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As Australia faces a gas crisis, Indigenous communities fear their millennia-old sacred sites will be collateral damage in the rush for fresh supplies.
“The rocks have been here for hundreds of thousands of years.
“They are our history, our story, our dreaming stories.
“They depict the remarkable survival of our people.”
On the west coast of Australia, Raelene Cooper slips off her shoes before ascending a unique rock formation with her daughters.
It’s an act learned from her ancestors, the Mardudhunera People, who’ve performed it for millennia.
“It’s my mother’s home, my grandparents’, all of our old people that walked this place, many, many, many moons and evolutions ago,” she says.
“When we come here, this is the place to be.
“It’s our place of healing, our spirituality, where we can connect to the [country] and to our people.
“They tell us and show us our paths. They show us everything that we need to know and we learn to hand our knowledge down to our young followers.”
Murujuga is the traditional name for this place where Ms Cooper belongs.
It means ‘hip bone sticking out’ and refers to the shape of the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara region, in northern Western Australia.
Sunrise is a magical time at Murujuga.
As golden light illuminates Ms Cooper’s climb, ancient rock carvings of turtles are revealed, telling the story of the peninsula’s creation.
“They left [the carvings] here to tell the stories,” Ms Cooper says.
“The turtle from the Fortescue River … come down the waterfall, couldn’t get back up the waterfall, so he come through Fortescue.
“Through the mouth of Fortescue River, he come around Murujuga, right around through the Maitland area back to the mouth of Fortescue River, where the freshwater and the saltwater meet.
“That’s the creation story.”
Murujuga is home to one of the world’s largest collections of rock carvings, believed to tell ancient stories older than 50,000 years.
It includes some of the earliest depictions of the human face — which cannot be photographed — and has been nominated for a UNESCO world heritage listing.
Some Traditional Owners fear these carvings are under threat from the continued expansion of industry on the peninsula, and this week Ms Cooper presented their concerns to the United Nations in Geneva.
“The rock art archives our lore. It is written not on a tablet of stone, but carved into the ngurra, which holds our Dreaming stories and Songlines.”
Pluto rising
The Burrup Peninsula is also home to Australia’s largest oil and gas extraction plants.
Since the 1980s, Woodside has had a presence on the peninsula through the North West Shelf project, located near Karratha, which has produced liquefied gas for export.
The project expanded in 2007 to include another processing facility, Pluto.
Woodside has now received state and Commonwealth approval for a further $16.5 billion expansion, known as the Scarborough offshore gas project, which includes the expansion of the Pluto facility, called Pluto 2.
The gas mining industry already provides employment for a third of the local population — more than 4,000 jobs.
Woodside said the expansion would create up to another 3,200 jobs during construction and nearly 600 ongoing roles across the country, and the company said it had a commitment to prioritising Traditional Owner and Custodian employment.
The company said it had consulted extensively with Traditional Owners, including “environmental monitoring, archaeological and ethnographic surveys and access to independent expert advice”.
Over the decades, the Traditional Owners’ relationship with the company has been a complicated one.
In 2002, Traditional Owners agreed to give up three separate Native Title claims on the Burrup Peninsula and Maitland area, after the WA government told them it intended to acquire the land for heavy industry.
In return, they received non-industrial land entitlements, millions of dollars in compensation and investment in education, training and employment.
In 2006, the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC) was established, which included the Ngarluma-Yindjibarndi, the Yaburara Mardudhunera, and the Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo people.
“The corporation was set up in the environment of the time, where Native Title in the Pilbara region wasn’t sorted yet,” MAC chief executive Peter Jefferies said.
“So for the time and place of where it was set up and how it was set up, the corporation was set up to be able to manage land and other assets on behalf of its members.”
To this day, the 2002 deal governs the use of the heavy industry estate. Companies consult with the MAC about future plans, but do not need their approval for works within the industrial zone.
Ms Cooper was a member of the MAC for 10 years, until she quit in February this year, partly due to a “gag clause” in the 2002 agreement, which she believed stopped Traditional Owners voicing their objections to industrial development in the area.
The clause stated contracting parties could not “lodge or cause to be lodged any objection to development proposals intended to occur on land” within the industrial estate.
A federal senate inquiry into the Juukan Caves destruction last year described ‘gag clauses’ as “egregious” and recommended they be prohibited in the industry at a Commonwealth, state and territory level.
Ms Cooper says emissions from Woodside’s gas plants are already doing irrevocable damage to her spiritual home.
“I’ve been out on this [country] many, many times over the years with my family and we’re visibly seeing the effects of the emissions and the air pollution.”
Woodside says there has been no peer-reviewed scientific evidence that shows impacts on the nearby rock art by industrial emissions.
But previous studies have been criticised for a range of issues, and the WA Department of Environment has commissioned the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Project — a thorough investigation to look at whether emissions are accelerating natural weathering of the petroglyphs.
The company told the ABC in a statement it was also adopting technology to reduce the emission of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from its gas plant and supporting the on-going monitoring of the Murujuga rock art.
Traditional Owners, like Peter Jefferies, have again been weighing up the importance of their land, culture and artefacts, and the economic prosperity of the region and their people.
“There’s been lengthy consultation with the Aboriginal Corporation from Woodside over the last two and a half years with regards to the Scarborough development,” Mr Jefferies said.
“So there’s been quite a bit of work done with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation about sitting there and understanding the potential risk or opportunities with regards to Scarborough.”
