Abo culture is a hole in the ground

Aboriginal Heritage, the New Dark Emu
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Peter O’Brien Quadrant Online April 3. 2025


Writing recently in the Monthly, David Marr took Quadrant to task for its campaign against the Orwellian concept of truth-telling: From America they’ve learnt the art of word flipping. It takes talent, time and money, but words can be turned on their head. “Elite” is now a pejorative in political discourse. So is “progressive”. Even “educated” has a bit of a smell these days. But the Coalition and its backers set out to do something more ambitious: to turn truth to muck—“truth” as in “truth-telling”.It is not “truth” that is anathema to conservatives but “truth-telling”. The irony is that in the Aboriginal industry “truth” is a rare commodity or, more accurately, non-truths abound. Take your pick from the “oldest culture on Earth”, “First Nations”, “guardians of the environment”, “Stolen Generations”, “colonial wars”, “intergenerational trauma”, “first astronomers” and the grandaddy of them all, “deeply spiritual attachment to country”.

“Deeply spiritual attachment to country” gave us the absurd High Court decision that a part-Aboriginal New Zealand citizen convicted of a serious crime could not be deported from Australia to New Zealand because he had resided in Australia for many years and had a “spiritual attachment” to the land.

This seemingly benign concept is particularly pernicious because it leads, inter alia, to the insatiable demand for the protection of Aboriginal heritage, something that plagues economic development, particularly the resources sector. Mining companies have to tiptoe warily and expensively through the minefield of Aboriginal heritage.

Consider two simple propositions. First, mineral resources do not belong to mining companies, Aboriginal people, or the government, they belong to all Australians. Second, they should be exploited for the benefit of all Australians. They are not just critical to our prosperity, they are critical to our survival as a first-world nation.

In Western Australia, our largest source of mineral wealth, mining companies operate in tenements that cover large swathes of uninhabited and, in agricultural terms, unproductive land. The main challenge was the harsh, remote environment until enter, stage left, Aboriginal heritage.

The Pilbara, for example, covers roughly 500,000 square kilometres with only a few small towns. The Aboriginal population, around 8,000 people, live in some thirty communities.

Most of the Pilbara is subject to Native Title except for the Burrup Peninsula which is held by the Aboriginal community under freehold title. Generally, mining companies enter into participation agreements with the relevant registered Aboriginal communities, known as Prescribed Body Corporates.

These agreements provide, inter alia, housing, health services, education, training and employment, as well as compensation—sometimes profit-sharing, sometimes royalties. It is hard to know how much money these communities have received, but in January 2024 the National Indigenous Times reported on an underpayment by Rio Tinto to just three traditional owner groups:
A charitable trust representing three Traditional Owner groups in Western Australia’s eastern Pilbara region has received $125 million in unpaid royalties.
Iron ore giant Rio Tinto made the massive payment to major Aboriginal Pilbara group The General Gumala Foundation and is likely to contribute more in future after underpaying royalties over several years.

The windfall payment to the charity, which is distributed to the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation that represents the Banjima, Yinhawangka and Nyiyaparli traditional owners in the eastern Pilbara, comes after more than three years of negotiations after Rio admitted in July 2020 it had identified historical underpayments in royalty payments under its Yandi land use agreement, which commenced in 1997.

The $125 million payment, which was made in December 2022 but only revealed in Gumala foundation’s recently published annual report, is the first indication of how big underpayments from Rio have been, with further payments expected.
“We note the final amount remains unresolved,” the foundation’s report stated …
The negotiations with Rio have proven costly for GAC and trustee company Gumala Investments, with GAC’s annual report showing the corporation incurred legal costs of $1.06 million in the arbitration of the Rio Tinto dispute in the year to June 2023.

Gumala stated in its 2023 annual report it “continues to engage with Rio Tinto to finally resolve the matter” and had previously commissioned an audit that put the total underpayment figure as high as $400m.

There may more to this matter, as litigation continues, but if this is an underpayment over a period of less than thirty years, the total amount to be paid to just three groups of maybe 1,000 people, for doing nothing, must be staggering. Nice work if you can get it.

