University of Western Australia
By Carrie Cox
‘New’ discoveries of ancient rock art in WA’s north-west continue to be made by a UWA-led team of researchers working with local communities to unlock the deep-time secrets of water sourcing in the desert.
‘From the Desert to the Sea: Managing Rock Art, Country and Culture’ is a five-year collaborative research investigation into how the mythological narratives and rock art enable the transmission of vital knowledge in Australia’s deserts.
Lead chief investigator Professor Jo McDonald, who is Director of UWA’s Centre of Rock Art Research + Management, said while the project team had set out to revisit known rock art sites, ‘new’ ancient sites continued to be uncovered in the process.
“Our original intent was to go back to the 800-plus sites that we recorded with communities along the Canning Stock Route between 2007 and 2010, but we’ve already found many more sites,” Professor McDonald said.
“For example, one of our Martu traditional owner partners asked us to survey an area that had fallen out of contemporary use, but which was connected to other places that they knew about.
Image: Martu shows researchers how to dig for bungarra (lizard), under the watchful eye of Murphy Williams..
"What we found there was one of the most intact cultural landscapes I’ve ever seen, completely unaffected by pastoralism, mining or tourists.
“There were thousands of grindstones there and many, many engraving and painting sites – it really was quite amazing.
“So there’s definitely still more to be discovered and we’re expecting to keep documenting new sites.”
Rock art sites in the Western Desert and Pilbara are believed to number in the millions, with some being among the oldest in the world and documenting the entire human occupation of Australia.
Waking up to the dreaming
Professor McDonald said the ARC Linkage project ‘From the Desert to the Sea’ was aiming to produce a more nuanced understanding of Aboriginal settlement and land use in north-west Australia.
“All three of the Aboriginal organisations we are working with have contemporary cultural links that allow us to understand their chains of social connection,” she said.
“We’re working with these groups to better understand how rock art and the Dreaming stories encode information about where water is in the desert.
“The Martu people, for instance, have exclusive native title rights to water across an area twice the size of Tasmania because they were able to name all the water sources across their land.
“How do people remember that sort of information? How does that connection to country enable them to continue those long-distance and deep-time connections to ancient knowledge, which they obviously still do?
“The answer lies in mythological narratives about how the landscape and particular water sources were formed by the ancestral beings, and rock art seems to be fundamentally linked to that.”
Professor McDonald said the way Aboriginal people understood their ancient connections to place and time in the landscape was not so dissimilar to the viewpoint of archaeologists using western scientific training.
“As archaeologists we record evidence of occupation in centuries and millennia and that isn’t necessarily inconsistent with the way Aboriginal people see their connection to country.
“As far as they’re concerned, they’ve always been there – the landscape was created by their ancestors and ancestral beings.”
Keeping threats at bay
Knowledge is key to managing the myriad threats to Australia’s cultural heritage in the state’s north-west, according to Professor McDonald.
“While the resource sector hasn’t yet had a major impact on the sandy desert region, the Martu native title lands have over 500 mining tenements across it and that has the potential to have a massive impact over the next 20-to-30 years,” she said.
“Unless we know what’s there and its cultural value, it’s hard to protect it.
“It’s a strong driver for all of the communities we’re working with to get systems in place that allow them to know what’s theirs so they can make rational and timely responses to future threats.
“Ultimately I want all three communities that we’re working with to feel they have a greater capacity to be on country and to manage their significant heritage places.”
Professor McDonald said while some culturally significant sites were so remote as to be effectively protected by isolation, that could quickly change.
“As soon as you build a major road or open up an area to tourism, all sorts of uncontrolled things can happen,” she said.
The role of technology
Though they’re frequently immersed in ancient and fragile landscapes, Professor McDonald’s team is actively harnessing new technology to achieve better research outcomes.
“These days we routinely use drones to visualise the landscapes we work in and help us map where the grindstones or rock art sites are,” she said.
“We will also be using remote (satellite) sensing for water, which hasn’t been used for predicting heritage locations in these desert environments before now.
“Subterranean water sources feed into the myriad Aboriginal soaks and rock holes and you can’t understand this interconnectedness any other way.
“We’re also using apps that create 3D images of stone structures and caves, which allow for instantaneous visualisation of heritage features – we couldn’t do this 10 years ago.”
Professor McDonald said she was also hopeful that emerging AI applications would help her research team in the areas of image enhancement and machine learning.
“One of our students recently completed a thesis using face recognition software to explore stylistic differences in a particular rock art motif – it’s all really exciting stuff and we’re embracing it.”
Navigating native title
One of the many challenges inherent within a project spanning multiple native title estates is the bureaucracy attached to the legal processes.
“Already we’ve been able to mobilise some legacy information collected for native title, namely the Dreaming narratives that were lodged with the Federal Court as part of the demonstration of how people understood this place, but it was a slow process obtaining the necessary community approvals,” Professor McDonald said.
“One of the problems with native title and heritage management is that many people who provided information to the government departments 20-plus years ago are no longer alive and because they can’t give permission to have it released, this material remains locked up and their descendants can’t get access to it.
“So that’s one of the many goals of this project – to make sure that the information that’s been collected goes back to the communities and to make sure that it’s in a form that is useable and culturally appropriate.”
The importance of collaboration
Professor McDonald’s work across several decades to form meaningful relationships with local communities and Elders has been critical to the take-up of ‘From the Desert to the Sea’.
“We’ve been working with these communities for many years and together we have built this project from the ground up.
“Often the people on the Boards now and working as rangers are the children and grandchildren of people we worked with 20 years ago.”
She said this research project was necessarily ‘slow science’ due to its highly collaborative and culturally sensitive nature.
“What we’re trying to do is make sure everyone comes along on the journey with us, which requires continually talking to the cultural and governance authorities of the local communities and other stakeholders,” Professor McDonald said.
“It’s all about constant negotiation and finding out what people really want – their aspirations, strategies and goals.”
UWA is working with chief investigators at Curtin University, The University of Melbourne, The University of New South Wales, The Pennsylvania State University and Utah State University, in collaboration with partner organisations Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC), Mungarlu Ngurrarankatja Rirraunkaja Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC (MNR), and Jamukurnu Yapalikurnu Aboriginal Corporation (JYAC), with funding from Woodside, BHP, Newcrest Mining, and with partner investigators from the Western Australian Museum, Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, and Desert Support Services.