Murujuga: Rock Art, Heritage, and Landscape Iconoclasm

By José Antonio González Zarandona and Michel Lorblanchet

A fascinating case study of the archaeological site at Murujuga, Australia

Located in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Australians who have historically inhabited the archipelago. To date, there has been no comprehensive survey of the site's petroglyphs or those who created them. Since the 1960s, regional mining interests have caused significant damage to this site, destroying an estimated 5 to 25 percent of the petroglyphs in Murujuga. Today, Murujuga holds the unenviable status of being one of the most endangered archaeological sites in the world.

José Antonio González Zarandona provides a full postcolonial analysis of Murujuga as well as a geographic and archaeological overview of the site, its ethnohistory, and its considerable significance to Indigenous groups, before examining the colonial mistreatment of Murujuga from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of postcolonial perspectives, Zarandona reads the assaults on the rock art of Murujuga as instances of what he terms "landscape iconoclasm": the destruction of art and landscapes central to group identity in pursuit of ideological, political, and economic dominance. Viewed through the lens of landscape iconoclasm, the destruction of Murujuga can be understood as not only the result of economic pressures but also as a means of reinforcing—through neglect, abandonment, fragmentation, and even certain practices of heritage preservation—the colonial legacy in Western Australia. Murujuga provides a case study through which to examine, and begin to reject, archaeology's global entanglement with colonial intervention and the politics of heritage preservation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296983

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Murujuga

Murujuga

Rock Art, Heritage, and Landscape Iconoclasm

José Antonio González Zarandona

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: González Zarandona, José Antonio, author.

Title: Murujuga : rock art, heritage, and landscape iconoclasm / José Antonio González Zarandona.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031272 | ISBN 9780812251562 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Petroglyphs—Australia—Burrup Peninsula (W.A.) | Art, Aboriginal Australian—Australia—Burrup Peninsula (W.A.) | Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Burrup Peninsula (W.A.)—Antiquities. | Iconoclasm. | Art—Mutilation, defacement, etc.—Australia—Burrup Peninsula (W.A.) | Landscape archaeology—Australia—Burrup Peninsula (W.A.) | Cultural property—Australia—Burrup Peninsula (W.A.) | Burrup Peninsula (W.A.)—Antiquities. | Burrup Peninsula (W.A.)—History.

Classification: LCC DU124.P47 G66 2020 | DDC 994.1/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031272

Contents

Foreword by Michel Lorblanchet

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I

Murujuga

Chapter 1 Situating Murujuga

Chapter 2 Murujuga and Its Meanings

Part II

From the Colonial Gaze to the Academic Appreciation of Rock Art

Chapter 3 The Colonial Gaze

Chapter 4 Rude Aesthetics

Chapter 5 The Colonization of the Landscape

Part III

Landscape and Heritage

Chapter 6 The Destruction of Landscape in Murujuga

Chapter 7 The Making of Heritage

Part IV

A Theory of Landscape Iconoclasm

Chapter 8 Landscape Iconoclasm

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Michel Lorblanchet

In 1975–76 I was sent to Dampier (Western Australia) for several months by the I Canberra-based Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies, AIATSIS), where I worked as a research consultant. As a French researcher, I was ceded by the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) to Australia for three years. AIATSIS then gave me the tasks of producing a report on the scientific significance of the Dampier site and of making proposals regarding its archaeological study. At that time, the scientific study of Dampier (Murujuga) was in its infancy, and an engineer with the Dampier Salt company—Enzo Virili—had asked AIATSIS for an archaeologist to provide an estimate of the importance of the site. In 1984, 1988, and 1992, I returned to Murujuga on some missions (funded by the CNRS and AIATSIS) to continue the study I had started in the mid-1970s.

My discovery of Murujuga’s engravings was the most significant shock of my life! In front of this mineral landscape, with its long brown hills, and the gigantic chaos of dark, intrusive rocks, standing out against the blue of the ocean, were engravings, some so old that they were hardly visible. I was amazed!

I was invaded by a feeling both of extraordinary beauty and of archaeological impotence in the face of the site’s vastness, which plunged me into the immensity of time. Hitherto I had devoted my life to the study of the European decorated caves, but they each contain only a few hundred works—in exceptional cases, one could find a few thousand works—and they are hidden in the depths of the earth, whereas in Murujuga the engravings are openly visible, under the huge blue sky, and take possession of the landscape.