This payment is made on top of royalties paid to the state government. In return, mining companies hope they will not be unduly inconvenienced by Aboriginal heritage. They expect, or should expect, some give and take, that not every site is sacrosanct.

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. Thousands of protected sites are registered, many uncovered by archaeological surveys commissioned by mining companies as part of their licence conditions under the West Australian Aboriginal Heritage Protection Act of 1974. In the Pilbara, the vast majority of these sites have been avoided by mining companies. Relatively few have been legally disturbed, but a few have been legally destroyed under the exemption provisions of Section 18 of the Act. Complying with these obligations is a costly business for miners.

The vaunted “deep spirituality” of Aboriginal people is widely deployed to mean they are more virtuous and less materialistic than other people. It confers special moral authority on Dreamtime mythology. How can one reconcile a supposed higher spirituality with the way in which so many Aboriginal men treat their partners and children?

Perhaps it is because Aboriginal animist beliefs may be more concerned with ritual and tradition than the moral underpinnings of social behaviour. Given that most Aborigines profess Christianity or agnosticism, their devotion to the Dreamtime might more accurately be deemed superstition or even nostalgia.
The demolition in May 2020 of two rock shelters in the Pilbara, now known generically as Juukan, was carried out by Rio Tinto following the letter of the law in Western Australia despite last-minute pleas by the local Aboriginal community, the PKKP, that the shelters should be spared on the grounds that they were especially ethnographically significant to the Aboriginal people concerned. It was described as a national tragedy with international implications.

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.

Contrast that speed with the response to Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s call for a parliamentary inquiry into Aboriginal land councils, many of which control vast wealth in the form of royalties and other payments, yet whose constituents are among the most dysfunctional and deprived in Australia or anywhere. Three years on and nothing has happened.

Since Rio Tinto had acted in accordance with the law, the presumption was that the law must be wrong. The terms of reference for the inquiry were constructed on that basis. The remit was to determine whether the existing laws were fit for purpose and how they could be improved. The focus was entirely on protection of Aboriginal heritage. The interests and concerns of the resources sector (and consequently the entire Australian population) were ignored.

The recommendations, naturally, mirrored the terms of reference. The first was to make the federal Minister for Indigenous Australians responsible for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage matters. This self-evidently counter-productive idea was universally opposed by mining companies on the basis that state governments—which have a genuine interest in the matter—were much more likely to support pragmatic rather than ideological outcomes. Another was to give Aboriginal communities a unilateral right of veto over any proposed destruction of a site.

It was also proposed that a definition of cultural heritage recognising both tangible and intangible heritage be developed, one of the few useful recommendations to come out of the inquiry. However, in the hands of the Aboriginal industry, this is likely to make the problem infinitely worse.
My suggestion is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 should be amended to restrict sites and objects that may be subject to legislative protection such that:

1/ They must be tangible. The haunts and highways of mythical creatures, or “secret business”, for example, would not qualify.
2/ The only intangible culture that should be sacrosanct is one which is still being lived, not play-acted, by the majority of its community;
3/ They must be of human construction. Trees under which Aboriginal mothers once gave birth, for example, would not qualify; and
They must of such a scale that they elicit a degree of wonder or admiration, for example, the Brewarrina fish traps, the Lake Condah eel traps, the Ubirr rock paintings in Kakadu, the Gwion paintings in Western Australia and so on. Middens would not qualify.

I recognise this is somewhat simplistic and government ministers must be allowed some discretion, but the over-riding consideration should be the national interest. Protection of genuine Aboriginal heritage is a worthy aim, but the underlying principle should be that where there is a conflict between essential or even highly desirable development and Aboriginal heritage, protection should be the exception rather than the rule. The same considerations should apply to European heritage: protect and preserve where possible, but community and national interest must prevail.

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. 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.
I present my case in a new book, Juukan: The New Dark Emu? to be published later this year by Quadrant Books.

Peter O’Brien is the author of Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, published by Quadrant Books. He is a regular contributor to Quadrant Online
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https://quadrant.org.au/…/aboriginal-heritage-the-new…/