Can industry and ancient rock art coexist on the Burrup Peninsula?
The biggest and oldest collection of rock art in the world lies hard up against a booming resources precinct. Can they really coexist?
The rubble of red stones is heaped high across the remote Burrup Peninsula, as if a giant has casually emptied out pocketfuls of marbles across the narrow land mass. In high summer, the rocky landscape shimmers and distorts in a heat mirage; any bare hand or foot risks burning after even a fleeting touch.
It takes a trained eye, or a hastily tutored one, to pick out the incredible secrets etched into those stones — lively images of a tortoise crawling across a rust-red surface, black-headed pythons rearing up, two waterbirds fighting over a fish, an emu standing above a couple of egg shapes. Here and there a human figure appears, men in ceremonial dance or spearing a dugong — all vivid outlines that first emerged when the artist scraped into dark desert varnish “skin” on the rock surface to expose a paler layer beneath.
Among the one million engravings, or petroglyphs, in Western Australia’s northwest is the earliest known image of a human face in the world, as well as a procession of now-extinct animals. Human presence — as far back as 40,000 years — is hinted at everywhere, at waterholes where fringing rocks are so abundantly incised they were clearly a gathering place, or on ridges where hundreds of standing stones have been erected like mini Stonehenges.
In 2007, the Australian Heritage Council listed the rock art on the Burrup Peninsula and described it as “a masterpiece of human creative genius”. The Aboriginal people of the Pilbara region know the site as Murujuga, a word that likens the land spur on which the art sits to “a hipbone sticking out”. Currently, a bid for UNESCO World Heritage listing of Murujuga is being mooted for the biggest and oldest collection of rock engravings in the world.
Retired CSIRO scientist John Black and his wife Claire couldn’t believe what they saw on the rock surfaces when they first laid eyes on the site. Arriving in the resources town of Karratha, they made the half-hour drive up to the Burrup, past salt mines, Rio Tinto’s massive iron ore export port, and on towards the tall, gas-flaring stacks of Woodside’s North West Shelf LNG plant, a vast industrial precinct visible from most parts of the Murujuga art precinct. “We were totally amazed,” Black says. “The intricacy of some of the rock art, the detail, was amazing.”
The pair learnt that Murujuga was where the Yaburara Aboriginal people lived, fished and left their mark. “Here in one place was a history of people living with a changing environment with all of their activities, their spiritual beliefs, their day-to-day activities,” he says. “Claire and I took a plane ride over the whole rock art area to get a better perspective. We talked about it quite a lot. It is so beautiful and meaningful.” And ultimately tragic. Black learnt that Yaburara men, women and children were massacred on the shores of Burrup’s Flying Foam Passage in 1868, less than three years after Europeans reached the area.
On that visit his eyes kept returning to the flares rising from an industrial chimney, hissing out nitrogen oxides, compounds that form nitric acid when deposited in the environment. “I had a sense of incongruity. How could these two things coexist — industry at that level and cultural history? I left there wondering how we preserve what’s there.”
Black has always been a doer, a solver of problems. When he was awarded an Order of Australia in 2001, it was for multiple contributions to science, junior sport and bushfire safety. “I spent a lot of time in the local bushfire brigade in the Blue Mountains where I live. Walking out on patrols in the bush, I came across a lot of Aboriginal rock art, mostly petroglyphs or carvings or hand stencils in caves. So I was always interested. But this has taken over, and it’s changed my life.”
Murujuga’s rock art lies 3680km away from Black’s home outside Sydney. Trying to protect it has cost him $135,000 in airfares so far and all his spare waking hours; it has tested the patience of his family and seen a dispassionate scientist embark on a crusade he never anticipated.
No visitor to Murujuga leaves without noting the vast, productive industrial estate nestled incongruously alongside the rock art. The silent figures etched in the rock have witnessed a cavalcade of industry appearing on their doorstep. Typical of resource-rich Western Australia, the arrival of diggers and bulldozers preceded any real knowledge of what else lay in the landscape. And Aboriginal voices went largely unheard until native title laws in 1993 gave people a voice.
The Burrup is the gateway to Australia’s biggest oil and gas operations — the gleaming sprawl of pipes and emission stacks from Woodside’s $34 billion North West Shelf joint venture were later joined by its $15 billion Pluto LNG Project. Down the road lies Dampier port, one of the busiest bulk-handling ports in the world.
