Regional focus
A bleak history
In May 2020, miners from Rio Tinto destroyed the caves at Australia’s Juukan Gorge, an ancient Aboriginal site that has been part of the local culture for perhaps 46,000 years. While the disaster sparked a particularly intense outcry, it’s arguably part of a far wider pattern. Andrea Valentino talks to James Fitzgerald, a lawyer at the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, and Tim Buckley, director at Climate Energy Finance, to understand the long history behind the incident, what is being done to prevent future vandalism – and whether it is enough to create a fairer industry.
round 50,000 years ago, our world was almost impossibly different. Mastodons and woolly mammoths roamed from Siberia to France, and sloths the size of elephants stalked the plains of Argentina. People were unfamiliar too. Modern humans competed with Neandertals – with their pug noses and unwieldy gait – as they hunted and gathered for survival against the odds. Even the landscapes in that distant past would feel bewildering today. Much of North America was under an ice sheet two miles thick – but the Sahara was a fertile savannah filled with lions and hippos. Yet if the planet back then was so different, one corner of Western Australia (WA) may have seemed familiar. Burrowed under the region’s red sands and scrublands, people have occupied the caves of Juukan Gorge continuously for millennia –
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as suggested by fauna, grindstones and a kangaroo bone shaped into a primitive hunting tool. Other evidence for Juukan’s deep heritage is more compelling still. A length of plaited human hair found at the site, 4,000 years old and woven from the heads of different individuals, shares much with the DNA of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people who still live in WA today. All told, this is a place that may have first welcomed human footprints 46,000 years ago.
Now though, the wonders of Juukan Gorge have gone the way of the Neandertal. In May 2020, this sacred site was blasted by miners from Rio Tinto, as they expanded the Brockman 4 iron mine, cutting one of our last cords to the world of the mastodon. Predictably, the backlash was swift. Rio Tinto’s CEO resigned, new legislation was announced and local
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
bmphotographer/
Shutterstock.com
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