Who owns the past? Koonalda puts focus on Indigenous issues

Researchers Keryn Walshe (left) and April Nowell at Koonalda Cave, South Australia

This week, almost three years after vandals scrawled graffiti over 30,000 year-old engravings in the unique Koonalda Cave, the South Australian government finally installed surveillance cameras at the remote Nullarbor site.

The technology, which includes a beam to alert officials 900km away in Adelaide if anyone enters the limestone complex, with its precious “finger flute” engravings, has been welcomed by Indigenous custodians.

Yet the delay in upgrading security at Koonalda, a national heritage site with an international reputation, is a salutary case study in the difficult question of deciding “who owns the past” in a country with a living culture that dates back 65,000 years.

Like the recently revived Mungo Man reburial controversy, and the ongoing dispute over a tailings dam at Blayney in NSW, Koonalda sees separate groups of First Nations people claiming the right to speak for their heritage.

It’s easy to blame the delays at Koonalda on the conflict between the legal native title holders, the Far West Coast Aboriginal Corporation, and the Mirning Traditional Owners also given a voice in this issue. Yet it also raises questions about the failure of government to resolve an impasse that has threatened to indefinitely block scientists from an important cultural site.

The installation of the cameras is a step forward for Koonalda, but little else emerging from a 2½-year-long review augurs particularly well for resolving future disputes.

Indeed, extended consultations involving bureaucrats, Indigenous owners and external consultants have proved nothing short of a disaster for researchers, who have spent several years recording the cave’s rock art.

In 2022, archaeologist Dr Keryn Walshe raised the alarm about the vandalism, forcing the state and federal governments to pay attention to a site that had sat under the radar of most Australians since it was first recorded in 1956.

The vandalism prompted a $400,000 grant from the Australian Heritage Council to fund the review, which was charged with developing a conservation management plan, and to pay for a new security system. All research was halted and razor wire was added to a gate at Koonalda as a stop gap, but the review quickly got bogged down.

Walshe and colleagues Dr Clare Buswell, chair of the conservation commission of the Australian Speleological Federation, and Dr April Nowell, an archaeologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, wanted access for just 10 days to carry out digital scanning of the engravings and take water and air samples as part of managing the future of the fragile limestone cave system.

They were forced to cool their heels for years before discovering a few weeks ago that they had lost their fight to resume work. About $85,000 of the heritage money, which had been earmarked for their research, was to be sent back to the council because the delays meant the deadline for use of the money had passed.

This week, a letter from the national parks section of the South Australian Department of Environment and Water, confirmed to Walshe that she would not get a permit.

Instead the department was developing a “research prospectus and protocol” to manage research. No timetable was given.

The reason? It seems that while the native title holders, the FWCAC, are happy for work to ­resume, the Mirning Traditional Owners are not, and their concern about “activities to be undertaken within the cave” has caused the impasse. (The Mirning Traditional Owners are people listed on the state’s Aboriginal Heritage central archive as having a traditional association with the cave.)

The state Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation says that if work goes ahead, the traditional owners could launch a complaint, seeking prosecution of the scientists under the state’s Aboriginal Heritage Act, which carries significant penalties for those who damage or interfere with ­Aboriginal heritage without the proper authorisation.

Clearly, bureaucrats must operate within the law and must also be sensitive to the complex ties to the land of different, if related, Indigenous groups.

It’s understood that, along with their claims to be the “cultural monitors” of the site, some Mirning elders have cultural concerns about women entering the site.

But the delays at Koonalda have frustrated scientists and the FWCAC who are keen to ensure not just the preservation of the cave but continued investigation into its extraordinary human story. Closing sites like Koonalda to modern scientific study makes it all too easy for Australians to ignore or discount this ancient shared past: out of sight can readily become out of mind.

Walshe, who works as a freelance archaeologist, believes the agencies involved have “chosen to find fault within the Indigenous stakeholders rather than take responsibility for protecting a site they are legally responsible for”. She has said previously the departments involved, and their ministers, failed “even the lowest standard of conservation practice”.

A management plan has now been agreed and Walshe is still hopeful of getting a permit, despite the concerns of some Mirning people about female researchers entering the cave.

Walshe argues her team knows precisely what to do after having worked for so long on the site in the past and that it would make no sense to give permits to others.

Walshe, who has had to go to Canadian sources to get funding in the past, has been navigating this tricky territory for years, ever since the Native Title Tribunal gave title to the FWCAC in 2012. That decision is still disputed by some Mirning elders and sits behind the conflicts over who “owns the past” at Koonalda.

In 2020, for example, Walshe wrote to the then premier of South Australia, Steve Marshall, asking him to intervene because the Mirning Council of Elders was “denying the FWCAC, research and economic engagement in one of their major cultural sites”.

DEW told The Australian on Friday that consultation on the new protocols would take place in coming months and any permit applications could take an additional “number of months” to finalise.

It was working with the commonwealth and other partners to confirm funding arrangements, including extension of the Australian Heritage Council grant due to expire at the end of this month.

In South Australia, the intersection of First Nations people and government inevitably plays out against a background of the 1990s Hindmarsh Island dispute and the conflicting claims of “secret women’s business”.

The battle over building a bridge to the island near Goolwa ran for years and was a searing experience for lawyers, anthropologists, bureaucrats and politicians.

It remains a hugely divisive Australian story and has doubtless added to the caution of non-Indigenous officials when managing competing claims to the past.