Original subtitles

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The rock art. The rock art is remarkable

and it shows and tells the song

lines. It carries an ancient story line.

It depicts and tells a story and history

of our people.

Near Dampia in the far northwest of

Australia is a vast outdoor art gallery.

The ancient Aboriginal rock art of

Murajuga is extraordinary and unique.

I'm president of the International

Scientific Committee on Rock Art. Um,

and for me, this is the most important

rock art site in the world. This is an

art that goes back 50,000 years with

extinct animals and the world's oldest

depictions of the human face. Murajuga

has more than a million rock images, the

largest number of images of any site.

Nowhere else in the world has this

density and it is just sitting there on

the surface highly visible. It is an

anathema to to think you could place

industry within a landscape like that.

Yet, incredibly, amid the rock art,

governments have allowed rampant

industrial development

here. The oil and gas giant Woodside is

at the center of a prochemical hub that

threatens the rock art's very survival.

I'm Dr. Ken Mulaney. I'm resident of

Dampia. I've been recording the rock art

here basically on and off for 45 years.

We have this animal. It's playled out.

There's the body tail and legs going.

Archaeologist and anthropologist Dr. Ken

Malaney has documented different phases

of the rock art over time.

For decades, he's been fighting to save

these ancient petroglyphs.

When I first came and here working for

the West Australian Museum, we were

employed to survey in front of the

bulldozers that were leveling an area to

make way for the Karath gas plant at the

time. Back in the late 70s, early 80s,

people didn't realize or appreciate just

how important, how dense this cultural

landscape was in terms of its art, its

archaeology, its Aboriginal

importance. But 10 years, 20 years

later, we knew it. I was expecting there

would be no more industrial development

here because we knew then just how

unique and culturally important this

place was. But if Dr. Mulaney thought

the presence of the priceless ancient

rock art would stop development, he was

mistaken. In the time I've been here,

I've seen five major developments go

ahead. We have some companies that

insist, and Woodside is amongst them,

who insist that they want this as a gas

hub, the largest prochemical development

in the southern

hemisphere in a place that they knew was

so culturally significant. And

everything they do does have an impact

on that cultural heritage. It's not just

the footprint of that development. It's

the impact, the audio impact, the flares

going, the noise from the industry. But

worse than that is the question of the

emissions, the industrial emissions that

are pouring out of these plants that are

settling on the rock surfaces.

Gas burnt in the plants is creating

emissions that make the rock surfaces

acidic. This could eat away the natural

varnish, protecting the images etched

into the stone.

So for 50,000 years, the rocks have

remained stable in an environment that

has preserved them. But over the last 40

years, that industrial development has

increased the emissions load that has

altered the pH from alkaline to acidic.

And by doing that it is destroying the

rock

art. At the University of WA they've

captured images of the rock art before

the gas and chemical plants were built

and refographed them

today. The before and after images paint

a bleak picture.

So we've digitized over a thousand

images and what those images show is

that from the 1970s to 2025 we can see a

discernable fading in those surfaces. So

they're getting paler.

Professor Ben Smith and fellow

researchers also tested how the acid

fallout affects the rock. So we have

extensive laboratory evidence that shows

that the pollutants that are coming out

of those woodside stacks are actively

degrading the rock art surfaces. Over in

Germany in a very fancy lab in Bourne,

we did sort of climate experiments where

we take actual pieces of rock still in

their solid state and then put them in a

climate chamber where you're simulating

both the pollution and simulating the

rain and also simulating sun and heat.

And then you speed up time so that what

we can see is what happens to those

rocks over a six-year period. So we've

modeled um the degradation of those

rocks under current pollution conditions

in a lab for six years and we can see

radical change in those rocks. How

certain is that evidence? So this it's

absolute. It's incontestable.

A welcome to country for special guests.

Fiona Hall is a photographer and

sculptor known for her multimedia

installations. Tracy Moffett is a photo

artist and filmmaker renowned worldwide.

Hi, how are you going? Good to see you.

They're joined by traditional custodian

Railen Cooper from the group Save Our

Song Lines and Esther Montgomery.

