by Mark Mckenna
On the rock-covered slopes of the Pilbara’s Burrup Peninsula—the largest island in the Dampier Archipelago and home to one of the oldest, most concentrated and culturally significant galleries of rock art on earth—there is one place that graphically captures the confrontation between rampant industrial development and the struggle to retain Indigenous heritage. Archaeologist Ken Mulvaney, one of the leading authorities on the Burrup’s rock art, brought me here on a fiercely hot afternoon in November 2015. Over the last decade or more, he has devoted much of his time to surveying the extensive areas of the peninsula’s art that still remain largely unidentified, repeatedly calling on the Australian government to nominate the area for World Heritage listing. He knows the significance and contradictions of this place better than anyone.
Straight off the plane after an 8-hour journey from Sydney, the sensory impact of the Burrup overwhelmed me: oppressive heat that immediately sapped my strength, irrepressible squadrons of tiny flies bent on crawling into my eyes and mouth, and all around me, abutting the Indian Ocean, the landscape’s breathtaking palette of colour—piles of burnt, iron-red rocks that appeared to have been thrown down at random from above; a sea of spinifex that dissected the bare, rock-strewn hills and from a distance, softened the country to the eye, changing from straw-yellow to gold in the late afternoon light; and in the valleys and gorges, small, gracefully gnarled, white-barked gums that emerged like beacons from the bone-dry ground; all spread under the vault of an achingly blue sky.
As we drove out along the peninsula it was impossible to escape industry’s footprint. The Burrup is Australia’s Ruhr and Lascaux in one: towering industrial plants on one side of the road, ancient World Heritage–significant rock art on the other. Even the road we travelled on existed because of the establishment of the North West Shelf Gas Project in the 1980s. Stopping the car opposite Woodside’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, we crossed the road and walked no more than five minutes until 30-metre-high rock walls surrounded us, the narrow floor that ran between them no more than a few metres wide. Ken stopped and pointed up above our heads. ‘There it is’, he exclaimed. Although I had seen photographs of the ‘Climbing Men’ petroglyphs—art created by removing part of the rock’s surface by pecking or pounding—to stand before them was both an act of recognition and to experience something else entirely. They were smaller and more intricate than I had imagined, a series of images 20 to 40 centimetres long, imprinted on a flat, outward-facing rock no more than 1 metre wide. Not far above head height, they looked down on me like a painting hung high on a gallery wall.
Some images appeared to show men climbing a tree (although this is only one interpretation), while others showed human figures and a ‘face-like motif’ with enormous eyes, possibly in ceremonial dress. The lizard on the left of the panel is probably the most recently engraved. Geologist Mike Donaldson, who spent years photographing and documenting the Burrup’s rock art, has explained how ‘different levels of repatination’ indicate that the ‘Climbing Men’ images were ‘produced at very different times, perhaps thousands of years apart’. Remarkably, the large eyes also bear strong similarity to the so-called ‘archaic faces’—rare petroglyphs found far away in the Cleland Hills in Central Australia. I soon realised that all the images were in conversation with one another: art produced in response to earlier traditions, sometimes embellished with new images placed side-by-side, sometimes overlaid completely. The result was an extraordinary open-air museum, a library of cultural knowledge and expression that linked Aboriginal people across millennia. In the weeks that followed my departure from the Pilbara, it was this site above all others that left the most lasting impression, not only for the quality of its art but for the mammoth industrial complex that stands only a few hundred metres away.4
‘Climbing Men’, Murujuga, 2015
The starkness of the juxtaposition was unforgettable. Standing at arm’s length from the ‘Climbing Men’, I could see Woodside’s plant in the near distance (now known officially as the Karratha Gas Plant). It was alarming to think that such ancient and priceless cultural heritage stood within a hair’s breadth of obliteration. To hear the roar of the plant’s spitting gas flames was to feel the force of industrialisation itself, one that threatened to steamroll everything in its path. In Europe or the United States the equivalent of the Burrup’s rock art would be a proudly managed World Heritage tourist site. Yet in the Pilbara, Indigenous heritage struggled for recognition amid the push for industrial development. How had Australia allowed this to happen? The answer lies not only in the way successive governments have continually encouraged the expansion of industry since