When Woodside first moved in during the early 1980s, decorated boulders were removed like rubble to make way for progress. Nearly 2000 items of prehistoric art were transferred into a fenced, locked compound for “safekeeping”; out of 720 Aboriginal sites identified on the proposed LNG site, 349 were destroyed. Around that time, in September 2003, the World Monument Fund added Burrup’s rock art to their global “black list” of 100 most threatened sites. It was the first Australian site to go on the list.
Heritage listing covers just under half of the 30km-long peninsula, but on the half available to industry more rock art was lost as companies moved in to make use of the region’s bountiful natural gas; an ammonia plant and a fertiliser and nitrate processing plant were built within hundreds of metres of rock art.
Last year, a leaked memo revealed that the new McGowan Labor government is considering approvals for more plants for urea and methanol production. Billions in state and national revenue, and thousands of jobs, depend on Burrup’s industrial might. So is coexistence with the rock art precinct a necessary evil?
Black wasn’t sure, but he wanted to know more. He got hold of CSIRO documents that, back in 2007, concluded that industry would have no impact on the rock art. As a scientist — a former senior CSIRO one at that — Black looked at the methodology. “What changed my life was reading those reports,” he says. He believes the CSIRO reports were flawed, pointing out shortfalls when we meet over a coffee during one of his many lobbying trips to Perth.
Black explains the problem. Each one of the one million images was created by incising lines or hammering dots into the dark, weathered rock patina, just deep enough to reveal the lighter clay-rich seam underneath. The patina is a kind of “desert varnish”; as Black explains it, specialised bacteria and fungi have evolved to survive in this extremely dry, harsh environment. The tiny organisms extract and concentrate manganese and iron compounds in dust to form a hard, protective sheath. But they only form under near neutral and alkaline conditions, and are prone to dissolve if acid levels rise. He argues that if new industry adds to that acid load, it could accelerate the rate at which the patina dissolves.
That possibility was confirmed in research conducted and published in 2005 showing acidity on the rock surfaces had increased since industrialisation of the Burrup. Ian MacLeod, former executive director of maritime heritage at the Western Australian Museum and a world expert on corrosion, had measured the pH levels on monitored rocks at Murujuga. Over time the levels had gone from near-neutral to as low as 4.2, meaning significantly acidic. “He had graphs showing mineral dissolution of the manganese and iron that make up that outer patina, and he showed that they were being dissolved,” says Black.
When he’s not talking gas emissions at Burrup, Black’s time is taken up with another kind of emission — methane from cows, an issue he’s been tackling since retiring from his job as assistant chief of CSIRO’s division of animal production. Why, I ask, should anyone heed his warnings in an unrelated field of industrial emissions? “My credibility as a scientist, for one,” he responds, bristling slightly. “I went through the ranks to the highest level, and I’m used to working on the science and the facts.”
He and MacLeod published a paper about the effect of industrial emissions on the rocks in The Journal of Archaeological Science. Their views are shared by others who have long warned against further industry incursions into the rock art precinct, including the Friends of Australian Rock Art (FARA) and the Centre for Rock Art Research at the University of Western Australia. The Centre’s director, archaeologist Jo McDonald, wrote the submission that argues for UNESCO World Heritage Listing of Murujuga. Late last year, the McGowan government stated it would work with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation to seek that international status. Yet the leaked memo raises the prospect of more industrial plants there. Black has made dozens of trips to Perth, as he and fellow lobbyists arranged meetings with any minister who would listen. Their message is always the same: “Reduce emissions down to a very low level, close to zero, or the rock art will be destroyed. And move any future industrial plants off the Burrup to an industrial estate further south.”
Industry representatives — from giants Woodside and Rio Tinto to ammonia nitrate plant owner Yara International — have listened patiently. But neither government nor industry has budged from their mantra that rock art and industry can coexist. Yara insists there is no credible scientific evidence to indicate that existing industrial emissions have had any measurable impact on the rock art. It says it has monitoring in place around its operations and independent monitoring is carried out, too.
