A study in conflict: let science give ‘voice’ to Mungo Man’s neighbours or let them lie?
Scientists fear that crucial insights into the origins of the human species will be lost if the planned reburial of thousands of ancient Aboriginal remains goes ahead in outback NSW.
The planned reburial of thousands of ancient Aboriginal remains discovered near the grave of Mungo Man in outback NSW would doom critical research into human evolution and breach the nation’s international obligations, scientists warn.
The vast cache of fossilised bones will be returned to the ground, starting next week, pitting the worldly pursuit of knowledge against the time-honoured spirituality of Indigenous Australians. Scientists fear that important lines of investigation into the origins of modern humans will be lost if the reburials go ahead.
Archaeologist Michael Westaway, of the University of Queensland, has appealed to Tanya Plibersek to intervene before it is too late.
This comes on top of Federal Court action to compel the federal Environment Minister to exercise her heritage powers to halt the program.
“These artefacts are valuable to all of humanity, and the stories they tell are informing the world about the significance of Aboriginal culture as one of the earliest known,” Professor Westaway said. “It’s their voice and it is truly amazing we get to hear it after all these centuries. That’s why we need to keep these remains available to science … not many have actually been properly assessed and tested, and the technology is improving so much, so quickly, that there is no telling what we will be able to learn from them in the years to come.”
But the traditional land owners who have custody of the fossils are adamant that the interments will proceed over the coming fortnight at sites known only to them.
Willandra Aboriginal Advisory Group chair Warren Clark told The Australian: “We are putting the elders back in the country where they belong. Not to be displayed, not to be studied, because they have been out of the ground too long.”
The remains, ranging from fingernail-sized fragments of bone to complete skulls, joint and limb structures, have been tentatively identified as belonging to 106 individuals who lived alongside Mungo Man during an ice age more than 40,000 years ago.
Unearthing of the near-intact skeleton of Mungo Man in 1974 and the earlier discovery of the cremated remains of an adult female, Mungo Lady, in what is now the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area of far southwest NSW electrified scientists globally, confirming that Aboriginal people had formed one of the planet’s earliest known cultures.
Endearing patterns of prehistoric life emerged from the subsequent excavations. Among the finds were hundreds of preserved footprints, dated up to 20,000 years old. Imprints left by children skipping across the then frozen terrain were suspended in time, along with the exertions of a one-legged man.
“Mungo Man, Mungo Lady and the work done around them changed the way Australians think about ancient Australia,” said Professor Westaway, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the finds. He cautioned Ms Plibersek that the ancestral remains represent the “largest series of modern human fossils” outside of Africa from the Late Pleistocene period. Some could reach back to when people arrived in Australia 60,000-plus years ago.
But returning the fossilised remains to the windswept and “highly corrosive” landscape invited their destruction. The relics “are so exceptional they transcend national boundaries and their potential to rewrite the story of modern human origins are of importance for present and future generations of all humanity,” Professor Westaway wrote in a letter to the Environment Minister, sent on Tuesday.
If the collection was lost, there would be a strong case for United Nations agency UNESCO to revoke the 1981 World Heritage status of the Willandra Lakes reserve, one of the first Australian sites to be listed.
“Minister Plibersek, you may be considering (that) approval to rebury this collection is an achievement of your office towards Aboriginal empowerment,” he wrote. “But I can assure you that is true for only a small number of people and its ultimate result will be to destroy the very values that supported the Willandra’s inscription to World Heritage.
“If this reburial goes ahead, it will have been to oversee the destruction of one of the most significant human stories ever to be revealed in Australia, destroying the key cultural record that resulted in the inscription of the Willandra landscape worthy of World Heritage status.”
The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said state authorities in NSW had advised the reburial of relics would commence this coming Monday, March 3.
Responding on behalf of Ms Plibersek, a departmental spokesperson said it would be inappropriate to comment when her refusal to issue a protection order over the relics was being challenged in the Federal Court.
Stories to be told
The clamour over their future has split the traditional custodians of Willandra, with each side professing to act in accordance with what the ancients would have wanted.
Former Aboriginal Advisory Group member Jason Kelly, who is taking the Federal Court action in an 11th-hour bid to force Ms Plibersek’s hand, insisted the emergence of the remains was no accident: the old people had “come back to tell their story through science”.
The Wamba Wamba-Mutthi Mutthi man who sits in Victoria’s First Peoples’ Assembly said: “They were clever people. They returned to us from deep space and time because they had something to teach us, all of us, the whole world … that Aboriginal people are the planet’s oldest continuous living culture.