the 1960s, but in the long history of the Burrup Peninsula, the period that includes what writer Nicolas Rothwell has labelled ‘one of the least-examined questions in the story of Australian settlement’: ‘the dramatic depopulation of the [Indigenous] northwest’. Long before the names ‘Pilbara’ and ‘Burrup’ were inscribed on European maps of north-western Australia, the Burrup Peninsula’s traditional owners, the Yaburara, knew their Country as Murujuga (‘hip bone sticking out’). They first encountered European settlers on the shores of their archipelago in the mid-nineteenth century, almost eighty years after Arthur Phillip arrived in Sydney Cove with the First Fleet in 1788. The history of this ever-expanding frontier, little known and largely severed from the history of industrial development in the late twentieth century, is nothing less than the ground on which Australia’s resources boom was built.5
Karratha Gas Plant, Burrup Peninsula, Murujuga, 2015
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The opening pages of Australia’s European history are all too familiar: a series of Dutch, British and French navigators—the sun-struck creation ancestors of white Australia—brush up against the continent’s coastline, mapping and naming places as they go. Once ashore, they are quick to judge, summing up the entire country in a throwaway phrase (usually pejorative), observing the bizarre flora and fauna and the trails of smoke from the ‘natives” fires, searching desperately for fresh water and invariably condemning the few Aboriginal people they meet as savages. Seeded with the pessimistic pronouncements of an ad hoc collection of maritime explorers and buccaneers, Australia was imagined as a land outside God’s creation and entirely lost to European civilisation; a discordant place without culture and history that many Europeans had seen, but about which, in the words of the seventeenth-century French author Denis Vairasse, they had only ‘been able to give the most superficial observations’.6
Two months before Phillip Parker King charted and named Port Essington in April 1818, he explored Dampier Archipelago, which had already been named by Louis de Freycinet in 1803 in honour of William Dampier’s brief visit in 1699. On board with King was Bungaree, the famed Aboriginal mediator and explorer from Broken Bay, New South Wales, who had circumnavigated the continent with Matthew Flinders fifteen years earlier. Unlike his predecessors, King sailed the archipelago for several days, christening islands as he went. In some respects he was no less convinced than Dampier that the country was the ‘most barren place on earth’, yet his observations were far from superficial; he noted how it was crisscrossed by ‘the tracks of the natives’ and ‘the mouths of the creeks were planted with their weirs’. While he made no mention of engravings, he thought that he could detect some purpose in the rocks that were ‘piled in all directions’ across the landscape.7
On 26 February 1818, sailing close to where the town of Dampier stands today, King saw three Aboriginal men paddling on logs in the direction of ‘Lewis Island’.8 As he sailed towards them they immediately became ‘alarmed and cried out in loud tones’. Every time his men managed to manoeuvre the Mermaid’s cutter close by, the men jumped into the water, dived under the ship and ‘swam astern’. After eluding King several times, one of the men was finally seized by the hair and dragged from the water, resisting so strongly that it required ‘two men to hold him’. Only when he saw Bungaree did the man calm down and ‘allow himself to be l
ifted on board’. Probably in his early twenties, he was not the only one protesting his capture. After anchoring the cutter near the ‘central island’ nearby, King noticed about forty men, women and children on the shoreline. ‘The whole party’, he wrote later, ‘appeared to be overcome by grief’, the women crying out ‘and rolling on the ground and covering their bodies with sand’.
On board, King placed a bead necklace around the man’s neck and a ‘red cap’ on his head, upon which everyone applauded his regal appearance. They were rewarded with a brief smile. By adorning his prisoner with colourful gifts, King was demonstrating his good intentions. As he explained, the man was ‘greatly caressed, in order to induce him to give a favourable account of us to his companions’. In retrospect, this was not what happened. Held captive, the man was reduced to a plaything, half an hour’s amusement for King’s men: force him from the water, dress him up and feed him biscuits (he spat them out) and offer him sugared water in a saucer (he lapped it up). When King took him to the side of the ship where he could see his people on the beach, he shouted out to them for help. Finally, King allowed him to paddle ashore, lashing an axe to his log and tying a bag around his neck that contained ‘a little of everything he appeared to fancy’. Then he watched the ripple effect of his actions as the man was reunited with his friends and family.
