Ancient Aboriginal rock art at risk

The lack of management also means it is possible for theft to occur. The worst case involves vandals removing at least one rock face with power tools.

“People take these rocks away. If there’s a small rock with an engraving on it, people have been stealing them,” Smalldon said.

Robert Bednarik, who since discovering the rock art in the 1960s has been a passionate defender of the area, said the industrial development of the Burrup was an “enormous planning blunder” given the importance of the art.

“Western Australia has one of the lowest population densities in the world. We have oodles of land, we have enormous stretches of coastal spinifex plains that are completely unoccupied,” he said.

“And what do we do? We put the biggest industrial development in the country at the same site as the biggest cultural heritage site in the country. It’s incredible.”

Austrian-born Bednarik, an epistemologist who has published widely on archaeology, believes industrial emissions pose the biggest risk to the art and will gradually strip away the etchings.

“The only rock art, the only petroglyphs that you are going to see 100 years from now are those very, very deeply carved. And they of course are a small minority,” he said.

Woodside and the government deny the assertion, saying air monitoring on the Burrup has found air emissions to be well below national and international environmental and health standards and are not impacting rock art.

Western Australia’s Deputy Premier Eric Ripper said the state government was establishing Murujuga National Park, to be jointly managed with the indigenous community, over parts of the Burrup that lie in National Heritage areas.

An Aboriginal heritage management plan to guide the protection of indigenous heritage and culture in the wider Dampier Archipelago had also been developed.

“We recognize the immense national cultural and heritage values of the area and believe a cooperative approach between all of these groups is the best way to manage and protect those heritage values,” he said.

But local Aboriginal leaders such as Wilfred Hicks, from the Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo people which claim a connection to the Burrup, remain concerned about the site.

“I’m very worried about it. All my people are worried about it because it’s destroying all the Aboriginal art,” he said.

“To me, there’s enough development now, I don’t think there should be any more.”