From the Edge

by Mark Mckenna

  Rio Tinto iron ore train, outside Karratha, 2015

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  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, archaeologists such as Sylvia Hallam began the task of surveying, mapping and photographing what they would eventually realise was only a small percentage of Murujuga’s petroglyphs. The effect the petroglyphs had on many who saw them was life changing. Engineers Robert Bedarnik and Enzo Virili, ostensibly employed to establish mines, roads and townships, devoted much of their spare time to examining the engravings. The ancient, mysterious presence of the images, imprinted on a jumbled, burning red canvas that at first glance was almost alien to European eyes, appeared to eclipse the transitory nature of the industries they had come to establish. Bedarnik eventually gave up his job and devoted the rest of his life to the study of Australian and global rock art, campaigning to save Murujuga’s art from the effects of industrial development. Few who took the time to climb the rocky slopes and observe the images closely came away unmoved. To stand surrounded by art that stretched far into antiquity, inscribed with a cultural significance that would forever remain obscure, was to be reminded of how little Europeans understood of Australia’s deep past. Impressed by the enthusiasm of engineers such as Virili and Bedarnik, local newspapers in the early 1970s reported on ‘one of the little-known benefits’ of the ‘mineral boom’, ‘the discovery of Aboriginal rock paintings and engravings’.64 Discovery, however, would not necessarily lead to protection. Although industrial development resulted in the first surveys of Murujuga’s Indigenous heritage, neither these nor the state’s 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act could stop the destruction and removal of almost 5000 images, which began in 1980 when staff from the Western Australian Museum moved rock art from the building site of Woodside’s gas plant to a compound at Hearson’s Cove. The rocks would remain there for more than three decades, caged ruins of a cultural heritage Australians had yet to fully respect.65

  For Aboriginal people, the mining boom offered little succour. After award wages for Aboriginal pastoral workers were introduced in the 1960s, many had little choice but to leave the large stations for Roebourne Reserve, where more than three hundred people resided in Third World conditions, prey to high rates of disease and infant mortality. Segregated from the rest of the community, they struggled to adapt to life on the reserve, where many of them were entirely severed from their homelands. With the sudden influx of miners into Roebourne in the early 1960s, they faced yet another onslaught. Thirty years later, long-time resident of Roebourne and Banjiyma elder Alice Smith described how Aboriginal communities ‘just fell apart’:

  Petroglyphs, Murujuga, 2015

  The 1960s mining boom was a lot like the pearling boom a century earlier, because both booms brought an influx of single white men and grog, violated our women and filled the jail with our people. The difference was that while pearling made us slaves, mining left us out of the work force … police, pub and welfare, that’s all we got left …66

  In 1975, the reserve was closed. More than two hundred and fifty people from over fifty families were moved without consultation into ‘the village’, a new collection of government-funded houses near the old Roebourne Cemetery. ‘Homemakers, all ladies’ came from the ‘family service’ to assist with the finer points of domesticity. After finally becoming accustomed to life on the reserve, the suburban model of housing broke down surviving social structures. Many teenagers turned to crime and alcohol and drug abuse. Incarceration rates increased dramatically. In September 1983, a fight broke out between police and Aboriginal people outside the Victoria Hotel in Roebourne. One of the many arrested, 17-year-old John Pat, died in his cell after allegedly being punched by a policeman, his head hitting the ground during the melee in front of the hotel. A Karratha jury later acquitted the police charged with Pat’s murder. The Aboriginal community in Roebourne erupted in anger. On television news, the town’s main street, with its sadly familiar scenes of Aboriginal dysfunction and public drunkenness, became the symbol of a similar malaise in communities across the nation. As rapid industrial development continued only 50 kilometres away, the events at Roebourne became the catalyst for the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–91). Few Australians were aware of the brutal frontier history that had brought Roebourne to such a parlous state. While the epicentre of the nation’s ‘economic powerhouse’ at Murujuga powered ahead, Aboriginal communities imploded. The new towns built during the boom had sucked resources from Roebourne, once the region’s largest town. The Roebourne gaol and an ever-increasing police presence appeared to be the only growth sectors in the town’s economy. Subjected to wave after wave of displacement and oppression for more than a century, many Aboriginal families had been brought to the point of total collapse, the face of their Country changed forever.67