I had never seen anything comparable; now, at the end of a lifetime of research in Europe, India, and trips around the world, I still do not know a site similar to Murujuga. Our most extensive European sites of outdoor rock engravings, the Vallée des Merveilles and Valcamonica in the Alps, only have, respectively, 40,000 and 140,000 figures, dating back only 4,000–5,000 years, while Murujuga has hundreds of thousands of figures whose chronology extends over tens of thousands of years. These are not dead images, vestiges of an irredeemably long-gone time, as in Europe and the rest of the world, but living images that still speak to present-day human communities. What dramatic differences! Murujuga is unique in the world!

In spite of my first feeling of helplessness, I managed to develop a method of study that could quickly obtain an idea of the main problems involved in the archaeological survey of Murujuga’s engravings. Faced with the impossibility of immediately recording and studying the hundreds of thousands of engravings, I established—by means of a technique similar to that of making test-pits in an excavation—a series of sectors, each measuring 100 square meters. Within each of these sample areas, I carried out an exhaustive study. This involved recording all the engravings and making a complete survey of all the remains associated with the figures—sometimes seashells or bones but especially stone tools that were scattered on the ground surface. I also excavated the prehistoric deposits that I discovered among the engraved boulders.

I thus established seven control zones that could provide some preliminary objective knowledge of the region’s archaeology. I placed my control zones in two valleys of the Murujuga Peninsula: Skew Valley (SKV), 500 meters long, and Gum Tree Valley (GTV), which extends for 1.5 kilometers. In SKV I centered my first study area on a shell midden surrounded by engravings, which I excavated. In GTV I placed six other control zones, some at the valley’s entrance, near shell middens, two others on the plateau dominating the valley, and the last one at the top of the valley, with a final small set of engravings and habitations on the plateau overlooking the top of the valley.

The variety of geographical locations in these control zones—sometimes close to the coast, sometimes distant, sometimes in the valley bottom around water points, sometimes on the plateaus overlooking the valleys—enabled me to understand how the inhabitants of this site had used the environment’s diversity over millennia. Likewise, the fourteen radiocarbon dates obtained during my work, including the dating of the engraved slabs that I discovered buried under the shells during my excavation of the shell heap at SKV, as well as the exhaustive study of all remains inside each control area, made possible a thorough comparison of all the data. Ultimately, I obtained a full panorama of the evolution of the settlement of Murujuga, from the Pleistocene to the colonization period, over more than twenty-two millennia.

At the beginning of my research, I was living with my family in Karratha. I was helped by several people, including Virili, who was a tremendous help with many technical operations, especially when mapping the engraved rocks with a theodolite. During my fieldwork, I was visited by some Indigenous people from Roebourne, friends and colleagues such as Peter Randolph (from the Western Australian Museum), the ethnographer Kingsley Palmer, AIATSIS linguist Franck Wordick, and rock art experts Bruce Wright and Patricia Vinnicombe.

I set up a photographic field laboratory in my mobile home and practiced my favorite activity: the patient decipherment of etched surfaces and their graphic recording. I remember the long moments we spent in silence, in the heart of GTV, sitting on the big shell mound at the edge of the temporary stream. It was as if we were at the center of a theater, surrounded by engravings. We had in front of us the great eagle with its ceremonial headdress, which for millennia carried a stick at the end of its wing and danced the corroboree, as explained to me by an old Indigenous elder of the region, who had visited me during my work.

We witnessed with reverence the almost cinematographic presentation of the engravings that the sun gave us on its daily journey! Each engraved surface was touched momentarily and successively by a ray of sunshine, which appeared and disappeared depending on the orientation of the rock surface. At 11 o’clock the eagle rose in its splendor, and then disappeared around 12:30 when the human figures on the nearby rock lit up. On the same panel, two figures were visible for half an hour while a third, more blurred figure was then visible only for a few minutes. I scrupulously noted these data and attributed to each panel an index of visibility: I noticed that some motifs were easily visible and for a long time. They were on open view, while others seemed to hide and be reserved for those who took care to get very close to them.

Toward the top of GTV, I discovered expanses of large engraved slabs, deeply patinated. In the middle of the day, only about fifty figures were visible in the blazing, particularly blinding sunshine. I also made tracings at sunset and even at nightfall, which enabled me, for example, to find 470 figures here—10 times more than those that can be seen during a quick visit! Thus, for the oldest figures, which are the most faded and the most difficult to decipher, the lighting conditions are decisive, and the regular use of artificial lighting is necessary.

