Earlier red flags for scientist at centre of Barossa debacle

Oil and gas giant Woodside Energy also says it will not be carrying out any review of the work done for it on the Scarborough LNG project by Dr Mick O’Leary.

UWA marine geoscientist Mick O'Leary was found by the Federal Court to have ‘lied’ when preparing a report that helped block Santos’s $5bn Barossa gas project.

The University of Western Australia scientist found by the Federal Court to have “lied” when preparing a report that helped block Santos’s $5bn Barossa gas project had earlier been compelled to make multiple corrections to another disputed piece of work.

But oil and gas giant Woodside Energy says it will not be carrying out any review of the work done by Mick O’Leary that found the undersea pipeline at Woodside’s contentious $US12bn Scarborough LNG project would have little to no impact on archaeological heritage values in the rock art-rich Burrup region.

The findings delivered this week by Federal Court Justice ­Natalie Charlesworth savaged Dr O’Leary’s research into the potential impact of Santos’s Barossa pipeline on underwater cultural heritage sites and sacred dreaming places of Tiwi Islanders.

In handing down her decision dismissing the Tiwi Islanders’ legal challenge to Barossa, Justice Charlesworth was scathing of Dr O’Leary’s conduct while carrying out cultural mapping.

“Dr O’Leary’s admission was freely volunteered, such that he did not lie to the court. But he did lie to the Tiwi Islanders, and I find that he did so because he wanted his ‘cultural mapping’ exercise to be used in a way that would stop the pipeline,” she said.

Federal Court Justice ­Natalie Charlesworth.

“It is conduct far flung from proper scientific method and falls short of an expert’s obligation to this court.”

The court’s findings cast new light on the stoush that has played out inside UWA in recent years, with Dr O’Leary’s colleagues having previously raised issues with some of his methods.

UWA researchers led by geo­archaeologist Ingrid Ward and her husband Piers Larcombe in 2022 wrote a paper that was highly critical of the findings made by Dr O’Leary and others in their ­research into Indigenous artefacts on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula.

Dr O’Leary and his colleagues fired back with a retort describing the critique as a “wet straw man”. The response dismissed “armchair critics ignorant of recent developments in the field” and said “their critique is detrimental to the ­development of this entire field of ­archaeology, as well as damaging to the rights and interests of coastal Indigenous communities through­out Australia”.

But Dr O’Leary also went on to publish in June 2023 a correction to his original report, making multiple revisions to his original text. Those corrections included addressing errors in three statistical analyses and “additional discussion of interpretations”.

That original report was prepared by a group called Deep History of Sea Country, a collection of academics from various Australian universities and which has won more than $2m in funding from the Australian Research Council since 2017.

The group’s project with the biggest ARC grant – worth just over $1.1m – began on July 1 last year, just a fortnight before the corrections to the original report were formally published.

Despite Dr O’Leary’s corrections, in December Dr Ward and Dr Larcombe’s paper was retracted. The journal Geoarchaelogy said the retraction was the result of “evidence confirming that the required university approvals were not sought prior to the research being conducted”.

Dr Piers Larcombe.

Dr Larcombe, who had earlier questioned whether Dr O’Leary should maintain his position at UWA in the wake of the Federal Court’s findings, said he still stood by the scientific content of the criticism. The retraction, he said, was “not about the quality of the science” and that the process that led to retraction was still under review.

Woodside, meanwhile, confirmed that it would not be re-examining the work Dr O’Leary did for the company when it was assessing the cultural impact of its proposed Scarborough pipeline.

Dr O’Leary in 2021 helped design a research project to assess areas of archaeological prospectivity along the pipeline route within the proposed development area. Sea level changes since the last ice age mean some artefact-rich and heritage-rich areas of the Burrup Peninsula are now underwater, and Dr O’Leary’s research helped establish that the Scarborough pipeline plans would not damage potentially undiscovered rock art examples. The Scarborough project has attracted opposition from some Indigenous groups, with one of those – Save Our Songlines – last year securing a court injunction against Scarborough’s seismic testing program.

“Woodside does not intend to reassess an earlier scope of work undertaken by Dr O’Leary between 2020 – 2021, which was also subject to independent expert review. Dr O’Leary was one of several contributors to a suite of work relating to the identification of submerged cultural heritage, which also included close consultation with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation,” a spokesman for the company said.

“Woodside considers Dr O’Leary’s contribution was within his area of expertise and exceeded baseline industry standards.”

The Federal Court’s findings have also sparked scrutiny of the potential conflicts that can arise when academics are commissioned to consult on projects.

Professor Peter Ridd. Picture: Jamila Toderas/The Australian

Professor Peter Ridd, a physicist who was sacked from his role at James Cook University after he flagged concerns over some of the university’s climate change research, told The Weekend Australian that Santos should consider taking legal action against UWA in the wake of the court’s findings.

He said it would take such a legal challenge for universities to increase the intellectual rigour and scrutiny applied to consultancy work. “If Santos actually takes UWA to court, it will start to concentrate the minds of universities to actually do the job they’re supposed to do,” he said, adding: “UWA should carry a significant fraction of the responsibility for what happened.”

Santos declined to comment on whether it was considering any further legal options.