A sacred site in Western Australia that showed 46,000 years of continual occupation and provided a 4,000 year old genetic link to present-day aboriginals have been destroyed in the expansion of an iron ore mine.
The move was entirely legal, as Rio Tinto received ministerial consent ot destroy or damage the site in 2013, under Western Australia’s outdated Aboriginal heritage laws, which were drafted in 1972 to favour mining operations.
The Aboriginal Heritage Act has been under review in some form since 2012, and re-writing the act was listed a priority for Labor before their election win in 2017. Ben Wyatt, the Aboriginal affairs minister, pushed back the final consultation on his draft bill until later this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Rio Tinto are not entirely against the concept of re-working the law, but they argue that existing agreements must still be honoured. In some ways this is fair, as a deal is a deal, but the damage to Aboriginal heritage is significant. There is no easy way out of this puzzle for the Australian government, but it should undoubtedly reform the laws which make it so easy to desecrate heritage sites.
This isn’t the first heritage site which has been under threat, in 2007 Woodside Petroleum was given permission to destroy a large quantity of Burrup rock art so that processing facilities could be expanded. The Burrup Peninsula was home to one of the wold’s largest collections of rock art, some of which was up to 20,000 years old. However, this move was only put down after wide-scale protests, and Burrup was placed on Australia’s heritage list. In 2014, the Western Australian government rescinded this status and is now under threat again.
Western Australia is undoubtedly rich, both culturally and in terms of resources. The choice between the two is binary, and for now money is the main motivator driving the province’s government, as it allows an increasing amount of destruction of the identity of its original people.
Festus Media 