The curious case of the Burrup Murujuga

“Mediocrity does not see higher than itself. 
But talent instantly recognizes the genius” Sir ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

“We stood in our small and twisting valley, the ancient rocks piled high on either side of us, the hair on the back of our necks standing up in awe at what was in front of us. There, peering back at us from deep time, a face, an image, probably the oldest representation of a human face on earth. There it was – carved in the rock before us, so many thousands of years earlier”.

PETER HYLANDS suggests that before you read any more of this article that you move down the page to the photo of ROBYNE CHURNSIDE sitting by the sea, click to play the sound file below her photo, then move back up the page and watch the slide show of Burrup Murujuga images … then read on.

ROBYNE CHURNSIDE talking about the Burrup Murujuga

Our small party included SYLVIA HALLAM, the eminent Australian Archaeologist, CARMEN LAWRENCE, Premier of Western Australia from 1990 -1993 and Australia’s first female Premier and rock art enthusiasts, ROBIN CHAPPLE (Western Australian Greens MP), STEPHEN BENNETTS from the University of Western Australia and KEN MULVANEY from the University of New England, Armidale in New South Wales. We were on a trip organised by JEANNINE GAN from the Friends of Australian Rock Art.

Audio excerpt 01: Robin Chapple

Audio excerpt 02: Robin Chapple

Audio excerpt 03: Carmen Lawrence

So what is the Burrup Peninsula?

The Burrup Peninsula, or in local language the Murujuga, in the remote North West of Western Australia, contains an extraordinary collection of ancient rock carvings created by many hundreds of generations of aboriginal people across the millennia.

As creative cowboy films, out of consideration to indigenous peoples, prefers the use of the term Murujuga, this name will be used from now on unless we are quoting from other sources.

The Murujuga, once an island, now forms a Peninsula as it was joined to the mainland by earthworks to create road and rail access for industrial development. The Murujuga is part of the Dampier rock art precinct which is made up of 42 islands, islets and rocks covering an area some 45 km in radius. The rock art precinct represents the largest and possibly the oldest such precinct in the world. There are more than one million rock carvings. The area is beyond value, and as well as being of great archaeological, cultural and artistic merit, it is a storehouse of knowledge and memory. The place is of great significance to indigenous peoples of the region.

Today, the Murujuga is listed on the World Monument Funds list of the 100 most endangered places in the world. The Murujuga is recognised as a cultural and artistic achievement of global significance.

The Murujuga, is however, still under significant pressure from industrial development in the form of industrial infrastructure – factories and processing plants, infrastructure for extraction industries whose source of supply is distant from the Murujuga.

What is remarkable is that the rock art precinct on the Murujuga contains some of the hardest rock on earth and is surrounded by degraded pastoral land which is some of the flattest on earth, the latter perfect for industrial development and infrastructure. The major question therefore is why is the Murujuga being used for industrial infrastructure, given its enormously important and global cultural significance?

When the destruction first started the rock art was just bulldozed, no one knows how much, (KEN MULVANEY estimates that at least 10,000 engravings have been destroyed) now an attempt is made to save and relocate the rock art. What eminent scientists around the world believe and what is critically important, is to ensure that as much of the rock art landscape as possible on the Murujuga stays intact. Moving the rock art essentially destroys its relevance in time and place.

As population pressure increases so does vandalism and the likelihood of theft. The rock art for the present remains largely unprotected and undocumented. A greater scientific effort is needed.

In early July 2007, the Australian Federal Government announced a National Heritage listing of parts of the Burrup Peninsula. Unlike World Heritage listing, National Heritage listing in Australia, does not provide protection for the site.

In an interview (3 July 2007) on the ABC radio (Australian Broadcasting Commission)

MALCOLM TURNBULL, Australia’s former Minister for the Environment and Water Resources stated;

“The rock art along the archipelago tells a dynamic visual story about the formation of the landscape. It tells the story of the changes to the environment and the animals, the animals that populated this continent after the sea levels rose.

It gives a real insight into the daily life of the Aboriginal people, from adapting to those significant environmental changes, and it shows the connections between the different Aboriginal groups”.

Dr SYLVIA HALLAM describes the precinct,

“The Burrup art is a monument to the spread of modern humanity, the first exponents of the symbolic and the sacred across the globe. It now sits amidst the incongruity of towering industrial installations spewing out flame, smoke and ammonia. Unique engravings are threatened, not only from immediate physical destruction…”.

