct date back many thousands of years. It is universally accepted that the rock art dates back beyond 6,000 years, however more recent estimates suggest that these dates will be pushed back beyond 30,000 years. Many of the rock carvings show images of now extinct animals such as the Thylacine and of immense significance, the Murujuga contains what are likely to be the oldest depictions of the human face.
The Ngarluma people are now the guardians of the Murujuga. When Peter Hylands spoke to Robyne Churnside, a Ngarluma social activist in the town of Dampier, Western Australia, in July 2007, Robyne said:
“The environment of the Burrup has to be protected, it is connected to Aboriginal people who feel their rock art should be preserved, sometimes mother nature lets you do something but sometimes mother nature turns against you. There is a long history on the Burrup of preserving the ancient springs and their water and the land”.
Dr Sylvia Hallam says:
“Before sea levels rose in response to global warming at the end of the last ice age, the hills of what is now the Dampier Archipelago, were uplands 150 kilometers from the sea. Australia’s ‘archaic faces’ lie in small clusters in a very few remote valleys hidden in widely spaced massifs; the Burrup, the Durba Hills, the Calvert Range and the Cleland Hills, focal places of ceremony and symbolism, sparsely scattered across 1,700 hundred arid kilometers.
The Burrup valley provides a glimpse of a time when early colonisers moved through an interior, once less dry, linking significant nodes into a nexus of ceremony, symbolism and myth stretching across the continent.They managed to preserve these connections through the times of greatest aridity, around 20,000 years ago. The Burrup allows us to follow the processes of adaptation as sea levels rose, marine resources from warm shallow seas enriched subsistence, and populations increased. More people engraved a diversity of new motifs, in increasing numbers and rapidly changing styles over more and more localities, on what had become a group of islands. Sacred and secular activity on these islands ceased only with the advent of new colonists, pastoralists and pearlers.
Eventually iron ore-trains and salt evaporating basins linked the one-time Dampier Island to the mainland, to become the Burrup Peninsula.The abundance of Burrup art is often stressed. What is more significant is its extraordinary diversity, indicating the convergence of groups from a wide area, and a long sequence of phases, stretching back tens of thousands of years. Australians have gathered here for ceremony and celebration and impressed their symbols laboriously on these hard rocks for many times as long as the millennia that separate us from Stonehenge or the pyramids”.
1000 generations to make it, just one generation to break it
Over the many thousands of years that the Murujuga rock art was being carved, the local indigenous people preserved the art works of countless previous generations and they protected the land. The Yaburrara people, who lived there, led a sustainable lifestyle that lasted many thousands of years.
Recent history has dealt very badly with the local indigenous population. This is a long and hard story which I won’t go into here, however, following a massacre, the Yaburrara people, who were then the custodians of the Burrup were largely exterminated.
“The Ngarluma people, living now mainly in nearby Roebourne, retain strong cultural associations with the Dampier Archipelago. The neighbouring coastal Mardudunera also have traditional links with the area, as do the Yindjibarndi whose country is mainly further inland”. Robert Bednarik
So what are the lessons for humanity?
Peter Hylands goes on to say:
“I have always considered the Murujuga and its rock art to be one of human society’s most important cultural sites. In one sense I think of the Murujuga as a barometer of the human condition. If we can destroy our cultural heritage, that is our past and our present, we have the capacity to destroy the future; a future that belongs to others, the future generations of this world”.
Malcolm Fraser, Prime Minister of Australia (1975 – 1983) said:
“It is a mistake to think that the industrial development of the North West depends on using the Burrup Murujuga. The Peninsula is so rugged and precipitous that it is hard to understand how it ever came to be used for industrial development”.
Spike Milligan, the great comedian and writer, often expressed his deep disappointment and hurt at seeing Aboriginal Rock Art (in this case paintings in New South Wales) being vandalised. He would be very hurt by the Murujuga. Thank you, Spike.
And finally from a barman in Western Australia to Peter Hylands:
“It’s only old graffiti mate, if we’d have done it we’d be but in jail”.
What more can I say!
The Murujuga Declaration
Statement by Robyne Churnside, traditional owner of Murujuga (the Burrup Peninsula) read at the protest against the Pluto project by Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi custodians at Woodside’s Pluto LNG lease, 17 November 2007.
Woodside says they have not destroyed any rock art on the Burrup Peninsula, just ‘moved’ it. My people say that once a piece of rock art left by our ancestors is removed, our song line, our sacred site, is destroyed forever. Aboriginal people believe that the Burrup is a powerful and dangerous place, and that bad things will happen to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people if it is disturbed.
