Murujuga Achieves World Heritage Status: And a Complex Celebration

After years of work led by traditional custodians, Murujuga on the north-west coast of Australia became a World Heritage listed site last month, with its ancient rock art recognised as a ‘masterpiece of human creative genius’.

You might remember our visit there, in the heat of December 2021, when I spoke with Clinton Walker, Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi man, Traditional Custodian of Murujuga, and CEO and Founder of the award-winning Ngurrangga Tours. I was actually only able to release the conversation in full for the first time in January this year. And while more than one million petroglyphs, some dating back about 40,000 years, should have meant the judgement was as near a shoe-in as possible, industry expansion plans were creating tension.

In the end, the Australian government managed to negotiate to have its cake and eat it too, achieving both World Heritage and industry expansion for the area. It’s a moment of undeniable and deserved celebration, and yet the tensions remain about the limits of protection World Heritage might afford.

Welcome to the 7th instalment of Vignettes from the Source, the short form series featuring some of the unforgettable, transformative and often inexplicable moments my guests have shared over the years. 

We pick up this 15 minute slice of the conversation with Clinton about seven minutes into the full episode. It forms a powerful snap shot of the place, why it is now World Heritage listed, what it means to the people there, and the uncertainly that remains.

If you’d like to hear or revisit this conversation in full, including Clinton’s brilliant story, head to episode 245 – ‘Cultural Economies at the Greatest Rock Art Gallery in the World’ (links in the show notes, and photos on the website of the original partial release for episode 109).

Chapter markers & transcript.

Recorded at Murujuga, 13 December 2021.

Title image: Clinton at Hearson’s Cove (pic: Anthony James).

Music:

Stones & Bones, by Owls of the Swamp.

The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests.

Pre-roll music: Heartland Rebel, by Steven Beddall (sourced from Artlist).

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Songlines and Murujuga
• 4:45 Rock Art and Ancient Climate Change
• 7:40 Cultural Adaptability Through Millennia
• 9:25 European Impact on Murujuga
• 11:27 Law, Songlines and Cultural Connection
• 17:32 World Heritage Status Challenges

Transcript

Clinton: 1:05

So some people may already know what songlines are, but basically I'll go into that a little because that'll help explain this area. But a songline is a series of songs that tell a story, and a lot of people heard about Dreamtime Stories, but what they don't realise is those stories have songs as well, and the songs basically they sing about the story, but they connect the story to landmarks. And Murra Duga, from a song line perspective, is a beginning point. It's where a lot of song lines begin, that start here, that end up on the other side of Australia, and so, as a place of significance, it's one of the most important sites in Australia from a cultural perspective, dreamtime perspective, but not only that, because we have all those songlines that begin here. Those stories need to be told in other formats, and so the format that was chosen was petroglyphs or rock carvings.

Clinton: 2:10

A lot of people say rock art and there's so many out here. It's crazy how much is out here Over a million, I mean. I've seen a lot and still haven't scratched the surface. I've lived here my whole life. I'll be 40 next year, so in that almost 40 years I've lived here, 30 odd of those years are spent in this area, learning about it all you know. Yeah, just when I take people out and show them, it's like it's unbelievable for for a lot of people. And then you tell them the age of some things, so like we've got rock art that's. You know they're made 100 years ago or so. That's the youngest people think 100 years is old, but in the scheme of things it's really young, especially when it comes to this rock art yeah.

AJ: 3:00

No, in a way, it's the fact that it's still being going. It's the interesting thing about that. Yeah, it didn't stop when europeans got here.

Clinton: 3:07

Yeah that's right. And with the age of them, like we've've got, yeah, rock artists are about 100 years old and then you go up from there, then you start hitting 1,000 or 500 to 1,000. Then you start hitting a couple of thousand and the next minute you're like in your tens of thousands. So you've got rock art that would have been made around seven to ten thousand years ago and that's when we had one of the biggest climate events in history of the world and that was the rising of the sea levels, which inspired many stories across the world to do with great floods. Some people are aware of Noah's Ark. Well, no more people and many other Aboriginal people also have a flood story that coincides with that same time and scientists now have been doing lots of studies and they reckon it happened between that period that I said.

Clinton: 4:00

But the rock art when you see the rock art that's to do with that flood event, you'll get carvings of, say, a kangaroo or an emu or something. That's a land-based animal that people were hunting on the land and then all of a sudden this water started coming in and flooding the country where people once lived and their diet had to change because the landscape changed, so they weren't just eating kangaroo and emu anymore, they started eating turtles, dugong, mud crab, you know all the different fish species, barramundi, et cetera. And so they carved these animals over the top of those kangaroos or those emus or whatever, to note the changes in the landscape, in the environment. And so when I tell people this was like 10,000 years ago, you know, and that is mind-blowing enough for them, because when you look at a rock art and you tell them, yeah, all this water, like where we're sitting now, you know it used to be 150km away this coastline they're like what it's like. Yeah, my ancestors lived out there once upon a time.