  In 1984, the construction of the Harding River Dam flooded ‘Yawajuna’ (Lockyer’s Gorge), ‘a beautiful valley of pools and paperbarks’, and dried up the Ngurin River downstream near Roebourne, a favourite camping place of the Aboriginal community. As elder woman Lilla Snowball exclaimed in the 1993 documentary film Exile and the Kingdom, the dam had ‘insulted’ her Country: ‘Everything’s busted up’. Mining renamed and reshaped Aboriginal Country.68 Wakathuni Hill, virtually cut in half by mining, became Tom Price. Across the Pilbara, places that had carried Aboriginal names for thousands of years—beaches, hills, headlands, valleys, gorges, rivers and plains—became nameless features on maps. Europeans named the places that mattered to them economically, but had no interest in naming every feature of such a vast landscape. Many beaches and headlands on Murujuga and surrounding islands remain unnamed today, ‘No Name Point’ being one of the exceptions. Inland, at Tom Price, the area’s largest hill, Jarndunmunha, became ‘Mount Nameless’. In 1979, mining executive Roderick Carnegie brought Australian artist Fred Williams to the Pilbara. Williams, seduced by the country’s ‘red-violet’ hues, produced one of his greatest series of landscape paintings. ‘Anyone who could not paint this particular country’, he mused, ‘is probably in the wrong profession’. Mount Nameless, Afternoon was one of his most memorable paintings in the ‘Pilbara’ series.

  Williams had managed to capture the landscape’s heady sweep of colour and also point to its deeper Indigenous significance, one that would take decades to resurface.69 The new mining community at Tom Price embraced their ‘nameless’ hill, founding the ‘Nameless Festival’ in 1971, a week-long carnival that included a ‘beer festival’, ‘2-day shoots’, art exhibitions, firework displays and the crowning of the ‘Nameless Queen’. By the 1980s and 1990s, ‘wood chopping’, camel races, the ‘Wild West Ball’, and rolling pin and iron ore throwing competitions had been added to the program. Exasperated, Yinhawangka elder Lola Young offered her view of the mountain’s renaming: ‘non-Aboriginal people named the biggest hill around here at Tom Price, Mount Nameless. They didn’t ask the Aboriginal people here if that place had a name already. And it had. Its name for thousands of years has been Jarndunmunha: there’s nothing nameless about that’.70 Not until 2011, on the occasion of the festival’s fortieth anniversary, did the hill’s traditional name return when the festival was officially renamed the ‘Nameless Jarndunmunha Festival’.71 The shared name was one sign of the dramatic change in race relations that had taken place since the High Court’s Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) decisions and the decade-long movement for reconciliation that began in 1991. The recognition of native title empowered Aboriginal communities legally and politically. Mining companies were now obliged to negotiate with the country’s traditional owners. In the early 1990s, Aboriginal elders could rightly point out that for all the profits mining companies reaped from their lands, ‘blackfellas got nothing’.72 Now they would be able to strike million-dollar compensation deals and become mining entrepreneurs. Companies such as Rio Tinto and Woodside funded research into Indigenous heritage and soon agreed to cultural heritage and conservation protocols. These new relationships were potentially lib
erating and empowering but they also led to internal divisions and power struggles within and between Aboriginal communities. Who would benefit from these new legal and political instruments? Which groups had the right to claim traditional ownership and negotiate deals with mining companies? Who had the right to speak for whom?73

  Fred Williams, Mount Nameless (afternoon) 1981

  Oil on canvas, 1 22.3 × 152.8 cm

  National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

  Presented through the NGV Foundation by Rio Tinto, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2001 (2001.596) © Estate of Fred Williams

