Australia formally nominated for World Heritage status a broad swathe of land that’s home to more than one million ancient Aboriginal rock carvings, elevating Indigenous rights in a region at risk from an expanding gas industry.
(Bloomberg) — Australia formally nominated for World Heritage status a broad swathe of land that’s home to more than one million ancient Aboriginal rock carvings, elevating Indigenous rights in a region at risk from an expanding gas industry.
The Murujuga Cultural Landscape, which has the densest known concentration of hunter-gatherer petroglyphs anywhere in the world, is nestled near giant gas and fertilizer plants on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula. The industrial activity for years has stoked concerns that pollution is damaging the sacred art.
The government is proposing a World Heritage boundary of nearly 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of land and sea, and if the bid to Unesco is successful, the nomination will put Murujuga on par with the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Opera House in being recognized as culturally significant.
“Murujuga is a natural wonder of the world,” Tanya Plibersek, federal minister for the environment and water, said in a statement Friday. “Our Government is strongly committed to working with Traditional Owners and Custodians to properly protect the history of the oldest living civilization in the world.”
Still, World Heritage status won’t do much in practice to fortify protection against the threat from massive gas operations, according to Samantha Hepburn, a professor of energy, climate and environment law at Deakin University. It is unlikely to hamper current industrial activity if approvals for development have already been awarded before the listing, she said.
“If you’ve already approved it, then that’s just the way things work,” Hepburn said. “This is, of course, the problem with the legislative framework.”
A spokesperson for Woodside Energy Group Ltd., Australia’s biggest oil and natural gas exporter, said before the announcement that the company supports World Heritage nomination for Murujuga on the basis of the coexistence of heritage and industry.
The company owns the $12 billion Scarborough offshore gas project nearby — a huge reserve off Western Australia that could account for about a 10th of the nation’s LNG exports — and is planning to expand its onshore Pluto processing facility. Last year, the government approved a multi-billion dollar fertilizer project by Perdaman Chemicals and Fertilizers Ltd. in the region.
The nomination was prepared by the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, which represents the five traditional owners of the land in the Pilbara region, as well as the Western Australia state government.
Save Our Songlines, an Aboriginal activist group, is pushing for a moratorium on further industrial development on the peninsula until an independent investigation of heritage values is undertaken by the United Nations World Heritage Committee, according to a Friday statement.
“Support for this nomination from Woodside, Perdaman and the WA Government is deeply hypocritical while they are at the same time pushing ahead with projects that will destroy the very cultural values the listing is supposed to protect,” Save Our Songlines spokesperson Raelene Cooper said.
Australia has had a history of failing to protect Aboriginal cultural sites against industrial expansion. In 2020, Rio Tinto Group’s destruction of a 40,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site sparked national outrage, eventually leading to the resignation of a number of the company’s senior executives, including then-Chief Executive Officer Jean-Sebastien Jacques.
In 2019, the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, home to the Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in southeastern Australia, was granted World Heritage status. Unesco’s assessment process for the Murujuga bid will take at least 18 months.
(Updates with comment from activist group in 10th paragraph.)
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