AJ: 5:01

And that Australia, well as we know it today, was like a third bigger or something.

Clinton: 5:04

Yeah, yeah, it was huge. I mean already huge.

AJ: 5:07

Exactly.

Clinton: 5:09

But yeah, it was literally about a third larger, and people find it so difficult to comprehend, especially that are from overseas, let alone Australia, because they're like they can't trace their ancestry back even a couple of hundred years. Yet I can tell you what my ancestors were doing 10,000 years ago. Yeah, they were getting ready for some great big changes. And then we can tell you even further back from there. We can go back 20, 30, 40, 50, 60,000 years. I can tell you my history and that's the connection we have to this place as traditional owners?

AJ: 5:47

No, it does. For a Westerner, it boggles the mind a bit that those stories are mapped out in country like that and last through those changes and that's a huge story in itself, isn't it? That the cultures have shifted with those massive. When we talk about sea level changes today and climate changes today, I mean a hundred meters plus sea level change. This has been navigated by human cultures before and the stories are here for us to read, if you like.

Clinton: 6:14

yeah, and people are like I hear, like you know, I hear all this stuff today about, um, climate change and a lot of people. People are either for or against it, or some people think it's just a conspiracy theory or whatever. But the fact of the matter is, climate change is real. It's happened many times throughout history. We've all adapted to it as human beings. The difference is my people haven't forgotten about it. We've kept that alive the entire time we've been here. I get asked a lot of different questions, but one of the questions I do get asked is that did your people war with each other? And I tell them no, not like in other countries. You know we had skirmishes. People fought. It's human nature. But in order for us to have rock art that goes backwards in time and the stability that we've had, to stay here and carry those song lines and share it with other peoples right across the nation, that means we didn't fight with one another. Very often I think life was too cruisy, to be honest.

AJ: 7:21

Well, this is some of what we're learning, and about Indigenous cultures globally too that the idea of a day where you work all day wasn't part of the thing. I mean this is how the art ended up here. It wasn't working all day.

Clinton: 7:36

No Rock art was done like basically people's work. You know their daily activity, especially at this time of year in the summer where it's like 45 degrees or 46 or whatever you know, mid to late 40s, nobody's doing anything during the day. You go and lay under a tree like a kangaroo and just stay there all day until it cools down. You know those Spanish never invented the siesta. Our original people did.

AJ: 8:04

So, speaking of navigating big changes, europeans arrive. We've got these places like Barrett Peninsula the English name, as you mentioned before for these places and it was actually an island. It's only been what? 60 years or something, that Europeans decided to fill it in, and pave it.

Clinton: 8:24

Yeah, so it's been an island for thousands of years. Before that it was a range. But yeah, it has been an island and it wasn't until Rio today. But dampier salt back in the day decided they wanted to build a salt pond so they could extract salt from the ocean and sell it as like a package with the iron ore. And yeah, they changed the landscape. They turned what was an island into a peninsula and it's named after this bar. I'm pretty sure his name was james, but don't quote me on that. You'll have to.

Clinton: 9:01

You'll have to go and have a look we could probably google it right now, um, this guy, he was a, a teller or a banker or something in Robe, and he was him and a few others. They were murdered and no money or anything was taken. It was really like suspicious, like there was no reason they should be dead really. But anyways, so he was one of these guys that were killed, so they named this place after him, but, like I said, it's known as Murujuga to my people, to all our people right across the Pilbara all the way to Uluru. A lot of people know about this place and Murriyuga means hip bone sticking out, and it's because we've got this nickel bay area and the peninsula part of it and some of the islands they poke out in that sort of northeast direction, pretty much northeast, and the way that they're shaped it looks like, if you were looking at it from above, it looks like a hip bone, specifically a woman's hip bone.

AJ: 10:03

Such a feature, isn't it of the well, a lot of the artwork too that we know today that there was aerial view at play without drones? Yeah, drones and airplanes and everything else that's?

Clinton: 10:14

right and that hip bone sticking out name, looking at it from like, as a woman's body part, like if you look at a woman's hips, they're for childbirth. You know that's the way they're shaped, which means women are creators, they create life. So this as a place is a creation place and that means from a Dreamtime perspective. We believe that everything started here and that's why the songlines start here and the songlines they're mapped out right and humans today keep that mapping alive by practising our Lauren culture going out, singing the songs, putting boys through initiation and in other places women go through that and that initiation process teaches those young people the songs and as they get older and they learn the songs more and more, they start to understand what the songs are about and that you're not just singing about your own country, you're singing about other places, that it's someone else's land, where other people are from. You know, and that's the connection we have with one another.

