News
A strenuous lobbying effort to overturn the UN’s initial rejection of the listing mustered support from countries that are major consumers of Australian gas. By Mike Seccombe.
Inside Watt’s push for Murujuga World Heritage
It was 4.30pm last Friday, Paris time, when Nikolay Nenov, chair of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, rapped his gavel lightly and the tears began to flow. After the long years of campaigning by Traditional Owners and Custodians, it had taken less than an hour for the 21 current member state representatives on the committee to iron out the final details and unanimously vote to inscribe the Murujuga Cultural Landscape in north-west Australia on the World Heritage List.
The decision recognised Murujuga’s ancient rock art as a “masterpiece of human creative genius”. At least one million, maybe two million, petroglyphs scattered across the Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago are testament to 50,000 years or more of continuous habitation.
“There was tears of joy,” says Peter Hicks, chairperson of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC), who has been involved in the campaign since the corporation’s inception in 2006. Also tears of sadness, he says, “for a lot of people, of our Elders, who have passed during the process”.
There was a large measure of relief in the emotional mix as well, as only a couple of months ago it looked as if the listing could be derailed. What followed was a strenuous effort, led by the Australian environment minister, Murray Watt, mustering support from countries with significant reliance on Australian gas, and a Kenyan delegation.
In May, a report by an advisory body to UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), confirmed the “outstanding universal values” of Murujuga but recommended that “several management and potential impact related matters” be referred back to the Australian government for resolution before a decision could be made.
Which is what UNESCO subsequently did, in a draft decision released on May 26.
The concern was that emissions from heavy industry near Murujuga – particularly the huge gas export facility at the port of Karratha, operated by Woodside Energy, but also other industry, including a massive fertiliser plant – was degrading the rock art.
The draft proposed radical measures. It required that the government not only “ensure the total removal of degrading acidic emissions currently impacting upon the petroglyphs” but also that it should prevent any further industrial development “adjacent to, and within, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape and develop an appropriate decommissioning and rehabilitation plan for existing industrial activities”.
The government was never going to agree to what amounted, essentially, to the de-industrialisation of the area. To do so would mean forgoing billions of dollars in taxes and royalties.
Indeed, the release of the UNESCO draft resolution all but coincided with the announcement on May 28 of a “proposed decision” by the federal Labor government’s new environment minister, Murray Watt, to allow an extension of the operating life of the Woodside gas processing plant. It was due to end in 2030; Watt gave it another 40 years, to 2070 – albeit “subject to strict conditions, particularly relating to the impact of air emissions levels”.
A final decision and the conditions that might attach are yet to be announced. Watt’s office says negotiations between the government and Woodside are ongoing, but there is little doubt that the company will get its extension.
That in turn will open the way for new gas mining developments in Western Australia to feed the Woodside plant. It is estimated this will result in the release of some 4.3 billion tonnes of planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That equates to about 10 times Australia’s current yearly CO2 emissions. Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of Australia’s premier environment group, the Australian Conservation Foundation, accurately characterises this as a “carbon bomb”.
Conservationists, including a subset of the Traditional Custodians, the Save Our Songlines group, saw in the pending decision on Murujuga a chance to exert leverage on the government over the broader issue of climate change.
They did not oppose World Heritage listing for Murujuga – all parties, including Woodside, declared themselves in favour of that – but they wanted it to be made conditional on action to curb carbon emissions.
With the ICOMOS report and the UNESCO draft decision, they scored a win. The two issues, climate and the rock art, were conflated. Not only were the industrial activities at Karratha exacerbating the climate crisis, they were damaging to the biggest, most ancient collection of petroglyphs in the world.
But while the science on the consequences for the climate of continued carbon emissions is beyond doubt, the science relating to the degradation of the rock art was contestable.
The government immediately, vigorously, set about contesting it and lobbying for the draft decision to be overturned. Watt hosted more than a dozen ambassadors from countries on the World Heritage Committee at Parliament House for afternoon tea ahead of the UN’s meeting, according to Guardian Australia.
He pronounced himself disappointed with the draft and claimed it was based on “factual inaccuracies”, vowing to “work constructively” with the World Heritage Centre to ensure they were addressed.
“It is disappointing that the draft decision is heavily influenced by claims made in the media and correspondence from non-government organisations, rather than scientific and other expert evidence,” he said in a statement.
This was not an entirely correct assertion. There is scientific and expert evidence of damage to the petroglyphs. In 2021, the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority warned in its report to the state government of potential “serious or irreversible damage to rock art from industrial air emissions”.
It is true, however, that more extensive and recent work carried out by the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program – set up by the WA government, led by the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, and involving some 50 scientists – contradicted earlier findings.
An 800-page report, released a few days before Watt’s announcement of the Woodside extension, found some evidence of damage to the petroglyphs but blamed much of it on historic emissions from the former Dampier power station.
“There is evidence, in particular from the CSIRO in 2005, that there was acid rain back then,” says Professor Ben Mullins, the program’s research lead and an expert in air quality, aerosol science, and occupational and environmental health with Curtin University.