  After more than two hundred pieces of rock art were removed under Aboriginal supervision in 2007, during the construction of Woodside’s five-billion-dollar Pluto Gas Plant, Indigenous elder Wilfred Hicks criticised Aboriginal groups in the Pilbara for failing to stand up for Murujuga. Hicks, who described Murujuga’s rock art as an ‘Aboriginal Bible’, pointed to the fact that some Aboriginal people had received up to five hundred dollars a day from Woodside as heritage consultants to oversee the rock art’s removal. ‘Once the rock has been moved the spirit of that rock has been broken’, he lamented. ‘It makes me feel sick.’ Because only a handful of Aboriginal people with Yaburara ancestry remained, Murujuga and its extraordinary rock art were even more susceptible to competing claims of ownership and those in government and industry eager to pursue development at all cost. Native title would prove to be of little use.74

  In 2004, the Federal Court ruled that native title rights over the Dampier Archipelago had been extinguished. It was virtually impossible for any Aboriginal group to successfully mount a legal claim of continued association with Murujuga and the islands nearby. In any event, only one year before the Federal Court decision, the Yaburara’s traditional neighbours, the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi, struck an agreement with the Western Australian government in which they relinquished any native title claim they might have held over the Dampier Archipelago. They allowed industrial development to go ahead in exchange for control of the remaining land, funding for a visitors’ centre, ‘5.8 million dollars in up-front payments’ and state funding for housing and transport infrastructure in Roebourne. This remarkable deal, which effectively saw Aboriginal people forgo their native title rights, has divided local Aboriginal people ever since, with one Ngarluma custodian, Robyne Churnside, arguing that many of her ‘old People’ who signed the agreement ‘were illiterate and did not understand the terms of the deal’. Yet regardless of the consequences for native title, the 2003 agreement led to the creation of Murujuga National Park (2013) and its administrative body, the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, which today manages 42 per cent of the peninsula and comprises Murujuga’s custodians, now known collectively as ‘Ngarda-ngarli’. Throughout this process, industry’s ever-increasing presence was always underwritten by strong government support.75

  In 2007, when the Commonwealth and Western Australian governments struck a deal with Woodside and Murujuga’s custodians, they secured National Heritage listing for 368.3 square kilometres of the peninsula at the same time as they allowed Woodside’s new gas processing plants to proceed and earmarked 48 square kilometres for further industrial development.76 Those politicians who had warned that national heritage listing would be a ‘catastrophe’ that would jeopardise ‘the very core of the Australian economy’ were proven wrong.77 Politically, the deal appeared the only way to proceed. Acknowledge all ‘stakeholders’ by recognising the heritage value of Murujuga’s rock art and reassure industry that this recognition would not compromise its plans for further expansion. The truth, however, was that governments of all persuasions had consistently failed to place the protection of ‘the densest accumulation of engraved rock art in the world’ above the demands of industry.78 Despite National Heritage listing, insufficient funds for adequate management and protection continue to leave Murujuga’s rock art vulnerable to vandalism, possible damage from industrial pollution and perhaps the greatest threat of all—indifference and ignorance.

  Over the last decade, more than twenty sites have been defaced with chisels and power drills or covered in graffiti, often with spray-paint. The vandals carve names or images into the rock or disfigure the original images in any way they can. Aboriginal rangers have been forced to devote considerable time to fighting the vandalism and restoring the damaged art (often in vain).79 The desecration of ancient sites has also occurred at King Bay, where a memorial has been erected to the victims of the Flying Foam Massacre. Across the bay from the memorial site, Woodside’s Supply Base glistens in the distance. The inscription on the plaque reads: ‘Hereabouts in February 1868, a party of settlers from Roebourne shot and killed as many as 60 [Yaburara] people in response to the killing of a European policeman in Nickol Bay. This incident has become known as the “Flying Foam Massacre”’. Directly above the memorial site, a striking collection of standing stones appears to commemorate the event.

