Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about a place that to me and to many others is too precious to lose; I mean to speak about the Burrup Peninsula. In the local language it was and is known as Murujuga, and it is a place very close to my heart. On modern maps you will find it as the centrepiece to the Dampier Archipelago. I have been visiting the Burrup with my friend and colleague Robin Chapple since he introduced me to this extraordinary place in 2001. One of the reasons it is such a valuable part of our continent is that it has among the oldest and largest outdoor rock art galleries anywhere in the world. Some estimates place it confidently at 6,000 to 10,000 to 30,000 years old, and there are six or seven or more distinct types of rock art located across the peninsula and the islands of the archipelago. Thirty thousand years places it well before the onset of the last ice age.

There is somewhere between half a million and a million petroglyphs, ancient rock carvings created by hundreds of generations of people, and these go back to styles that look as though they came from South America—very complex, ancient styles that I am told are among the oldest on the peninsula—right up to material that was clearly being incised after the occupation by Europeans had begun. As well as the rock art, there are terraces, standing stones, enormous shell middens—some of them metres deep; rock formations with a significance lost completely to us now. The landscape itself is of granifier boulder piles, steeply incised valleys that frame billabongs and remarkable wetlands. And the priceless archaeological, cultural and artistic values of this place to Aboriginal people of the region and to wider communities have been recognised by the International Council on Monuments and Sites—ICOMOS—and of course Australia's National Trust.

In July 2007, after a campaign that ran for nearly a year, one of Senator Siewert's campaigns—she is on a bit of a roll—the Australian federal government announced National Heritage listing for the Burrup Peninsula. Or, as it turned out, parts of the peninsula. We discovered that that listing, which was eventually delivered by the then environment minister Malcolm Turnbull, simply protected the areas that industry had decided it did not want and the maps that were eventually delivered just had big rectangles chopped out of them. Nothing by way of a protective management plan; no signage, no protection from vandalism which, if anything, has increased in recent times. The Aboriginal custodians of the Burrup, represented now by the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, voted unanimously for World Heritage listing earlier this year. This listing will not be a cure-all, but we believe that it will provide a much higher degree of protection than placement on the dangerously toothless National Heritage List. The World Monuments Fund has listed the Burrup three times as one of the top 100 most endangered heritage places on the planet, and the only one listed in Australia.

What, you might ask, is it endangered by? For anybody who has spent time up there you will also be well aware that the Burrup is a site of one of Australia's most lucrative resource developments. It is the site of the Woodside North West Shelf gas plant, a tremendously important complex—the first gas processing plant set up in Western Australia in the 1980s—which has now spawned a host of other developments, including fertiliser factories, ports, lay-down areas and so on, with their attendant pipelines, desalination corridors, roads and power infrastructure. It is, in fact, one of the more important sites of industrial development in Western Australia, and it is an absolute disaster that successive governments have allowed one industry after another to crowd out the fragile and precious heritage and environmental values of this area.

The archaeologist Ken Mulvaney estimates that well in excess of 10,000 petroglyphs have already been erased. That either happens by blasting, cutting and filling or, as occurred when Woodside established the gas plant in the 1980s, the boulders are simply ripped out of their original emplacement and they are dumped—they are set aside in a fenced yard, some of them face down. The petroglyphs are then degraded by fire and other insults. It was described by an old man who showed Robin and I around up there a couple of years ago as 'a graveyard', and he told us that the petroglyphs which he referred to as 'witnesses' were 'dead', having been removed from their original places and dumped out of the way.

There are images of suns and of animals, including some now extinct. If you want to see thylacines carved—and they are unmistakably thylacines and they have been extinct in the north-west of Western Australia for many, many centuries—you can see them as fresh as though they were carved yesterday. As you stare at these extraordinary messages from millennia ago, the flare towers from the Woodside gas plant and other modern intrusions churning out ammonia and various other forms of toxic fumes interrupt the skyline.

The Burrup is Australia's Stonehenge; it is not enough to simply say, 'We offered National Heritage Listing to a fraction of it,' and the rest of it can go under the bulldozers or be blasted flat for new gas plants. This is not some historic insult from the 1980s that we have learnt the error of our ways from, because of course Woodside erased several hundred square metres of this terrain and parked the Pluto plant not even in one of the valleys—you could argue the North West Shelf plant is at least out of sight, apart from the flare towers; they put it on a bench above the landscape. There is simply no willingness as far as I am aware in the Western Australian government to offer the slightest amount of protection from the invasion of heavy industry that is occurring.

Instead of the Burrup being treated as though it is Australia's Stonehenge, keeping in mind of course it is thousands of years older than that, the Barnett government is in the midst of approving another nitrate plant. So the industrial vandalism of this extraordinary place continues unabated. It is interesting that Premier Barnett, who has had so much to do with the ruination of the landscape of the Burrup, is also one of the few people who has a clue as to its value. When he was in opposition he actually said—I will paraphrase; I do not have the exact quote with me—that, if we had known that that was there, that these were the values, we wouldn't have done it. But, of course, once elected to Premier, industry was simply given its lead, as we have seen right across Western Australia at the moment, and the destruction continued.

The Australian Heritage Council's report on the World Heritage values of the rock art of the archipelago was handed down to the minister and his department earlier this year. The report indicated that the Burrup met two criteria for World Heritage listing. It also listed four direct threats to the World Heritage values, including industrial development and the knowledge and engagement of the Ngarda-Ngarli people.

So we want to know when the minister will be moving to place the Burrup on the tentative list. It is well known and understood that the Commonwealth can move unilaterally if it looks as though these sites are in danger and that they, indeed, have the values of the World Heritage register. As we know at the moment, there are seven areas of land on the Burrup still zoned for heavy industry. Those are developments that will last 20 years, maybe 30 years, if we are lucky, as they go through the depleting gas reserves of the North West Shelf. But in fact they have the capacity to destroy human heritage that dates back tens of thousands of years. This is a place that is too precious to lose.

In closing I want to pay tribute to those who have stood up in defence of this place. We cannot but imagine how much more we would know about the values of the Burrup but for the massacres at Flying Foam that occurred many decades ago now and the smallpox epidemics that went through and wiped out the local populations. Nonetheless, the songs are still sung, the stories are still told by a dwindling number of people in the area. This heritage is still living. To whitefellas from the south, of course, it is a stunning outdoor art gallery. But to the people of the area it is much more than that as a living cultural landscape.

I want to pay my respects to FARA, the Friends of Australian Rock Art. It is a Western Australian based organisation that has done a huge amount to raise awareness and campaign for the values of the Burrup; also to the National Trust, who have gone way above and beyond the call of duty for the Burrup; and to international groups like ICOMOS and the World Monument Fund, who have pitched in and done their bit when the locals seemed not to care. Of course, I could not go much further without mentioning my dear friend Robin Chapple, who has made it a significant part of his life's work to stand up for the Burrup. This is a place that is too precious to lose. We want the Commonwealth to exercise Commonwealth powers and not simply re-delegate them back to the state that has shown no interest at all in protecting the unique values of this place.