I also discovered places where the engravings were accompanied by multiple standing stones rather like little menhirs (I learned later from Kingsley Palmer that the Indigenous people called them thalu). In another area I recorded an artificial mound topped by a stela bearing the engraved effigy of a person, accompanied by a great rock whose surface was entirely hammered.

I noted all the traces of human intervention on the ground and the rocks: my thorough deciphering of the engraved figures revealed to me that almost all of them had been regularly reworked over the millennia. Their contours had been reworked, and indeed the pecked lines had been refreshed so often that they had frequently ended up becoming real grooves—rubbing with a stone was enough to make a line reappear again when erosion tended to erase them. Some motifs—I remember stingrays from GTV, for example—had been partially renovated very recently: only their eyes had been retouched, which gave them a strange presence and an apparently renewed life!

I also found beautiful patinated tools belonging to the oldest Australian stone industry (Australian Old Tools Tradition) on the ground at the foot of the engraved rocks. I photographed and drew each piece, and then redeposited it immediately in the exact place. Among these very old tools, at the foot of those engravings that I considered the oldest by their style and their patina, I discovered the fragments of a huge shell, a Syrinx aruanus, which had doubtless served as a container for transporting water. The radiocarbon dating of these fragments soon showed that they were more than 22,000 years old, that is to say, from the Pleistocene, when the coastline was located some 200 kilometers west of the present seashore.

Hence my observations revealed the constant human presence on Murujuga over many millennia: the permanent maintenance of the engravings, the countless ritual traces, the remains of meals, or even a simple stone protecting a hole filled with rainwater—all of this indicated attention, precautions, the imminence of a return.

Once I had deposited the results of my Australian research in the AIATSIS archives, I concentrated on the study of the Paleolithic decorated caves of my home country. In 1996 I was appointed a member of the International Scientific Commission for the Côa engravings (Portugal). This commission helped protect an important site of Paleolithic rock engravings that were threatened with inundation (by the construction of a dam). The controversy aroused by the Côa engravings constitutes a case study that the Australian authorities might do well to revisit in order to find a solution to the protection of heritage while dealing with industry. In December 2018 we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Côa’s United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage listing.

With the editorial assistance of my colleagues Graeme K. Ward and Ken Mulvaney, I was able recently (2018) to publish online my book Archaeology and Petroglyphs of Dampier (Western Australia)—An Archaeological Investigation of Skew Valley and Gum Tree Valley. I hope that it may also appear in France one day.

When Dr. José Antonio González Zarandona invited me to write the foreword for this book, I had the strange feeling that I had been waiting for this message and this book for a long time! This courageous work appears at the right moment when struggles between heritage and industry are crystallizing and coming together. This book traces the history of the discovery and colonization of Murujuga by Europeans. It also details the history of the political and legal claims of the various local Indigenous groups and their complicated relations with the regional and national authorities. It explains the mythological significance, the sacred nature of the Murujuga site for the Aborigines. It also expresses, in ethnological, cultural, and human terms, what I felt and what I discovered as an archaeologist during my study of the Murujuga engravings. I find in this book the precise description of the threats that today face the immense heritage of Murujuga, as a result of the growing industrialization of the region and the first destructions of which it has already been the victim. It tells the story of the permanent, unshakeable attachment of the Indigenous people to the country of their Dreamtime ancestors, of which the archaeologists, through their excavations and studies, find traces and wanderings in the landscape. My work, my book, and this book are complementary!

I too, in my own way, modestly showed the attachment of the Indigenous populations to their site by revealing, through my tracings, all the forms of this attachment:

•  the durability of the occupation of the region since the very origins of settlement;

•  the renovation of engravings throughout the millennia; putting rock images back into service—spiritual images constantly boosted by beliefs;

•  the diversity of human uses of the region, and the permanent adaptation to changes in the natural environment, showing, in particular, how the Art of the Kangaroo Hunters was replaced by a Marine Art linked to the exploitation of coastal resources: that is, how these populations dealt with the arrival of the ocean on the lands of their ancestors at the end of the Pleistocene

My study was certainly extremely partial! José Antonio points out that, even today, only a small part of Murujuga and the Dampier Archipelago has been studied, but my work—like this book—shows what it would still be possible to investigate, and opens the way to new research. Both the archipelago and Murujuga could now be developed both culturally and touristically, as was done in the Côa, but here—as José Antonio suggests—it would be carried out with the highest respect for the Indigenous people and with their close collaboration.

Of course, Murujuga is, at the same time, an Indigenous, Australian, and World Heritage site: it is up to the men of power and the whole of humanity to recognize and respect it. Will our culture now be capable of protecting this precious heritage?

