One of the world’s greatest rock art ensembles threatened by the petrochemical industry

The Murujuga Peninsula in northwestern Australia, so named by the indigenous Jaburara people because of it.“dislocated hip bone”, is one of the largest and oldest art galleries in the world. More than a million rock carvings are concentrated on an area of ​​36,857 hectares. This narrow strip of land jutting into the Indian Ocean has also been an important center of activity in the mining and petrochemical sectors since the 1960s.

While construction work on a new fertilizer plant began at the end of April and oil group Woodside Energy is working on a gas megaproject to operate two huge offshore fields and expand two refinery facilities. On the peninsula, archaeologists are asking. Better protection of a site sacred to Aboriginal people for thousands of years.

“Our research shows that current acid emissions are already damaging the rock surfaces on which the petroglyphs were carved.” Building new factories will only accelerate the current damage and the destruction of the rocks will happen even faster., warns Benjamin Smith, emeritus professor of rock art at the University of Western Australia, who published a November 2022 study, Monitoring the Degradation of Rock Art. Archival Image Analysis of Murujuga Petroglyphs, Western Australia » .

Millennia of knowledge and stories

For a long time, scholars were primarily concerned with the direct effects of industrialization on archaeological sites. At Murujuga, construction machinery would destroy hundreds of petroglyphs over the decades. To build this new fertilizer plant by Perdaman Chemicals and Fertilizers, a mammoth project worth €3.7 billion, the group, in agreement with the authorities, moved three rock art panels to clear the way before work began.

According to the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC), a committee representing the interests of the traditional owners, the carvings were not damaged, but the episode was. ” very difficult “ for the community. Eliza Closer, local media reporter besidesOn April 28, on the morning of the operation, the police arrested him twice. Some were afraid of A ” Juukan Throat 2.0 »Mining group Rio Tinto’s May 2020 blasting of prehistoric caves in the Juukan Valley, a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal sacred site.