“If you want to understand what it is to be Australian and understand the landscape here, you have to have a relationship with the people of the land first. This is why this stuff is so important.”
Mr Kelly said his late grandmother and Mutthi Mutthi elder Alice Kelly had wanted the remains to go to a “keeping place” repository where they would be accessible to both researchers and the descendants of the old people.
This would have been developed with an education centre for the public, along the lines of one attached to Spain’s World Heritage-listed Atapuerca caves, containing a human fossil dated to nearly one million years.
One of the country’s most admired architects, Glenn Murcutt, was engaged to draw up a concept design.
But the Willandra scheme fell apart about a decade ago after the NSW government pulled the funding, according to those familiar with the sequence. Mr Kelly, 52, said his own family was now divided, with a maternal aunt, Patsy Winch, backing the decision to rebury the remains. Those of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied at undisclosed sites in the reserve in 2022.
Ms Winch was adamant that Alice, her mother, would have wanted this to happen long before now. “I think Jason had outside influences that were pushing him to go against his own aunties,” said Ms Winch, 69. “We are over that. “I don’t hold grudges and I would like to see our family heal.”
Mr Clark, defending the program, said the fossilised bones would be returned to the “secret places” they came from in the parched Willandra lake beds and sand dune country. “They have waited long enough to go home,” he said.
Renewing his plea for Ms Plibersek to act, Professor Westaway said only six sets of the remains had been dated and analysed, counting those of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady. The adult male had been ritually buried with ochre collected hundreds of kilometres away and evolving isotopic testing technology, measuring geochemical signatures from teeth, could help scientists reconstruct the migration of people across the prehistoric landscape, he said.
Mungo Lady, whose remains were found in 1968 by geologist Jim Bowler before he went on to locate Mungo Man six years later, was subject to the world’s oldest known ritual cremation. Professor Westaway said extracting DNA from a new process known as proteomics could provide fresh insight into the complexity of Aboriginal origins, showing how they mixed with proto-hominins such as Neanderthals and the enigmatic Denisovans while journeying to Australia, possibly by sea, more than 60,000 years ago. At the time, ocean levels were lower and Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania were part of the same landmass.
“A few months delay in order to provide the commonwealth with a more comprehensive and globally informed perspective of these ancient people is a tiny amount of time compared to the millennia (it) took for these ancient people to be fossilised,” Professor Westaway told Ms Plibersek.
He added: “I would urge you instead to delay any decision on reburial, and consider re-engagement with the process of construction of an appropriately resourced keeping place, education and research centre as was the vision of the many elders now passed.”
‘Killing the spirit’
Mr Kelly said the ongoing uncertainty over the remains was like a “soul sickness” for the local Indigenous clan groups, the Mutthi Mutthi, Barkandji and Ngyampaa. “It is really emotionally distressing,” he said.
“It’s like the spirits are on their deathbed … in palliative care until we sort this out. The only way I can describe it is soul sickness because it is stressful in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense it kills. It kills the spirit.”
Dr Bowler, 95, an honorary fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne, said the traditional owners had been placed in an impossible position by decades of inaction by governments to safeguard the relics. “There is no country in the world that matches the conjunction of antiquity and modern continuity of connection to country,” he said.
“That’s an extraordinary privilege for the Australian nation, and the nation has failed miserably to acknowledge that privilege.
“As a result, the Indigenous people who are the democratically elected custodians, have been caught in a cleft stick in the total absence of a proper resting place for those bones that could meet everyone’s needs.
“It’s a disgrace. We talk about having this World Heritage area in recognition of their significance but there is no monument, no heritage centre, no place for anyone to come to honour these special Australians or to learn from and study the legacy they left us.”
Confirming that the reburials were to go ahead, the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water said the process would be overseen by the traditional owners, consistent with federal approvals.
“I am very pleased to see the traditional owners making decisions about their ancestors’ remains,” state Environment Minister Penny Sharpe said. “I understand there has been some contention. However, this process to return the remains to their rightful owners has been conducted in the appropriate sensitive way and the vast majority of the traditional owners are in agreement with the reburial.”
‘They’d want this’
Mr Clark said the remains were currently in a “safe place”, under the supervision of the Aboriginal Advisory Group. Ritual smoking ceremonies would be held before the relics were taken by elders to “five or six” sites for reburial. No photography or filming would be permitted to preserve the secrecy of the locations. Mr Kelly, meanwhile, is due to return to the Federal Court on March 10 to pursue his case against Ms Plibersek. Asked whether it was now a lost cause, he said: “We can’t give up. I know in my heart this is what the ancient elders would have wanted us to do. We’re hoping we can still get a decision.”
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