I am today an old Indigenous man of Quercy, in southwest France. I too fight to safeguard my natural and traditional local heritage against the development of the increasing industrialization of polluting agriculture that affects our air, water, landscapes, and human health. European civilizations have lost their spirituality and their connection to the environment. In contrast, the Indigenous people of Australia and other parts of the world remind us that we are part of what surrounds us. They invite us to return to a respectful relationship with nature, to the landscapes and history of our cultures: the very destiny of our humanity is at stake.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Known as Murujuga in local Ngayarda languages, the Burrup Peninsula is part of the Dampier Archipelago in the coastal Pilbara region of Western Australia. Murujuga is said to host the world’s largest concentration of petroglyphs—rock art motifs produced by a reductive process, such as pecking or abrading¹—with the number of motifs estimated to be around one million.² Partly due to the size of the area, in the 1960s it was chosen as the location for major industrial development, which has since desecrated this cultural landscape. Researchers estimate that 5–25 percent of rock art on Murujuga has been removed or destroyed as a result of industrial development and poor archaeological advice.³ Up to 2004, less than 14 percent of land on Murujuga had been impacted by industry.⁴ Rock art researcher Patricia Vinnicombe noted in 2002 that, despite the limitless research, education, and cultural tourism potential, no organization was responsible for managing and studying Murujuga’s remarkable cultural heritage. She regretted that the petroglyphs would be seen in a completely different landscape as a result of the destruction caused by the industrialization of the area. The future of Murujuga, she stated, was determined by the lack of responsibility in the present.⁵

Although the Pilbara region was known to explorers by the seventeenth century⁶ and has been investigated by ethnographers, anthropologists, and linguists since the turn of the twentieth century,⁷ the rock art of Murujuga was not studied in any great detail until the 1960s and 1970s, when its outstanding values were finally recognized. In the late 1970s, this recognition was underlined by rock art expert Michel Lorblanchet,⁸ who declared that the Dampier Archipelago contained one of the most impressive clusters of [rock art] sites he had ever seen.⁹ Academic recognition for the area was achieved in the 1970s and 1980s when research theses were written by scholars and when reports were created by the now-abolished Department of Aboriginal Sites (DAS).¹⁰

Due to the establishment of the Aboriginal Heritage Act (AHA) of 1972, archaeological surveys were undertaken from the late 1970s, commissioned by companies responsible for development in the area. These surveys increased knowledge about the rock art, but they were limited to those areas devoted to hosting future facilities. To date, no survey has covered the entire area and recorded every rock art motif, primarily because such a task would carry a very high cost and take a considerable amount of time to complete, estimated to be on the order of AUD$20 million over some ten years.¹¹

Further surveys were carried out between the 1990s and 2010s, and the bibliography on Murujuga rock art likewise expanded considerably.¹² Western Australian newspapers reported widely on the situation that Murujuga faces, and the active Dampier Campaign, initiated by rock art researcher Robert Bednarik, attracted yet more attention. Bednarik’s campaign was further publicized in 2006 when an episode of 60 Minutes, drawing attention to the destruction of petroglyphs at a national level, was broadcast across Australia. Assessments have been made in order to nominate the site for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List, but to no avail.¹³ At a national level, the Australian Heritage Council (AHC) has considered Murujuga and the Dampier Archipelago to be National Heritage sites since 2007. In 2013, 49 square kilometers of Murujuga became Western Australia’s hundredth national park. In 2016, Murujuga was mentioned by the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in his Closing the Gap statement,¹⁴ demonstrating that an awareness of the destruction of rock art in Murujuga had moved beyond the academic arena, where destructions of art are mainly considered iconoclasm, and entered the realm of public opinion, where these destructions are usually referred to as vandalism.

How is it possible that the largest rock art site in the world is subject to such destruction and neglect? To begin with, few of the remaining descendants of the original inhabitants of the area have much traditional geographic or cultural knowledge of the landscape…. No one claimed to have been born there or had died there. No one claimed direct mythological or totemic links with Murujuga or any economic dependence on either the land or the sea.¹⁵ Lack of any recognizable ownership in the traditional sense changes Westerners’ perspectives on the land because proving ownership of a piece of land through texts has been recognized as a fundamentally Western, logo-centric concept that overrides Indigenous authority.¹⁶ The heart of the issue is the clash of cultures in Western Australia. Native Title, based on a Western concept of ownership, is the only legal means by which Indigenous people can attempt to prove that their land is theirs. Sometimes this legal tool takes the form of heritage legislation—hence I critique the concept of heritage in this book.