For nearly forty years, Woodside and other companies have made billions of dollars from our country. But what benefits have we, theAboriginal custodians of the Burrup, seen from the mining boom? While white mining executives live in luxury in Peppermint Grove in Perth, today, in 2007, there are still 15 Aboriginal families in Roebourne living in houses made of asbestos!
Our people said we were happy for Woodside to build the gas plant on our country, as long as they didn’t damage our rock art, our sacred sites, our library for future generations. We asked them to put the plant nearby, somewhere where our cultural heritage, our stories would be safe. That’s what we said to Woodside, the Western Australian Government and the Federal Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, but instead, they were too greedy, and didn’t listen to us.
When our old people signed the BMIEA Agreement with the State government in 2003, we thought they would be true to their word. Woodside and the Western Australian Government promised to protect our cultural heritage, but instead they told us a lot of lies.
Woodside has not even followed the section 18 conditions set down by State Minister, Michelle Roberts, legalising Woodside’s destruction of our rock art.
The WA Aboriginal Heritage Act gives mining companies permission to legally destroy Aboriginal heritage in Western Australia under whitefella law but doesn’t even follow white fellas’ own law. It gives a right of appeal to white developers who ask the Minister for permission to destroy our heritage, but not to the Traditional Owners who own that heritage. So it goes against white fellas’ own law, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.
WA Environment Minister David Templeman’s EPA approval for Woodside’s Pluto project was also illegal.
Woodside paid archaeologists and anthropologists to come here and destroy our rock art on Pluto A and B leases. None of them got permission from our old people to do this. By doing this, they breached their own professional codes of ethics, as well as the Burra Charter and the UNESCO Statement on the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage.
When my goombarli [brother-in-law] Wilfred Hicks asked Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull to protect our cultural heritage on Pluto B and move the Pluto plant somewhere else less dangerous, he waited until three days after his own Government was dissolved in October, and then told his offsider, Mr John Cobb, to send a fax to my goombarli telling his decision.
John Cobb told Wilfred that in his opinion, ‘the Pluto B area does not meet the criteria under the Act for an Aboriginal protected area’.
Woodside and the WA Government think they have the right to do whatever they like with our country here, which they call ‘Pluto B’, an area that is part of what we call ‘Murujuga’.
We say Murujuga is still our country, through our ancestors and our dreaming. We say it is still our right under Aboriginal Law to come here, to hunt, collect bush tucker and bush medicine, light fires, conduct ceremonies and make decisions about this country.
We have come here today to show people around the world that whatever Woodside, the State and Federal Governments say, we still have the right to enter our land, to exercise our native title rights here and to defend and protect it from the greed and destruction brought upon it by the Western Australian Government and Woodside.
At the time of writing Robyne Churnside is a member of the Ngarluma native title group, Pilbara Native Title Service Executive Committee, Equal Opportunity Commission Discrimination Committee and convenor of the Roebourne Strong Women’s Group.
So what is the Burrup Peninsula?
The Burrup Peninsula, or in local language the Murujuga, in the remote North West of Western Australia, contains an extraordinary collection of ancient rock carvings created by many hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people across the millennia.
The Murujuga, once an island, now forms a Peninsula as it was joined to the mainland by earth works to create road and rail access for industrial development. The Murujuga is part of the Dampier rock art precinct, which is made up of 42 islands, islets and rocks covering an area some 45 km in radius.
The rock art precinct represents the largest and possibly the oldest such precinct in the world. There are more than one million rock carvings. The area is beyond value, and as well as being of great archaeological, cultural and artistic merit, it is a storehouse of knowledge and memory. The place is of great significance to indigenous peoples of the region.
At the time of writing, the Murujuga was listed on the World Monument Funds list of the 100 most endangered places in the world. The Murujuga is recognised as a cultural and artistic achievement of global significance.
The Murujuga, is however, still under significant pressure from industrial development in the form of industrial infrastructure – factories and processing plants, infrastructure for extraction industries whose source of supply is distant from the Murujuga.
What is remarkable is that the rock art precinct on the Murujuga contains some of the hardest rock on earth and is surrounded by degraded pastoral land which is some of the flattest on earth, the latter perfect for industrial development and infrastructure. The major question therefore is why is the Murujuga being used for industrial infrastructure, given its enormously important and global cultural significance?