International rock art expert Benjamin Smitharrived in Perth six years ago from South Africa to take up a professorial chair at UWA. He has studied the world’s major rock art, yet his first sight of Murujuga was a revelation. “I couldn’t believe it, it’s an astonishing place,” he says. “One tends to get blasé, because I’ve seen rock art across Africa. But the beauty of the preservation, the landscape it lies in, the changes in style through time are incredible. It has some of the oldest art in the world, probably older than the Chauvet cave paintings in France, which date back 36,000 years. I’m surprised by the lack of acknowledgment that Australia has about this place.”
The CSIRO reports cited routinely by government and industry “appear to have been underfunded, as if they were set up to fail”, Smith says. “They were quick studies using less than ideal equipment that produced results that are quite simply not very useful.” He continues: “Almost anywhere else in the world they wouldn’t put industry in a place of such cultural importance. It could be argued they didn’t know it at the time, that it’s a mistake we have to live with. But it may require changes in industrial practice. What’s seriously lacking is proper modelling of short, medium and long-term effects of emissions.”
When Yara International sought a licence to ramp up production — and emissions — in 2016, Black felt desperate. His arguments over flawed monitoring and warnings about potential damage to the petroglyphs were falling on deaf ears. So he went to environmental activist Bob Brown, who directed him to Christine Milne, the former Greens leader, who in turn urged her Senate colleagues to instigate a Federal Senate inquiry into the fate of the rock art. It began hearings in November 2016. “The people on that inquiry did a very thorough job,” says Black approvingly. “They visited the Burrup; they talked to a lot of people and understood what was going on.”
In March last year, after many delays in publishing its findings, the Senate committee released its report. Greens senators on the panel said there should be no further development on the Burrup. Labor senators recommended the state Labor government “conduct a comprehensive survey to identify all rock art sites in a two kilometre radius… which may be affected by emissions.” The two dissenting Liberal senators said there was no credible evidence of adverse impact of emissions on rock art, highlighting the economic importance of industry on the Burrup Peninsula.
Some of the ancient faces peering out from Murujuga’s rock surfaces have haunting wide eyes and a quizzical look, as if surprised at the failure to secure their future despite five decades of “protection” under WA’s Aboriginal Heritage Act. Woodside has announced an $11.4 billion expansion to its Pluto LNG plant; chief executive Peter Coleman has described the plan as part of a “Burrup Hub Vision” to “create a pathway for the globally cost-competitive development of Western Australian gas resources.” The company told the Senate committee it went to significant effort to monitor and manage environmental impacts.
Last month, the McGowan government released a “Murujuga Rock Art Strategy”, which accepts the inadequacy of previous findings and monitoring “undertaken over the past 15 years”. The strategy was drawn up by a 16-member committee, the majority of them industry and government representatives, who first met late last year. They were instructed to adopt a “scientifically rigorous approach” in determining an “appropriate level of protection” for the rock art.
Dr Ron Edwards, chair of the committee, says the new monitoring program “must be world-class and peer-reviewed”. He says he’s “in awe” of the rock art and likens the “unsatisfactory” nature of the CSIRO monitoring thus: “You’ve got the Mona Lisa and someone’s left the curtains open on it. Murujuga is many times the Mona Lisa.”
Black was invited onto the committee. “We’re keen to have John in the room, we need strong critics,” says Edwards. But by accepting his seat, Black is no longer permitted to comment publicly on its deliberations.
Friends of Australian Rock Art (FARA) spokesperson Judith Hugo believes the new strategy could be a delaying tactic by the state government. It lacks funding and no tenders will be issued until later this year to begin research, she says, meaning that it will produce no meaningful results for several years. Meanwhile, 20 FARA supporters have donated $350,000 to pay for an independent pilot study to look at the effects of the current acid load on the rock surface. Black and archaeologist Smith are co-ordinating the study and have asked one of the nation’s top geochemists, Ron Watkins, to analyse rock samples.
Smith says putting more industry on the Burrup just as it is being mooted as a UNESCO World Heritage site is “bizarre”. As for Black’s fervour and the enemies he has made along the way, Smith remains firmly in his corner. “I’d challenge anyone to go to the Burrup and not come away with the passion he has. But what’s special about John is he’s acted on his passion, he’s not sitting in his lounge room just talking about the problem. He’s an extraordinary individual who deserves a lot of credit.”