In the early 2000s, five Indigenous groups (Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo, Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Yaburarra, and Mardudhunera) claimed to have direct links with the land and applied for Native Title rights. Only the Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi secured rights after the Australian Federal Court granted them in 2005. Although the Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi are the proven rightful owners of an area where Murujuga lies, in reality, according to the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estates Agreement (BMIEA), the Native Title agreement for Murujuga is extinguished. When the BMIEA was signed in 2003, "there was no native title determination by the Federal Court in relation to any of the three native title claims before it. However, the benefits contained in the BMIEA were intended to endure regardless of whether or not any of the native title parties were determined by the Federal Court to hold native title over the areas in question. In July 2003 … the Federal Court found that non-exclusive native title rights still existed over parts of the land the subject of the native title claims but that native title no longer existed over Murujuga."¹⁷ As part of the BMIEA, freehold title was handed over to an Approved Body Corporate composed of the registered Indigenous claimant groups. This enabled the state government to compulsorily acquire Native Title rights to allow industrial development to expand across southern parts of Murujuga. Support was also provided to develop a conservation estate to ensure protection of Indigenous cultural heritage. The agreement also envisioned a series of economic and community benefits for the Indigenous groups, including education and training and a stake in future land developments. In return, 42 percent of Murujuga (the nonindustrial gazetted land) was leased back to the state of Western Australia to be jointly handled as a conservation reserve by the Approved Body Corporate and the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM).

Within the wider context of the state of Western Australia, however, the site is principally recognized for its industry associated with the processing and export of gas and iron ore, and not for its cultural values. The area is also important to non-Indigenous employees working in the industries established there, because it is the place where they work, live, and have built significant social relationships over many years. Non-Indigenous stories and connections attached to the site have already emerged—the most famous being the story of Red Dog.¹⁸ The site is multivalent and defined on several levels: international, national, state, local, and Indigenous.

This book investigates Murujuga’s rock art because it is both an outstanding example of world heritage and also in a unique situation: as a site, Murujuga is recognized for its heritage values, but it is being devastatingly impacted by industry. The site is a case of destruction of cultural heritage as a consequence of colonialism and postcolonialism. Therefore, this book proposes a new way to think about heritage destruction by analyzing the historical trajectory of Murujuga through different key historical periods as well as its status as an Indigenous heritage site. It is a historical study of visual content that explains why the petroglyphs in Murujuga were (and are) destroyed.

Theories that analyze the process in which objects change might be helpful here because they can explain the extent to which heritage objects are valued and devalued throughout their life.¹⁹ However, my intention in this book is to frame the destruction of images and landscape within cultural discourses (heritage and iconoclasm) that also consider systems of evaluation. It is also an investigation aimed at understanding qualities of heritage and how these affect its roles²⁰ in contemporary Australia, by providing a close contextual analysis of particular cultural processes and by being a model for others who wish to comprehend heritage as a contemporary phenomenon.

Iconoclasm

All objects are vulnerable and subject to being attacked and destroyed. Objects possess a power—they can refer to, symbolize, or embody an individual or group’s identity. By attacking or destroying the object, one can hurt the individual or the group by proxy. This applies to all objects, regardless of whether they are considered idols, art, or propaganda. However, the motivations behind the act of destruction vary from case to case and should be analyzed based on each individual context. Objects can be destroyed due to religious or political motivations, or because they might be offensive and transgressive to some individuals or to the law. In any case, the destruction always sends a message.

From the Greek είκονοκλάστης (image breaking), the term iconoclasm was originally linked to the destruction of religious images, but it was later appropriated to define the destruction of all images, including artistic ones. The definition changes according to the context. For example, iconoclasm was used in Byzantium in the eighth and ninth centuries and during the Reformation in the sixteenth century to refer to the destruction of religious images, while vandalism was coined during the French Revolution to refer to the destruction of architectural heritage, art, and images associated with the ancien régime.²¹

Different disciplines define the term accordingly. For example, an archaeologist understands iconoclasm as a practical action which had a direct and transforming impact on material culture.²² In contrast, a historian claims that it is the act of destroying religious works of art … two and three dimensional artifacts … buildings, and … cities.²³ For his part, a religious studies scholar claims that iconoclasm "was already a well-known phenomenon in antiquity, though often it took the form of destruction of symbols of privilege and established order, with the religious overtones muted…. [P]erhaps even more pertinent is the destruction of images of reigning or defunct emperors in the Roman period, as symbolic acts of political rebellion or of a posthumous damnatio memoriae."²⁴ Generally speaking, iconoclasm takes on two different senses. On the one hand, there is its literal sense of destruction and opposition to images (including religious imagery) and material objects (crucifixes, sculptures). On the other hand, in its abstract and symbolic sense, iconoclasm is a transgression of imperative rules and customs.