Ms Cooper has written to the Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney and the Minister for Water and Environment Tanya Plibersek about her concerns of industry impacts on the rock art, but there is limited avenue for appeal.
Ms Burney and Ms Plibersek declined to be interviewed.
Looming large in the back of Ms Cooper’s mind is the destruction of the 46,000 year-old caves at Juukan Gorge by mining giant Rio Tinto in 2020.
She’s not the only Traditional Owner deeply affected by what happened at Juukan Gorge.
Pilliga Forest
In the Pilliga Forest, in north-west New South Wales, Gomeroi woman Suellyn Tighe feels something isn’t right.
“Nature’s in some sort of flux — there’s things flowering.
“Birds are nesting, when they’re not usually nesting
“Our climate patterns are out of whack.”
This is Gomeroi country, where Ms Tighe grew up knowing where to find the biggest and best tasting berries.
“Those type of plants are what we call calendar plants, which will tell us when we can go fishing for a particular type of fish, or when we can go and catch freshwater yabbies.
“But when they’re out of whack that puts the timing out for even the animals, because the animals will be coming in eating those plants soon, so when the natural fruiting time comes, there will be no fruit.”
Ms Tighe is worried about what’s happening on the land that holds the stories and history of their people.
While she sees climate change slowly disturbing the Gomeroi seasons, she’s concerned looming industrial expansion will bring more disruption to the forest.
Australia’s biggest domestic gas supplier, Santos, plans to drill 850 gas wells in an area of the Pilliga Forest known as Zone 4, which has been set aside for forestry, recreation and mineral extraction by the NSW government since 2005.
The Narrabri project has already received the green light from the NSW Independent Planning Commission and the federal government, a process which included heritage assessment.
According to Santos, all of the gas from the Narrabri project will be committed to the domestic market, and will fulfil up to half of New South Wales’s household gas needs.
Australia is a major global exporter of gas, but this winter the country’s domestic supply has fallen short.
The cost of coal and gas is largely driven by international demand, which means supplies needed outside of existing contracts are exposed to volatile international spot prices.
That demand has risen sharply as European countries try to wean themselves off Russian gas, because of the war in the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, ageing energy infrastructure in Australia means planned and unplanned outages have also disrupted domestic supply.
At the same time, demand has increased as Australians try to keep warm.
It’s a situation federal energy minister Chris Bowen warned could not be solved quickly, but the new government has indicated its support for new gas projects that receive regulatory approval.
“So that has a flexibility premium which is important as we are managing this transition [to renewables].”
But while the government supports gas projects, climate experts are sceptical that gas is the best solution to provide Australian households with any real reprieve from soaring prices.
Independent economist and economic adviser for the Climate Council Nicki Hutley says it’s problematic to assume Australia desperately needs gas from new projects.
“None of these reserves are going to come online and save us in the next couple of months,” she said.
“We need to take into account all the social, cultural, environmental impacts and that includes Indigenous heritage.”
The area for proposed gas exploration in the PIlliga Forest by Santos is part of a Gomeroi Native Title claim, which is still to be determined.
Earlier this year, the Gomeroi people overwhelmingly rejected entering a compensation agreement with Santos.
The case is now being heard in the Native Title Tribunal, which will decide if the project can go ahead without Gomeroi consent.
A ruling is expected within months.
A Santos spokesperson told the ABC the company would respect the Native Title Tribunal’s decision.
“Santos has been consulting and working with the Gomeroi since 2012,” a Santos spokesperson said.
While neither Woodside nor Santos had anything to do with what happened at Juukan Gorge, Ms Tighe finds it difficult to trust big business, after the legal destruction of the ancient caves.
“[Rio Tinto] made that promise then, and they went ahead and destroyed those rock shelters, which are thousands and thousands of years old and destroyed First Nation people’s culture and their interaction with land,” she says.
What price on culture?
Almost half of the Pilliga Forest remains protected under the NSW Parks and Wildlife Act as a national park, and is the largest inland native forest in Australia.
But for Ms Tighe, that’s not enough.
“We will not be able to access the lands that we would normally access,” she says.
She explains that like the calendar plants’ connection to the birds and the fish, Gomeroi culture connects sacred ceremonial sites with stories in the sky.
These stories are connected to specific Songlines: walking tracks that link important sites and locations across the country that were here long before colonisation.
“They all link and if we take one of those links out, as the generations move on, that’s going to be lost,” Ms Tighe says.
“People won’t know the emu story in the sky, because the places that are significant, where ceremony is conducted, they will be destroyed.”
Santos says the claim it will permanently harm culture and the environment is “false and misleading” and not consistent with the findings of government and planning.
The Climate Council’s Ms Hutley says there’s currently no mechanism to quantify the value of Indigenous heritage.
“One of those things is Indigenous cultural heritage, these things are completely priceless to people.”
‘It’s about change’
In the Pilliga Forest, three men are dancing the totem animals of the Gomeroi people, as Ms Tighe watches on.
On the other side of the country, in Murujuga, Ms Cooper is singing the songs passed down by her ancestors.
As the country navigates through an energy crisis, both women want to be listened to, and heard.
“It’s not about fighting anymore,” Ms Cooper said.
“It’s about a change.
“It’s about coming together as people, not as a race, as people, as humanity, to be able to preserve those important totems as important stories that belong to us and that we are part of, because everybody’s a part of it.”