As soon as the man stepped ashore he was met by a group of his fellow countrymen, their ‘spears poised and pointed towards him’. ‘Huddled together in the greatest alarm’, they ordered him to ‘stand at a distance’ and throw away his red cap, bag and axe, which he duly did. Women and children peeped over the nearby bushes and rocks, riveted by the interrogation that followed. All this time, the man stood ‘as motionless as a soldier at drill’ until the questioning ceased. Then, tentatively, the men advanced towards him, spears still at the ready, until they had him completely surrounded. One by one, they examined his body carefully to be certain that he was still one of their own. Finally reassured, they allowed the women and children to approach before everyone seated themselves ‘in a ring’, the man sitting ‘in the middle’, where ‘he told his story, which occupied about half an hour’. The elaborate process of his re-entry to society was almost complete. His story told, everyone stood at once and shouted loudly at King’s party, before removing themselves ‘to the opposite side of the island’ and leaving the unwanted gifts behind them on the sand.
Over the next few days, King continued to meet Aboriginal people, determined to ‘collect a vocabulary of their language’ (a forlorn hope as he later admitted) and to establish good relations. For the Yaburara these meetings involved every possible response: fear, anger, confusion, laughter, affection, curiosity and awe. They were perplexed by Bungaree’s ‘strange language’ and astonished to see his ‘scarred’ body, shouting with delight when he removed his shirt. ‘When he pointed to the sea’ to show them where he came from, ‘they set up a shout of admiration and surprise’. King soon realised that they were more interested in Bungaree than him. In fact, the Yaburara were trying to incorporate both the British and Bungaree into their worldview. How they explained their appearance in the waters of their archipelago is difficult to know: departed ancestors briefly returned, evil spirit beings to be feared, powerful foreign visitors who potentially threatened their livelihood, or all of the above.
On one occasion, as King approached a group of men, he noticed that they were ‘trembling with fear’. But after he took ‘the chief by the hand’ and placed a ‘red cap’ on his head—its striking colour and theatrical manner of bestowal confirming his authority—both parties relaxed and ‘were soon gabbling each in [their] own language’, somehow managing to enjoy their ‘mutually unintelligible’ conversation. As King’s party returned to their boat, they walked ‘hand in hand’ with five Yaburara men like lifelong friends preparing for a reluctant parting. They then shook one another’s hands, a ‘mode of leaving’, King thought they ‘appeared perfectly to understand’, perhaps from prior experience with other European visitors. It was easier for both parties to display the rituals of friendship when the newcomers were not intending to stay. Later the same day, when King tried to land on a nearby island to replenish his water supplies, he was prevented from going ashore by thirty Yaburara men who threatened him with ‘spears and stones’. Although he saw that their intent was not to kill them—‘we were in their power and had they been inclined, they might have speared the whole of our party’—he was equally convinced that it was pointless to risk destroying ‘the friendly intercourse’ he had established with the previous ‘tribe’. On this occasion, ‘their object’, he noted pointedly, ‘seemed to be merely to get rid of us, and in this they completely and very fairly succeeded’.
Unlike Dampier at Lagrange Bay in 1699, who shot one Aboriginal man during a fruitless search for water, King had avoided violence, but his intention to establish friendly relations had only been partly successful. With the exception of one friendly meeting, the Yaburara wanted him gone. Before he sailed to Nickol Bay, he named the islands where he had walked hand in hand with Aboriginal men ‘The Intercourse Islands’, now the site of one of Rio Tinto’s iron ore shipping ports at Dampier. While the stories of his encounters there would live on in Aboriginal culture, they would never become founding myths of the Pilbara’s settler history. Despite his intentions, King left with an understanding of Aboriginal society that confirmed the ascendance of European culture—their huts ‘nothing more than a bush struck in the ground’ and their means of water transport the ‘extreme case of the poverty of savage boat-building all around the world’. He saw the Yaburara as even more primitive than Aboriginal people elsewhere in Australia, a view that would ultimately prefigure the beliefs of those who settled the Pilbara more than forty years later. The day he dragged the young Yaburara man from the water and restrained him on board the Mermaid would prove indicative of much of the future race relations on the north-western frontier. Aboriginal people were to be used as the settlers saw fit.9
Until the surveyor and explorer Francis Thomas Gregory arrived in the Dampier Archipelago in 1861, the Yaburara’s contact with Europeans was limited. American whalers certainly built temporary structures in the mid-nineteenth century on some islands, but they left little evidence of their activities and their presence appears not to have seriously disrupted Yaburara culture. As so often in Australian history, the story of Aboriginal people’s contact with Europeans is comprised of meticulously documented encounters (sometimes of little more than a few days duration, as with King’s visit in 1818) punctuated by decades or even centuries of silence. In these tellings, Aboriginal people can remain curiously static in their cameo role, entering history only when Europeans visit their Country. To grasp the subtle changes in culture and shifts in perception wrought by their contact with Europeans for over two centuries before the settlers finally arrived in the 1860s is almost impossible. We are left with snatches of knowledge—noting the gradual introduction of English words and the use of tools such as metal axes or knives, or a liking for tobacco and other gifts—Indigenous oral history aside, their existence is nearly always mediated through European eyes.
