Deep History, lore, Pilbara landscape lost to mining.
In the Pilbara region on the edge of the Australian land mass, the Wintawari Guruma people protect the Weelamurra site. Weelamurra contains ancient Aboriginal petroglyphs, where some human habitation at rock shelters can be apparently be dated to over 50000 years old, and possibly about 60000 years old. These Aboriginal rock shelters appear to have been inhabited 45000 years before the end of the last “Ice Age” or the construction of Gobekli Tepe. Other ancient rock shelters at Weelamurra contain artwork, animal iconography, and geometric designs which are sacred to Guruma people and which appear to invoke creation stories.
The Weelamurra site, protected for over 50000 years, is leased to major resource extraction corporation Fortescue. The company has requested permission from the government of Western Australia to destroy these rock shelters to build mines.
In the Pilbara region alone, not considering the rest of Western Australia, there are at least 13300 formally-documented and distinct Aboriginal and ancient cultural sites on land leased to Rio Tinto for mining. (And this doesn’t take into account the thousands of other ancient cultural sites leased to other major mining corporations. The BHP company, for example, “owns” over 8000 ancient Aboriginal sites in the Pilbara.) The Eastern Gurumi report that they’ve lost more than 400 ancient heritage sites between 2010 and 2020. Kathryn Przywolnik, heritage manager for the Wintawari Guruma: “Everybody, every group, has stories about places that were culturally very valuable that are now inaccessible, or gone, or diminished, or perched on the edge of a mining site.” Included in a report by The Guardian from August 2020, a Martidja Banyjima senior elder suggested that it was important to record Banjima resistance to the expansion of mines “so they know we didn’t just sign off on this stuff and forget about it, we put up a fight about these places, about our lore and culture. We need people to know that.”
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In recent years, Western Australia has issued hundreds of leases to major mining corporations, and the issuing of leases is accelerating, allowing permission to blast, destroy, and remake hundreds of ancient cultural heritage sites. The Guardian reported in 2020 that there are 536 formally-documented cultural heritage sites located within the Paraburdoo iron ore extraction hub, also stating: “Permanent waterholes, which are sacred to the Yinhawangka and rare in the Pilbara, make up 7% of the sites.” Yirra is an unprotected Yinhawangka site in the region with evidence of Aboriginal occupation at least 23000 years old. The Guardian also reports that Yirra is less than 75 meters away from a 110-meter-high major roadway installation that Rio Tinto uses to truck iron ore from the mining pit.
In the same report, Indigenous scholar Marcia Langton said that public attention is all that keeps mining corporations from destroying more ancient sites. “Australians need to understand that the mining industry is making a play for raw power to destroy our heritage, Australian heritage, and world heritage – for a few dollars. [...] The companies ... are just biding their time and waiting for public attention to move to something else, and they will go ahead and destroy hundreds of sites -- amongst them sites as important as Juukan Gorge.”
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The Burrup Peninsula. In Ngayarda language of the Jaburara, the site is “Murujuga.” Home to an estimated 2 million Aboriginal petroglyphs, some of the rock art estimated to be 47000 to 50000 years old. It’s in the Pilbara region along the Indian Ocean coast of the state of “Western Australia.” peninsula is only about 115 square kilometers in size. The peninsula and nearby shoreline is also home Karratha Gas Plant; Yara Pilbara fertilizer plant; the largest mercury treatment plant in Australia; Yara Pilbara and Orica ammonium nitrates and explosives plants; a Rio Tinto iron ore terminal; a Rio Tinto salt production site; what used to be the largest offshore gas production platform in the world; the Pluto LNG plant processing gas from underwater offshore Xena gas fields; the Ichthys liquefied natural gas pipeline, located offshore, is the longest subsea pipeline in the Southern Hemisphere. [More on the significance and loss of Murujuga’s art and landscapes.]
Underwater sites of ancient Aboriginal cultural heritage are not automatically legally protected in Australia. During the Pleistocene and early Holocene, when sea levels were lower, Aboriginal communities in the Pilbara region lived on the continental shelf, along the coast of the Indian Ocean, on land now submerged beneath the sea.
In July 2020, news broke that many Aboriginal tools, at least 7000 to 8500 years old, had been documented from underwater sites just offshore of Murujuga. This research was published by the Deep History in Sea Country project team. And this site is less than 5 kilometers (3-ish miles) from where Australia’s largest gas producer, Woodside Petroluem, plans to build an $11 billion underwater fossil fuel pipeline known as the Scarborough project pending a final investment decision to be announced in 2021. Woodside is not legally compelled to take Aboriginal cultural heritage into consideration when constructing marine pipelines.
The Murujuga Aboriginal Corps (MAC) represents Indigenous land caretakers in the region. One of the leaders of MAC, Peter Jeffries, had this to say about the documentation of the submerged tools at Murujuga:
“At the moment, a 75-year-old shipwreck is automatically protected on discovery, but 8000-year-old evidence of Indigenous cultural heritage is not. This could allow a tragic destruction of important heritage, similar to the Juukan Gorge situation.”
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On 24 May 2020, to build the “Brockman 4″ iron ore mine, major leading international mining corporation Rio Tinto used explosives to destroy Aboriginal rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, which is also in the Pilbara region, relatively close to Murujuga. These now-destroyed Aboriginal sites contained artwork over 45000 years old. This news reached international headlines in 2020. And then, in the first week of September 2020, news also broke that Rio Tinto was not only aware of the significance of the Juukan Gorge site, but, several days before detonating the explosives, upper-level Rio Tinto managers hired lawyers in anticipation of a potential legal injunction launched by traditional caretakers of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people. In response to these recent destructions, Western Australia’s minister for Aboriginal affairs has said that the state will not reconsider or reevaluate the impact on ancient cultural sites for the leases which it has already issued to mining corporations.
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The Banjima people care for land near Guruma communities. In August 2020, The Guardian reported that, to expand its South Flank iron ore mine, major resource extraction corporation BHP has received approval to destroy between 40 and 86 of the cultural heritage sites on Banjima land. Senior Martidja Banyjima elder Maitland Parker: “The cumulative destruction of our country is something which sits uneasily with our people.”
An archaeologist specializing in Western Australia Aboriginal rock art, speaking in 2013 about the 50000-year-old Murujuga petroglyphs on the Burrup Peninsula: “This is the longest, deepest, [most] continuous narrative of human production, belief systems, and culture in the world.”
One Martidja Banyjima senior elder said that this iron ore mine will “hurt us Banjima people very bad. We can’t change the lore, the songs or the country, because they were given to us by the old people, but the mining companies can take the country away and make it changed forever.“