Some civilisations leave behind them towering monuments to human creativity and ingenuity: the Great Pyramid, Notre Dame, the Taj Mahal, Christ the Redeemer and even the Hoover Dam. Others left… rocks.
For years, now, Australians have been relentlessly hectored to don their hairshirts and flagellate themselves because, in the words of a silly quiz show, a “mining giant… sacred Juukan rock shelters”. Australians are also banned from climbing spectacular rock formations because of ‘rock art’ that no one can even see (it takes painstaking work with an electron microscope to even determine their apparent existence). Billion dollar mining ventures are banned because of an apparently entirely fabricated ‘blue-banded bee dreaming’.
This bizarre fetish for all things ‘Aboriginal’ is supposed to be a much-needed corrective for an alleged total disdain for Aboriginal culture that blighted Australia right up until the Great Enlightenment of… some time around 2010, apparently. It’s a load of bollocks, of course: from the moment Cook and Banks landed at Botany Bay, generations of white Australians expressed great respect for Aborigines, even as they acknowledged the primitiveness of Aboriginal material culture.
“They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth,” Cook wrote. “But in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans… they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c.” In short, Cook concluded, “They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition.”
Today, though, we are expected to worship at the altar of Aboriginal Wonderfulness by pretending that the distinct lack of Aboriginal culture never in fact happened. Nonsense like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu peddles myth about Aboriginal ‘towns’ and ‘farms’, even ‘democracy’.
If moderns are tempted to sneer at Cook’s ‘Noble Savage’ idealism, their own is even worse. Far from accepting Aboriginal culture on its own terms, they have to lie about it in order to judge it against a strictly Western metric, including the lie that literal rubbish heaps are a wonder on a par with the Sagrada Família.
Given that Aboriginal people have lived in the Pilbara for at least 46,000 years, there can hardly be a square inch where someone hasn’t camped at some time […]
Juukan has become a byword for wanton destruction of priceless Aboriginal heritage as in, ‘We don’t want another Juukan.’ It caused such a stink that, less than a month later, the Morrison government established a parliamentary inquiry, under the aegis of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia. That must be a record for government action.
I have studied the report, submissions and transcripts of public hearings of this inquiry and have come to the conclusion that it was a show trial.
Like the supposed Aboriginal magic space vaginas that called a halt to the Hindmarsh Bridge construction in South Australia for years, it was all a load of bollocks peddled by grifting activists.
Critical evidence was ignored, crucial witnesses were not called, and assertions as to the ethnological significance of the Juukan rock shelters were accepted as truth. The evidence of cultural significance presented to the inquiry was flimsy at best.
This is a complicated story but, in essence:
After decades of negotiation and billions of dollars of investment, Rio Tinto had been given agreement by the PKKP to affect the area concerned. The shelters, which contained no obvious ethnological significance such as rock paintings or extant cultural usage, were then marked for demolition, and this was approved by the WA government.
Even the name since bestowed on them was entirely an invention.
These shelters had no geographical significance, they had no ‘Dreamtime’ myth associated with them, and they had no Aboriginal name. ‘Juukan’ was the name of an elder who had lived in the 1930s.
The supposedly precious ‘artefacts’ were, let’s be real, nothing but rocks. That’s all they were.
But, with a simple wave of an activist’s wand, they became supposedly the most significant cultural achievement since the Parthenon.