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The Yaburara had no way of knowing that Gregory’s appearance on the south-eastern tip of Murujuga in 1861 heralded the arrival of permanent settlement. That realisation would dawn slowly. What had been for the last two centuries merely fleeting moments of contact with Europeans was about to become a brutal frontier, one that has figured little in Australia’s understanding of the north-west. How the land was ‘opened up’ has been relegated to a minor footnote in the triumphant narrative of development.
Gregory, who had already surveyed the Murchison and Gascoyne rivers to the south, was appointed by the British and West Australian governments to explore the north-west and assess its potential for development, particularly pastoral activities and growing cotton, then in short supply due to the American Civil War. For nearly three months in 1861, his ship,
the Dolphin, remained anchored off Hearson’s Cove (named after his second mate, who was accidentally injured as the ship off-loaded) while he explored the surrounding country. From his first days ashore, Gregory had difficulty keeping the Yaburara away from his camp. Convinced that they would steal his horses and provisions given the chance, he tried to make them understand that he had ‘taken possession for the present and did not want their company’. They took no notice of him and continued to approach, ‘ordering [him] back to the ship’. Only when Gregory fired on them did they finally withdraw. Later, further inland, he drew a line in the sand, ‘twenty paces’ from his camp, but Aboriginal men responded by setting fire to the grass around the camp. Again, it was gunfire that forced them to keep their distance. Although Gregory made it clear that he ‘did not wish seriously to hurt them’, his method of asserting his right to camp on their land would be repeated hundreds of times over in the years to come. Guns and bullets were the ultimate expression of the settlers’ authority, the brute, lethal instrument of frontier administration.10
Hearson’s Cove, Murujuga, 2015, where Francis Thomas Gregory arrived in May 1861
When Gregory returned to Perth, his sanguine description of the north-west gave more than enough encouragement to the British government to declare the area ‘open’ for colonisation. He pointed to the great ‘commercial value’ of the ‘the beds of the pearl oysters’, identified two to three million acres of Crown land as suitable for grazing, talked up the potential to grow cotton on the ‘arable lands on the De Grey and Sherlock’ rivers, and reassured potential settlers that the small numbers of ‘Aborigines’ would not prove ‘particularly troublesome … if properly treated’.11 He gave the impression that profits were there for the taking. Within the space of a few years the settlers arrived, encouraged by generous government land grants—up to 4000 hectares rent-free for three years—and funding from private investors and wealthy squatters from the eastern colonies eager to capitalise on Gregory’s predictions. Because the government had banned the use of convict labour north of ‘the 26th parallel’, the settlers would immediately turn to Aboriginal people for their labour force.12 ‘The North District’ that the government was about to ‘unlock’ stretched all the way from the Murchison River north to the Timor Sea, including the Kimberley and the vast arid regions to the colony’s border with South Australia, a territory so great that it gave rise to dreams of another empire. When the first shipload of settlers left from Perth in April 1863, the editorial in one of the city’s newspapers wondered whether the colony was witnessing the ‘colonization of an entirely new country’ that would one day break away from the colony and form an independent state. Perth, a lonely island of British settlement, was about to give birth to another island of British ‘civilization’, one that was so far away in its citizens’ imagination that it might just as well have been another country.13