They're fighting further development at

Muruga.

People look at the Mona Lisa as

something really incredible. This is a

Mona Lisa, but it's a natur on a natural

landscape. That's the canvas. This is

the beauty of it. When you look at the

rock art here, it's telling our story.

This is our Bible. This is our

cathedral, and this is who we are. The

song lines come from these stories, the

rock art. What would it mean for you and

your people if the rock art was to be

destroyed?

Oh, look.

Um, it's hard to put into words. It

really is.

Um, it'll be like, how can I put this?

It'll be like in metro um, Sydney, the

Sydney Opera House being blown to

smitherines.

The artists spend days viewing the

ancient art. The art that people had

here. We don't know. Sloping rock. The

fish is pointing to the I think it is

absolutely stunning. The

petetroglyphs are like treasures.

They're like rivlets of gold throughout

the

rocks, flowing over the

rocks and and then, you know,

discovering this one and that one and

and uh at first you think, "No, there's

nothing there." Okay. And then you look

close and there's the

fish and there's the geometric

pattern and there's the woman figure

with the spear and so on. It goes on and

on. We are looking at uh mountains of it

and it just must be saved. I mean, the

the thought of uh this um horror

landscape of this industry that's going

to be uh expanded to think that they're

going to build even more it it

uh h makes me want to

cry. I feel that the drive for

creativity is a shared force across

time, across cultures,

across whatever age you

are and across disciplines as well. And

how do you rank the rock art in that

schema?

Very very highly. And a space like this

should be able to exist for eons into

the future as is with no uh intervention

or destructive activity.

The great tragedy is the gas plants and

the prochemical hub that feeds on the

gas don't need to be at Muruga.

The gas is offshore along our

continental shelf 100 kilometers from

here at the closest. Some of the gas

there they're wanting to ship in is 800

km from here. Industry can go

anywhere and still process those

resources. They don't have to be here.

The rock art has already been damaged by

industrial pollution. According to a

report the WA government buried for a

year, it shows rock surfaces near

industry at Dampia are porous. What that

means if you look at it under a

microscope, it kind of looks like a

Swiss cheese. When it was finally

released, the report exempted Woodside

and blamed historic emissions from an

old power station.

Yet when Professor Smith read its 800

pages, he found graphs and data buried

in the report that contradict that

claim. Their own figures on page 633

show that that's not the case. Their own

statistics that are in the report that

Dampia power plant emitted just a

quarter of the emissions that are

currently being emitted by industry on

Marajuga. 13,000 tons of nitrous oxides

are being emitted at Majuga every year.

And it's those emissions that are

causing the damage we're seeing, the

increased porocity of those rock

surfaces. Then came the decision people

feared without even visiting the site.

Environment Minister Murray Watt

approved a 50-year extension of the

Northwest Shelf gas development for

Woodside.

He says there are strict conditions to

protect the rock art, but they haven't

been made public and whether they're

adequate remains to be seen. 50 years,

it's enough time to lose a significant

portion of the Majuga rock art at

current levels of pollution. Even if

Woodside can mitigate the impact of

emissions on the rock art, its gas

expansion is a massive carbon bomb that

will unleash billions of tons of

greenhouse gases. Our whales, our

dreaming stories, our turtles. These

song lines belong to everybody. Railen

Cooper sees a parallel between what's

happening at Murajuga and Rio Tinto's

destruction of indigenous rock art at

Jukan Gorge. They promised that this

would never happen again. Murajuga, more

than a million rock art

engravings that are being continually

destroyed.

This is a preventable disaster that is

happening. It's a a juken gorge in slow

motion that we're watching happening and

that we could stop at any point if we

had the political will to do it. It

makes me very angry, but it makes me

determined to carry on and make sure we

do something about this.

We would not accept in

Australia an oil rig placed inside the

barrier reef.

a prochemical plant sat next to

Olaroo. But for some reason on the far

west of Australia, it's all right for

industrial development to destroy

cultural heritage. This is Duke Karn

Gorge a thousand times

over and a thousand times over over

decades. It is just wrong.

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Wonder

I'm wonderful.

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