The Murujuga rock art, the world’s largest and oldest collection of petroglyphs, has survived 40,000 years or so out in the open on a finger of land extending from Australia’s northwestern coast. “Murujuga is the most important rock art site in the world,” says Michel Lorblanchet, an archaeologist at CNRS, the French national research agency, who is noted for his work on European cave art.
If realized, the expanded complex “would be the most polluting project ever to be developed in Australia,” asserts the Conservation Council of Western Australia. The additional emissions could make it difficult for Australia to meet its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says Bill Hare, a climate scientist with Climate Analytics, a policy institute.
The rock art provides an archaeological record of traditional use of the area over thousands of years. The petroglyphs include some of the world’s earliest known depictions of human faces, complex geometric designs, and images of marine and terrestrial fauna, including extinct animals such as the fat-tailed kangaroo and the thylacine, that illustrate how the ecosystem changed through rising and falling sea levels.
In the 1960s, when officials were looking to build a cargo port on the northwestern coast to ship iron ore from inland mines, they knew little about the Murujuga rock art and did not consult with local First Nations peoples. Antiquities experts recommended the Burrup Peninsula to avoid damaging other known Aboriginal sites. Later, as the significance of the Murujuga rock art was recognized, people realized the port siting was a “terrible mistake,” Smith says.