Imagine if ethnic British locked not only tourists, but Muslim immigrants and their children, out from Stonehenge or Westminster cathedral, because ‘secret White people magic’. Or if Italians barred anyone but Catholics from St Peter’s or the Sistine Chapel.
Slap a bit of Rapid-Tan and some ochre on this obvious nonsense, though, and we’re all expected to go along with it.
Rock climbing at the world famous Mt Arapiles in Victoria will be gutted under Labor after Parks Victoria cited secretive cultural heritage investigations as the driving force behind the decision.
The site is one of the world’s most significant rock climbing areas and arguably Australia’s nursery for the pursuit.
Up to half of all routes are predicted to be shut.
The bans will shatter the local Natimuk community, diminish global visitation and lead to the closure of the iconic Pines campground that for decades has been the quirky heartland of climbing.
This is part of a creeping trend of ‘Aboriginal cultural heritage’ laws being weaponised to lock everyone out of tourist sites and even private land, across the country. In WA especially, such laws led to landowners of even small blocks being stiffed with tens of thousands of dollars in ‘cultural assessment fees’ to even so much as plant a tree on their own land.
The issue is becoming such political dynamite that the Victorian government tried to bury the whole thing under utmost secrecy.
The Victorian government dropped the news to climbers on the eve of the Melbourne Cup and the US elections amid a looming revolt that will test Parks Victoria’s authority and credibility.
Climbers are rightly outraged. Not least because they personally committed so much time and energy into rehabilitating the area.
Mt Arapiles, also known as Dyurrite, was heavily grazed and used as a former rifle range before climbers helped remediate much of the cliff-facing landscape.
And this is the thanks they get.
“It’s a wipeout folks. The literal beating heart of climbing in Australia has been ripped out and discarded,’’ Save Grampians Climbing reported.
Save Grampians Climbing estimates that up to half of all routes at Mt Arapiles, about 340km northwest of Melbourne, will be closed.
To rub salt into the wound, the so-called ‘cultural heritage’ is mostly utter bullshit.
Parks Victoria says the cultural heritage surveys found tens of thousands of artefacts, scarred trees and rock art.
The artefacts are likely to predominantly be stone chips.
Scar trees are ubiquitous in western Victoria, especially around lakes, rivers and swamps but rock art is much less common.
‘Scar trees’ are basically litter: the leftover environmental damage from someone cutting treebark for a canoe. Far from ‘sacred’, they’re just workday remnants.
As for the ‘rock art’.
Much of the rock art is invisible to the naked eye.
Guess it was so culturally sacred that it was left to erode away to invisibility until white people magic made it reappear.
Maybe we should declare Centrelink offices a sacred whitefella site.