The carvings that form the cultural landscape on the Murujuga and throughout the Dampier rock art precinct date back many thousands of years. It is universally accepted that the rock art dates back beyond 6,000 years, however more recent estimates suggest that these dates will be pushed back beyond 30,000 years.

Many of the rock carvings show images of now extinct animals such as the Thylacine and of immense significance, the Murujuga contains what are likely to be the oldest depictions of the human face.

The Ngarluma people are now the guardians of the Murujuga. When PETER HYLANDS spoke to ROBYNE CHURNSIDE, a Ngarluma social activist in the town of Dampier, Western Australia, in July 2007, ROBYNE said:

“the environment of the Burrup has to be protected, it is connected to aboriginal people who feel their rock art should be preserved, sometimes mother nature lets you do something but sometimes mother nature turns against you. There is a long history on the Burrup of preserving the ancient springs and their water and the land”.

Dr SYLVIA HALLAM, the eminent Australian Archaeologist, says

“Before sea levels rose in response to global warming at the end of the last ice age, the hills of what is now the Dampier Archipelago, were uplands 150 kilometers from the sea. 

Australia’s ‘archaic faces’ lie in small clusters in a very few remote valleys hidden in widely spaced massifs; the Burrup, the Durba Hills, the Calvert Range and the Cleland Hills, focal places of ceremony and symbolism, sparsely scattered across 1,700 hundred arid kilometers.

The Burrup valley provides a glimpse of a time when early colonisers moved through an interior, once less dry, linking significant nodes into a nexus of ceremony, symbolism and myth stretching across the continent. They managed to preserve these connections through the times of greatest aridity, around 20,000 years ago. The Burrup allows us to follow the processes of adaptation as sea levels rose, marine resources from warm shallow seas enriched subsistence, and populations increased. More people engraved a diversity of new motifs, in increasing numbers and rapidly changing styles over more and more localities, on what had become a group of islands.

Sacred and secular activity on these islands ceased only with the advent of new colonists, pastoralists and pearlers.

Eventually iron ore-trains and salt evaporating basins linked the one-time Dampier Island to the mainland, to become the Burrup Peninsula.

 The abundance of Burrup art is often stressed. What is more significant is its extraordinary diversity, indicating the convergence of groups from a wide area, and a long sequence of phases, stretching back tens of thousands of years. Australians have gathered here for ceremony and celebration, and impressed their symbols laboriously on these hard rocks for many times as long as the millennia that separate us from Stonehenge or the pyramids”.

1000 generations to make it, just one generation to break it.

Over the many thousands of years that the Murujuga rock art was being carved, the local indigenous people preserved the art works of countless previous generations and they protected the land. The Yaburrara people, who lived there, led a sustainable lifestyle that lasted many thousands of years.

Recent history has dealt very badly with the local indigenous population. This is a long and hard story which I won’t go into here, however, following a massacre, the Yaburrara people, who were then the custodians of the Burrup were largely exterminated.

ROBERT BEDNARIK, a scientist who has fought long and hard, to save the rock art of the Dampier Precinct says this about Aboriginal custodianship;

“The Ngarluma people, living now mainly in nearby Roebourne, retain strong cultural associations with the Dampier Archipelago. The neighbouring coastal Mardudunera also have traditional links with the area, as do the Yindjibarndi whose country is mainly further inland”.

So what are the lessons for humanity?

PETER HYLANDS goes on to say;

“I have always considered the Murujuga and its rock art to be one of human society’s most important cultural sites. In one sense I think of the Murujuga as a barometer of the human condition. If we can destroy our cultural heritage, that is our past and our present, we have the capacity to destroy the future; a future that belongs to others, the future generations of this world”.

MALCOLM FRASER, Prime Minister of Australia (1975 – 1983) says;

“It is a mistake to think that the industrial development of the North West depends on using the Burrup Murujuga. The Peninsula is so rugged and precipitous that it is hard to understand how it ever came to be used for industrial development”.

SPIKE MILLIGAN, the great comedian and writer, often expressed his deep disappointment and hurt at seeing Aboriginal Rock Art (in this case paintings in New South Wales) being vandalised. He would be very hurt by the Murujuga. Thank you SPIKE.

And finally from a barman in Western Australia to PETER HYLANDS:

“It’s only old graffiti mate, if we’d have done it we’d be but in jail”.

What more can I say!

Photos by Andrea Hylands, Remi Vignals and Robin Chapple

Find out more or go to burrup.org.au