“The main contributor globally to acid rain is sulphur dioxide. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was no limit on how much sulphur you could put in fuel, or any anything you were burning.”
The emissions of SO2 have declined by 95 per cent from their peak, he says.
“The data from this program do not support the acid rain or acid deposition theory proposed by earlier research. Measurements of rainfall and wet or dry deposition over the past two years have been found to be neutral or slightly alkaline.”
Mullins, along with key contributors to the monitoring report – Professor Katy Evans, an expert in geochemistry from Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Robyn Schofield, associate professor in atmospheric chemistry at the University of Melbourne, formed part of the Australian delegation to Paris.
Their job was to explain the science to the 21 state party delegations who would make the decision.
“A lot of the countries brought technical experts that really dived into the science,” Mullins tells The Saturday Paper. “We had a lot of good discussions with them.”
Nonetheless, he says, he and his colleagues found their role “challenging”, because they had sympathy for the position of the conservationists and Save Our Songlines advocates who were opposed to the Woodside extension.
“Clearly,” he says, “there’s a lot of overlap between people who care about the rock art and the climate activists.
“And I’m sure all the scientists on the [rock art monitoring] project share the global consensus on climate change and the need for climate action.
“But greenhouse gas emissions are not relevant to the rock art. It’s unfortunate that it seems there’s been a conflation of legitimate climate concerns and protection of the rock art.”
Uncomfortable as it may have been for the experts to be arguing against the ICOMOS recommendation and for the government that had just approved Woodside’s “climate bomb”, they were persuasive.
The day before the decision was to be taken, media reports emerged that Australia had secured the support of “at least eight” of the 21 countries represented on the committee to reject the draft decision to defer the listing of Murujuga.
A member of the Save Our Songlines delegation in Paris says they were aware of the move a couple of days before that.
When the amendment was published on Thursday, with a list of countries that were backing it, they say:
“We did some fairly speedy background work and established that almost all the countries who were sponsoring the amendment had some links to Woodside.”
That was obviously true of nations such as Japan and Korea – both big customers for Australian gas. But not of the principal proponent of the move, Kenya.
Why Kenya? One can only speculate. There is no evidence of any obvious quid pro quo. It’s notable, though, that the United Nations Environment Program is headquartered in Nairobi. Thus Kenya has significant expertise to draw on.
Australian government sources also point to something called the Nairobi Declaration, which emphasises the importance of indigenous peoples in the protection of cultural landscapes. They suggest the Kenyans were “excited” by the opportunity to approve a proposal driven by an Aboriginal organisation.
Ben Mullins, for his part, says he was particularly appreciative of the buy-in from the Kenyan technical experts and the country’s ambassador to UNESCO, Professor Peter Ngure.
“He’s got a background in science. He really grilled us on the details of the science. I was really impressed by his understanding,” says Mullins.
Meanwhile, the Save Our Songlines people say, they were given short shrift as they attempted to lobby delegates, and they expressed concerns “about a significantly increased security presence at UNESCO on the day of the Murujuga nomination, which intimidated members of the delegation”.
After the event, the founder of the group, Traditional Owner Raelene Cooper, complained in a letter to UNESCO authorities that she had been denied the opportunity to address the meeting.
She was nevertheless pleased with the committee’s decision to inscribe the property. “If I had been able to speak on Friday as I intended,” she wrote, “I would have been able to express my profound joy at the successful inscription of Murujuga on the World Heritage list, and my congratulation to every member of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation on a momentous day for our people achieving such recognition.
“Instead, I was prevented from doing so. I wish to formally communicate my view that this was deliberate and politically motivated. In my view, our delegation was targeted due to our position about the ongoing industrial pollution affecting Murujuga’s sacred rock art. The gas industry is extremely powerful and holds huge influence over the Australian government…”
There is little doubt that on at least that last point she is right. Murray Watt’s decision, taken so quickly after his appointment as environment minister, to approve the extension of Woodside’s plant for another 40 years testifies to that.
At the end of the day, however, both sides of the issue, MAC and SOS, celebrated Murujuga’s listing.
On the conference floor, some delegates from other countries gave up their seats to the representatives of MAC, for which Peter Hicks is profoundly grateful.
“There were 19 seats given to us, for our delegation to all be on the floor. Our neighbours, so to speak, of the Australian delegation, in their support, vacated their seating.”
The room applauded while the MAC delegates wept.
“When the hammer fell, we were so … happy doesn’t describe the feeling … It was one of the most joyous feelings that one could have,” says Hicks. Had Murujuga not been listed, “it would have devastated our elderly people”.
Assuming the scientists of the Murujuga monitoring program are right, the petroglyphs are safe from direct impacts of industry, protected for Traditional Owners and for future generations to enjoy.
As to the indirect impacts, though, that is another question.
Climate change threatens rising sea levels, stronger storms and more frequent heatwaves. Already Karratha is one of the hottest places in Australia. On average, the maximum temperature is above 35 degrees for 115 days each year and above 40 degrees on 32 days. The record temperature is 48.4 degrees.
The petroglyphs may endure, but you have to wonder how their custodians will.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Inside Watt’s push for Murujuga World Heritage".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