Clinton: 11:21

But as a place itself, murujuga, it's the birthplace of our creation beings, it's where they came from, it's where we believe they created the earth and then they created the rock art, the original rock art, which was a tool to teach us how to preserve and record our history. And then they passed everything on to us and then they left, they went up into the heavens and told us, gave us a few rules to live by. You know, be kind, all this type of stuff. You know, like your Ten Commandments kind of thing, look after one another. But the main things was look after the land, look after each other and look after all the things within the land. You do all that stuff. You can come and join us up in heaven, basically.

AJ: 12:11

And you ended up going through these processes yourself as a young fellow?

Clinton: 12:15

Yeah, I've been initiated and you know we call it law law time, and there was this throughout my life I've gone out and I've, you know, followed my law really, really, really strongly. But then some years, like when I was working on mining and stuff, and what would happen is everyone else gets their time off at the end of the year. You know they go leave and they go on a holiday or something.

Clinton: 12:41

It wasn't the case for me. I'd go on leave, I'd spend some time with my family, but I'd mostly go out and I'd follow my law and learn about my history and my culture. And I used to do that for like a lot and then I was like, oh, you know what, I need a little break for myself and my family and take them on a holiday. So I started doing a few holidaying things, a couple of years here and there. You know, just skip a couple of years from the law. But I'd always go back, always go back, and this thing of following the law is what the elders call it. What we're taught is following the law is so important to us as a society because it teaches us our connection to our land, where we're from, our history. It gives us our identity as a people, but also it helps us to connect to our neighbouring groups and how we're all connected to them through these songlines. So we might be singing about a place in a songline that we're taught that we have to teach young people, but that song might be about Uluru or Burunga, you know, mount Augustus, or something like that. It's not our country, it's not where we're from, and singing about those places. Understanding the story of those particular sites where these songs take you is so important. And then, because you know about that place and you know that song and we're saying know the song, know the country, it makes you want to go and see that place. But you know that if you want to go there you can't just go there just nilly-willy. You've got to go and seek permission from the traditional owners of that area. And because you also know that, where you're from, you know your country, you know that song line, you know that story, you know that hill, you know what's good, what's dangerous, et cetera, et cetera. So when you go in someone else's land, you know that story, you know that hill, you know what's good, what's dangerous, etc. Etc. So when you go into someone else's land, you know those same things that you know that apply to where you're from must also apply there. So you know that you can't just go here and there and wherever. So you understand that in order to access that place belonging to those people, you have to ask for permission, for status, and then they'll take you out and they'll show you all the same things you would do with anybody else in your country.

Clinton: 15:05

And that was the thing that Aboriginal people right across Australia practice is first of all looking after country, learning the songlines, the stories, taking care of each other in different ways and also making sure people following the rules. But part of life was also leaving home and following someone's and learning those song lines. You already know the song, but you don't know the country. You got to go see the place in order to understand the story more, understand the song more. You know can't just stay in one place and by doing that you become more knowledgeable, more experienced, and then you get to know your neighbours better. So you have a better relationship with other people and once you do that, you don't want to fight them. You respect each other, you know.

AJ: 15:56

Yeah, it's huge how that's just embedded in the whole thing.

Clinton: 15:59

Yeah and that's, and so what I was talking about that we never warred with one another and all that type of stuff, and why we have such a strong connection to our rock, art, et cetera is because we've got a good relationship with other people and that we share all this knowledge with each other and that people don't want to jeopardise, that, they don't want to have a bad relationship with someone because it could mean that they can no longer access that place and learn about those stories. That's how important country is to Aboriginal people and songlines.

AJ: 16:33

And right now there's a World Heritage application for this place. Do you know where it's at?

Clinton: 16:39

It's gone to the national level. So how it works is people have to apply for it, the area has to apply for World Heritage Listing, gets on the tentative list, so it goes to state level. State government basically approves. Then they have to carry it forward to the national level. So federal government, then they have to carry it forward to the national level. So federal government then has to then put that forward to UNESCO. So that's where it's at at the moment, and then UNESCO then decide whether the place, according to a list long list of things, items whether the place is worthy of being in the World Heritage listing, and so some of the things that are part of the list. The tick of approvals is the impact of modern things on this ancient stuff. So right now we've got all these gas plants built out here and mining facilities and the state government wants to build more. They want another fertiliser plant out here and all this sort of stuff, and that could jeopardise us gaining world heritage listing, which is something that should have happened 20 to 30 years ago.

AJ: 17:55

It's as much of a gimme as any application that's ever been, isn't it? Unless something gets in the way of things like that.

Clinton: 18:03

Yep, and so that's one of the things that we're worried about is that more industry being built is going to jeopardise our application and, honestly, if we gain World Heritage Listing, I'll be so happy that people will finally know about this place and how important it is In terms of the significance of Murriyuga. There's a lot of sacred sites in Australia, a lot of very, very sacred sites. The most well-known is Uluru, but Uluru's stories, part of their songlines, come from here.