Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important bill and it brings to light again the responsibility we have for protecting the Indigenous art of this great nation. Amongst other things, the bill moves to ensure a certificate can be issued to owners of Australian Indigenous art pieces overseas, if that art is brought to Australia to be put on show, to have the artwork returned overseas because the owners are concerned that it would be confiscated in Australia and returned to Indigenous owners. This will simply mean that the artworks are available for Australians to see.

With my colleague Senator Siewert I have recently been to the Burrup Peninsula near Karratha in north-west Western Australia. It brought home to me the extraordinary richness of the Aboriginal art heritage in Australia. One thing I was not prepared for, though, was to find myself, as an Australian who thought he had a fairly good awareness of that richness, in what is arguably the world’s greatest rock art site. I had no idea that on this peninsula, which is some 22 kilometres long, and on the 40 or so islands which are next to it—in fact, the peninsula was an island until the bridge was put across in 1962—there are some 500,000 to one million rock art depictions, or petroglyphs. When you get onto the hilltops, which are strewn with boulders, and accustom yourself to looking for the magnificent, creative human heritage that is there, these rock artworks seem to be everywhere. I cannot describe them with anything like the justice they deserve but, helped by experts from the local communities as well as the National Trust of Western Australia, I was able to at least understand the magnificence of the complicated depictions of human faces, which I would have thought had some relationship to the Mayan or Aztec periods, except that they came thousands of years later. These Aboriginal artworks preceded them by millennia. These artworks may be 20,000 to 40,000 years old, and they are still sitting on the Burrup Peninsula.

Other works which span the era of these Aboriginal depictions in the rock—again, I am talking about hundreds of thousands of them in one confined area of this nation—include a number of Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines, which have been extinct on the mainland for thousands of years but were part of the world of the people living on the Burrup Peninsula during the last ice age when, far from being on the coastline, it was probably 80 kilometres inland, because the sea had receded as the ice built up at the poles. There are depictions of plains-wanderer birds just as I have seen them wandering on the Australian plains with their heads up—the statuesque walk that they have—and depictions of kangaroos and smaller marsupials. My host pointed out a kangaroo with spots on it and said, ‘We think this may be an extinct kangaroo which had spots on it like the thylacine.’ Of course, when you collect skeletons of extinct kangaroos, you do not see the coat, but here it is depicted on the rock by the people who lived with these creatures thousands of years ago.

There are pictures of men, women and children and a magnificent depiction a couple of metres high of maybe a dozen men climbing on both sides of what looks to be a pole or a tree. There are depictions of whales and of nets catching what may be dugongs. You can see, as the seas came in and this piece of Australian geography moved from being inland to being closer to the shore—and now it is surrounded; what were the inland mountain tops are now the islands—that the rock art went from being of marsupials and inland birds to sea creatures: turtles, whales, fish and crabs. They are fantastic drawings by people who were representing their world on the rocks. We are told that they were made maybe thousands of years before the ancient drawings at Lascaux in France, which are World Heritage listed and draw so many visitors that they have had to re-create the cave next door so that the very presence of people breathing does not deteriorate the artworks.

Here comes the killer punch: since 1962, Burrup Peninsula, or Dampier Island as it was, has been ‘developed’ for the export of iron ore by Hammersley and, more recently, to bring gas onshore from under the ocean for processing into liquid petroleum gas for export. This has entailed an industrial implant on the Burrup Peninsula, and it is my sorry duty to report to this parliament—unless I am wrong, it has never heard this before—that that has entailed the destruction of thousands of the rock artworks of millennia ago which ought to be World Heritage listed.

I am told—I have spoken with Woodside, which proposes a large development further on the peninsula which cannot be had without the further mass destruction of these petroglyphs—that this is a process that is encouraged by the Western Australian government. In fact, because the Carpenter government in Western Australia and its antecedents have invested millions of dollars in infrastructure on the peninsula, work has to go ahead there.

Here is the extraordinary thing: just down the way from Karratha, which is the town built for these developments—mercifully not on the Burrup Peninsula but a little way across on the mainland—is the Maitland industrial site where industry could be developed. There is some argument about gas coming ashore and whether it would involve the West Intercourse Island, which has rock art on it. I am told that it does not have to. The Maitland industrial site on the open plains where there are no rock art sites at all is empty. I am told that BHP has gone up the coast to Onslow for its new development and that this is not going to impact on what is the world’s greatest rock art site.

In speaking with Mr Gary Gray from Woodside a couple of months ago after the Burrup Peninsula had been drawn to my attention, I asked about Woodside’s proposals and pointed to the alternatives. I have gained no response from Woodside which would indicate that they are going to take up the alternatives. In fact, I got the indication that the Western Australian government was so intent on making good its investment that it wanted Woodside to go onto the Burrup Peninsula and further desecrate this astonishing part of global human heritage. Gary Gray asked me if I would like to speak to Woodside’s board. I said, ‘Let me first go with Senator Siewert to see the place and then I would like to do so.’ Having come back, I have asked to see the board and suddenly their time is taken up at all their board meetings now until the end of this year and they cannot see me. I will appeal to them again to change their mind on that.

It is incumbent on this parliament and the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell, to make sure that the Western Australian government’s dereliction of its duty to its state, to this nation and most of all to first Australians, which entails it promoting the further destruction of this World Heritage, is not allowed to proceed. The Howard government will have to make this decision if the Western Australian government is not good enough to do so. I am hoping to talk with Minister Campbell about this later in the week. Any modicum of commonsense, of pride in our nation or of respect for global human heritage would say that there is no way you can put in a liquid petroleum gas processing factory that would erode this astonishing repository of human heritage—all the more because there are good alternative sites which do not involve that destruction.

This is destined to become not just a local issue but a national and an international issue. What would we say if we heard that the Blair government in Britain was to say of Stonehenge, which is a much younger and newer site than Burrup, ‘We will keep 60 per cent of it; you can knock off the right-hand 40 per cent’? This is what the Carpenter government is saying about Burrup. They are going to protect 60 per cent—that is, they are going to allow 40 per cent to be destroyed. What would we say about that applying to Stonehenge? The world would be in turmoil about it. What indeed would we say if the Mubarak government in Egypt suddenly declared that there were three big pyramids so one of them could go because they needed rock for building highways or dams? Of course, there would be huge international outcry about it. But in Western Australia, the world’s greatest rock art site—unless my attention is drawn to something better—is being treated in that fashion. The government says that 40 per cent can go and we can keep 60 per cent. I appeal to all senators and to the government, through the minister, to act urgently to acquaint themselves and ourselves with this extraordinary national heirloom so that we do not allow it to become an industrial site but rather protect it for this nation and for the world for all time.