Iconoclasm might be the result of an emotional and violent response of an individual toward an object, or it can be a strategic and planned response carried out by a group of people or institutions.²⁵ In line with the latter characterization, recent work theorizes iconoclasm as a process—formed by a series of violent acts—that culminates in destruction, rather than a single moment of violence.²⁶ That is, iconoclasm destroys the targeted object through a transformative process that takes time to be effective—what Ian Lilley refers to as everyday heritage destruction, effected through large-scale projects or the cumulative impact of industrial expansion and smaller-scale projects.²⁷

Therefore, the rules that apply to the destruction of objects can also be applied to the destruction of a landscape when the latter is associated with a particular cultural group. In the case of Murujuga, iconoclasm is a process of transformation that reflects themes of control, power, domination, and social organization.²⁸ As this book will demonstrate, landscape iconoclasm is a lengthy, difficult, organized procedure²⁹ that impacts not only the landscape but also the cultural group associated with it. Images are important to people as signs of identity and of belonging to a specific place. Thus the reason that iconoclasm, enacted toward ancient rock art, also affects the local Indigenous community is because iconoclasm is closely associated with extermination or annihilation, as a form of ethnic cleansing, and … as a way of controlling a place and conquering a territory.³⁰

What follows is a full ethnographic account of a modern case of iconoclasm and the introduction of a new concept—landscape iconoclasm—to satisfactorily describe the destruction of a unique landscape. The premise of this book is that we cannot understand the destruction in Murujuga without unraveling archaeology’s deep entanglement with both the history of Western colonial and postcolonial interventions in Australia and the politics of Western Australian heritage that in several ways, including the use and abuse of archaeology, reproduced the colonial legacy. Landscape iconoclasm—a process of destruction—occurs, on the one hand, as a result of the deliberate destruction of heritage and poor archaeological advice, and, on the other, as a result of industrial development and bureaucratic deeds, perpetrated by people who simply followed orders without thinking about the consequences of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil is pertinent when you look at the destruction of heritage in Murujuga, as there exists a highly mechanized and organized bureaucratic organization that is slowly altering the landscape.³¹

I start by introducing the site, outlining its geographical location and providing an overview of the damage that has taken place there. I further explore matters concerning the ethnohistory of the area. In Chapter 2, I show how multivalent the site is by providing an overview of the many meanings attached to it by the Indigenous groups who populated the area before European colonization, as well as the meanings that the site elicits for Indigenous and non-Indigenous local communities today. In Chapters 3 and 4, I outline the disastrous consequences of colonialism, detailing the disinterest in and neglect of the rock art since the seventeenth century by the settlers and explorers who arrived in Australia and the Dampier Archipelago. I further show that these attitudes were not exclusive to Western Australia but were also common in Europe. The fifth chapter reviews the misinterpretation of the Australian landscape by European colonizers and how this influenced the first academic work on the area, summarizing the legacy of those who recorded rock art in Australia and Murujuga. In Chapter 6, I discuss how the establishment of industry influenced the mismanagement of the area’s Indigenous heritage by analyzing the lack of social value that standard heritage legislation demands. Next, I critique the concept of heritage by concluding that its implementation on Murujuga is merely a modern response to tame the foreign object—in this case, the rock art. Finally, a theory of landscape iconoclasm is offered, where I will further contextualize the concept of iconoclasm to overcome the argument that the motivation to destroy the landscape is purely economic.

Part I

Murujuga

Chapter 1

Situating Murujuga

Murujuga and the Dampier Archipelago

The Dampier Archipelago is located 1,650 kilometers north of Perth, along the northwest coastline of the Pilbara region in Western Australia (Figure 1). The archipelago consists of those landmasses not inundated by the sea during the last sea-level rise between ca. 7000 and 10,000 BP (before present)—islandization was achieved ca. 8000 BP.¹ Accordingly, the oldest rock art in the archipelago (large ornamented anthropomorphs, earthly animals, archaic faces, intaglio, and abstract images) was produced when the sea level was much