#murujuga

[jacaelyx]

The absolute disrespect for Indigenous land and art in Australia is ridiculous what do you mean we literally got it approved for world heritage listing and it's 50000 years old and the government still says Yeah Let's Mine Gas On It Until 2070 This Won't Kill The World At All

[twitterexile]

[rjzimmerman]

Pollution is threatening some of the world’s oldest rock carvings

Scientists fear climate change and mining contamination could destroy Murujuga—Australia’s next UNESCO site—within a century.

Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

On a remote peninsula in Western Australia, a 16-hour drive from the nearest city, 30,000-year-old faces stare at the rare visitor to this wild location. Those human depictions are part of Murujuga, one of the world’s largest collections of ancient rock art. These artifacts are 10 times older than the pyramids of Egypt.

Dating back tens of thousands of years, this cluster of one million images on the Burrup Peninsula is like an artistic encyclopedia, depicting human and environmental evolution. Carved into rocks are images of changing landscapes, tribal customs, and now-extinct species such as the Tasmanian tiger and fat-tailed kangaroo. These petroglyphs also reveal the mythology of one of the world’s oldest civilizations, Aboriginal Australians.

Although this extraordinary place is little known, even to most Australians, it is now gaining recognition for two contrasting reasons. There’s excitement around the tentative UNESCO World Heritage listing of Murujuga, which could drive a tourism boom. That is tempered, however, by grave warnings from rock art scientists that Murujuga could be destroyed within a century by pollution from the massive and growing industrial precinct that surrounds it.

Such a catastrophe is not unprecedented in Western Australia (WA), the economy of which relies on resource extraction. Two years ago, the world’s second biggest mining company, Rio Tinto, blasted a sacred 46,000-year-old Aboriginal rock art shelter, Juukan Gorge, as it expanded an iron ore project. That atrocity occurred about 140 miles south of Murujuga.

Both of those rock art sites are located in the Pilbara. This rugged region in WA’s north features towering gorges, serrated mountains, vast plains of red earth, and many multibillion-dollar mines. WA is among the most sparsely populated territories on the planet. It has almost four times the land area of Texas, yet is home to only 2.6 million people, about 80 percent of whom live in the state capital Perth, and less than 4 percent of whom are Aboriginal.

[withlovesana]

World's oldest known depiction of a human face, Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula), Western Australia.

[black-australia]

The world’s oldest and largest collection of rock art – the Burrup Peninsula, or Murujuga, on the Dampier Archipelago – has been deregistered as a sacred site under new guidelines to the Western Australia’s weak Aboriginal heritage laws, which state there must be evidence of religious activity to qualify it as a ‘sacred site’. The change has led to questions about whether the art will be reinstated to the cultural heritage register following a successful Supreme Court decision that ruled against the WA government’s definition of a ‘sacred site’.

Who wants to bet that they’ve done this because this site is sitting on top of prime mining land?!

[lukerowett]

The indigenous petroglyphs at the Burrup Peninsula or Murujuga. The Government protection of these 10-millennia old archaeological art works appears very much inadequate, and rather shameful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murujuga

[digitaldreamtime-blog]