  Standing stones, Flying Foam Massacre memorial site, King Bay, 2015

  At various intervals over the last ten to fifteen years, many of these standing stones (which resemble other ancient geological features constructed by humans throughout the archipelago) have been pushed over, smashed or otherwise damaged. Robert Bedarnik, who first visited the site in 1968, claimed in 2004 that of the original 138 standing stones only forty remained undamaged. Since that time more have been pushed over, some with their tops lopped off.80 It is as if the vandals, knowing that Aboriginal people believe that the survivors of the massacre erected the stones in memory of those killed, are even more determined to knock them down. Whether the stones were placed in position thousands of years ago or more recently, they stand over the place where Aboriginal people were murdered. The knowledge of what happened there transforms the meaning of the site. The stones appear to carry the aura of a memorial. In the words of elder Wilfred Hicks, ‘it is important that people remember this massacre, and learn the history of this Country. It is also important that we protect the sacred rock art here, which connects us to our ancestors’.81

  In 2013, local Aboriginal groups and others from across Australia came together to inaugurate the first National Day of Commemoration of the Flying Foam Massacre. Aboriginal leaders from the Pilbara stood on the steps of Parliament House in Perth to draw public attention to the day. The fate of the memorial site at King Bay and the story of the Flying Foam Massacre are now undeniably connected to the protection of the Yaburara’s extraordinary cultural legacy. So too is industry’s presence on Murujuga. The home of Australia’s largest industrial development, the North West Shelf Gas Project, stands on the very ground where one of Australia’s worst frontier massacres took place. On the shores of Murujuga, the protection of ancient cultural heritage, the memory of the violent history of colonialism and the mighty hands of industry are messily entwined. They are all part of Murujuga’s future.82

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  In November 2015, I saw rock art almost every day that I spent on Murujuga. It was impossible to avoid. Walking into one of the most accessible sites, Deep Gorge, the cathedral-like atmosphere grew heavier as the walls of the gorge closed in above me. It was difficult to find a rock that was not engraved. Images rained down from every direction: stick figures, female figures, masked faces, dugongs, kangaroos, mysterious circles, fish, turtles, emus, lizards, birds, spirit beings and many images that could not be easily deciphered. The further I walked, the more the larger engravings on the vertical rocks on either side of the gorge seemed to cohere, accentuating the gallery effect. Some were faint and weathered, while others virtually leapt out, intensely lit by the early morning sun, the temperature already 35 degrees at 9 a.m. It seemed impossible to grasp the deeper meaning of the ancient cultural heritage that surrounded me.

  A few days later, on my last morning in Dampier, I took a boat to Angel Island, close to one of the places where many Yaburara were killed in 1868. Approaching the island from the sea, it was already possible to make out a collection of striking, tablet-like sto
nes standing atop one of the rock piles near the shore. Walking past more remarkable standing stones on the beach, through the spinifex and low-lying scrub and climbing up the hill, I was standing before the tablets in less than half an hour. Packed tightly together, they stood almost perfectly upright surrounded by even more engravings on rocks nearby. The largest and most striking image was just over 1 metre in length and probably engraved long before the sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age six to seven thousand years ago. Older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids, it stood facing the sea, a majestic reminder of Australia’s ancient heritage before which all we have done in this country can easily appear ephemeral by comparison.

  Tablet stones, Angel Island, Flying Foam Passage, 2015

  As I returned to the boat and looked back at the stone tablets from the sea, I found it difficult to believe that the Western Australian and Commonwealth governments had failed to nominate Murujuga and the Dampier Archipelago for World Heritage listing. Putting aside the presence of so much heavy industry and the threat that it undoubtedly poses to Indigenous heritage, this is a place of international significance, a place that tells the story of our shared human heritage. If international tourists flock to see Ubirr and Uluru, given the provision of proper funding and infrastructure, why would they not come to Angel Island and Murujuga to view such extraordinary art? There is no other place like this in the world. The range and historical depth of the art on display—more than one million images—is astounding. Thylacines became extinct in north-west Australia between three and a half thousand and four thousand years ago. Throughout Murujuga, Ken Mulvaney has found many thylacine engravings, further evidence of the area’s outstanding heritage status despite the fact that so much of the peninsula’s art still remains unmapped. The history of Aboriginal occupation is well ‘beyond 20 000 years’ and Mulvaney believes the art will eventually ‘challenge the Kimberley’s status in antiquity and artistic endeavour’.83 The facts speak for themselves.