When the destruction first started the rock art was just bulldozed, no one knows how much, (Ken Mulvaney estimates that at least 10,000 engravings have been destroyed), now an attempt is made to save and relocate the rock art.
What eminent scientists around the world believe and what is critically important, is to ensure that as much of the rock art landscape as possible on the Murujuga stays intact. Moving the rock art essentially destroys its relevance in time and place.
As population pressure increases so does vandalism and the likelihood of theft. At the time of writing in 2007, the rock art remained largely unprotected and undocumented. A greater scientific effort is needed.
In early July 2007, the Australian Federal Government announced a National Heritage listing of parts of the Burrup Peninsula. Unlike World Heritage listing, National Heritage listing in Australia, does not provide protection for the site.
In an interview (3 July 2007) on the ABC radio (Australian Broadcasting Commission Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former Minister for the Environment and Water Resources at that time stated:
“The rock art along the archipelago tells a dynamic visual story about the formation of the landscape. It tells the story of the changes to the environment and the animals, the animals that populated this continent after the sea levels rose gives a real insight into the daily life of the Aboriginal people, from adapting to those significant environmental changes, and it shows the connections between the different Aboriginal groups”.
Dr Sylvia Hallam describes the precinct:
“The Burrup art is a monument to the spread of modern humanity, the first exponents of the symbolic and the sacred across the globe. It now sits amidst the incongruity of towering industrial installations spewing out flame, smoke and ammonia. Unique engravings are threatened, not only from immediate physical destruction…”.
The carvings that form the cultural landscape on the Murujuga and throughout the Dampier rock art precinct date back many thousands of years. It is universally accepted that the rock art dates back beyond 6,000 years, however more recent estimates suggest that these dates will be pushed back beyond 30,000 years. Many of the rock carvings show images of now extinct animals such as the Thylacine and of immense significance, the Murujuga contains what are likely to be the oldest depictions of the human face.
The Ngarluma people are now the guardians of the Murujuga. When Peter Hylands spoke to Robyne Churnside, a Ngarluma social activist in the town of Dampier, Western Australia, in July 2007, Robyne said:
“The environment of the Burrup has to be protected, it is connected to Aboriginal people who feel their rock art should be preserved, sometimes mother nature lets you do something but sometimes mother nature turns against you. There is a long history on the Burrup of preserving the ancient springs and their water and the land”.
Dr Sylvia Hallam says:
“Before sea levels rose in response to global warming at the end of the last ice age, the hills of what is now the Dampier Archipelago, were uplands 150 kilometers from the sea. Australia’s ‘archaic faces’ lie in small clusters in a very few remote valleys hidden in widely spaced massifs; the Burrup, the Durba Hills, the Calvert Range and the Cleland Hills, focal places of ceremony and symbolism, sparsely scattered across 1,700 hundred arid kilometers.
The Burrup valley provides a glimpse of a time when early colonisers moved through an interior, once less dry, linking significant nodes into a nexus of ceremony, symbolism and myth stretching across the continent.They managed to preserve these connections through the times of greatest aridity, around 20,000 years ago. The Burrup allows us to follow the processes of adaptation as sea levels rose, marine resources from warm shallow seas enriched subsistence, and populations increased. More people engraved a diversity of new motifs, in increasing numbers and rapidly changing styles over more and more localities, on what had become a group of islands. Sacred and secular activity on these islands ceased only with the advent of new colonists, pastoralists and pearlers.
Eventually iron ore-trains and salt evaporating basins linked the one-time Dampier Island to the mainland, to become the Burrup Peninsula.The abundance of Burrup art is often stressed. What is more significant is its extraordinary diversity, indicating the convergence of groups from a wide area, and a long sequence of phases, stretching back tens of thousands of years. Australians have gathered here for ceremony and celebration and impressed their symbols laboriously on these hard rocks for many times as long as the millennia that separate us from Stonehenge or the pyramids”.
1000 generations to make it, just one generation to break it
Over the many thousands of years that the Murujuga rock art was being carved, the local indigenous people preserved the art works of countless previous generations and they protected the land. The Yaburrara people, who lived there, led a sustainable lifestyle that lasted many thousands of years.
Recent history has dealt very badly with the local indigenous population. This is a long and hard story which I won’t go into here, however, following a massacre, the Yaburrara people, who were then the custodians of the Burrup were largely exterminated.
“The Ngarluma people, living now mainly in nearby Roebourne, retain strong cultural associations with the Dampier Archipelago. The neighbouring coastal Mardudunera also have traditional links with the area, as do the Yindjibarndi whose country is mainly further inland”. Robert Bednarik
So what are the lessons for humanity?
Peter Hylands goes on to say:
“I have always considered the Murujuga and its rock art to be one of human society’s most important cultural sites. In one sense I think of the Murujuga as a barometer of the human condition. If we can destroy our cultural heritage, that is our past and our present, we have the capacity to destroy the future; a future that belongs to others, the future generations of this world”.
Malcolm Fraser, Prime Minister of Australia (1975 – 1983) said:
“It is a mistake to think that the industrial development of the North West depends on using the Burrup Murujuga. The Peninsula is so rugged and precipitous that it is hard to understand how it ever came to be used for industrial development”.
Spike Milligan, the great comedian and writer, often expressed his deep disappointment and hurt at seeing Aboriginal Rock Art (in this case paintings in New South Wales) being vandalised. He would be very hurt by the Murujuga. Thank you, Spike.
And finally from a barman in Western Australia to Peter Hylands:
“It’s only old graffiti mate, if we’d have done it we’d be but in jail”.
What more can I say!
The Murujuga Declaration
Statement by Robyne Churnside, traditional owner of Murujuga (the Burrup Peninsula) read at the protest against the Pluto project by Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi custodians at Woodside’s Pluto LNG lease, 17 November 2007.
Woodside says they have not destroyed any rock art on the Burrup Peninsula, just ‘moved’ it. My people say that once a piece of rock art left by our ancestors is removed, our song line, our sacred site, is destroyed forever. Aboriginal people believe that the Burrup is a powerful and dangerous place, and that bad things will happen to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people if it is disturbed.
For nearly forty years, Woodside and other companies have made billions of dollars from our country. But what benefits have we, theAboriginal custodians of the Burrup, seen from the mining boom? While white mining executives live in luxury in Peppermint Grove in Perth, today, in 2007, there are still 15 Aboriginal families in Roebourne living in houses made of asbestos!
Our people said we were happy for Woodside to build the gas plant on our country, as long as they didn’t damage our rock art, our sacred sites, our library for future generations. We asked them to put the plant nearby, somewhere where our cultural heritage, our stories would be safe. That’s what we said to Woodside, the Western Australian Government and the Federal Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, but instead, they were too greedy, and didn’t listen to us.
When our old people signed the BMIEA Agreement with the State government in 2003, we thought they would be true to their word. Woodside and the Western Australian Government promised to protect our cultural heritage, but instead they told us a lot of lies.
Woodside has not even followed the section 18 conditions set down by State Minister, Michelle Roberts, legalising Woodside’s destruction of our rock art.
The WA Aboriginal Heritage Act gives mining companies permission to legally destroy Aboriginal heritage in Western Australia under whitefella law but doesn’t even follow white fellas’ own law. It gives a right of appeal to white developers who ask the Minister for permission to destroy our heritage, but not to the Traditional Owners who own that heritage. So it goes against white fellas’ own law, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.
WA Environment Minister David Templeman’s EPA approval for Woodside’s Pluto project was also illegal.
Woodside paid archaeologists and anthropologists to come here and destroy our rock art on Pluto A and B leases. None of them got permission from our old people to do this. By doing this, they breached their own professional codes of ethics, as well as the Burra Charter and the UNESCO Statement on the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage.
When my goombarli [brother-in-law] Wilfred Hicks asked Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull to protect our cultural heritage on Pluto B and move the Pluto plant somewhere else less dangerous, he waited until three days after his own Government was dissolved in October, and then told his offsider, Mr John Cobb, to send a fax to my goombarli telling his decision.
John Cobb told Wilfred that in his opinion, ‘the Pluto B area does not meet the criteria under the Act for an Aboriginal protected area’.
Woodside and the WA Government think they have the right to do whatever they like with our country here, which they call ‘Pluto B’, an area that is part of what we call ‘Murujuga’.
We say Murujuga is still our country, through our ancestors and our dreaming. We say it is still our right under Aboriginal Law to come here, to hunt, collect bush tucker and bush medicine, light fires, conduct ceremonies and make decisions about this country.
We have come here today to show people around the world that whatever Woodside, the State and Federal Governments say, we still have the right to enter our land, to exercise our native title rights here and to defend and protect it from the greed and destruction brought upon it by the Western Australian Government and Woodside.
At the time of writing Robyne Churnside is a member of the Ngarluma native title group, Pilbara Native Title Service Executive Committee, Equal Opportunity Commission Discrimination Committee and convenor of the Roebourne Strong Women’s Group.
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