News that Rio Tinto blasted Juukan Gorge cave to rubble in Reconciliation Week in its search for Iron ore has left many Australians – both First Nations and non-Indigenous – reeling with shock.
The 46,000-year-old sacred site is of priceless cultural and historic significance as it’s the only inland site in Australia showing continuous human occupation through the last Ice Age. It also provided a genetic link to present-day traditional owners in the form of a 4,000-year-old plait of woven of human hair.
The loss is irretrievable for all of us, and for the world.
Make no mistake, Juukan Gorge cave was of profound archaeological significance. And my heart aches for the Puutu Kunti Kurrama traditional land owners, for their elders, and for future generations who have been robbed of the cultural continuity that sustains our people.
Some have compared this to the destruction of ancient Buddha statues – except that, guess what, it wasn’t a crime!
That’s right, the mining giant received permission in 2013 to destroy the site under WA’s archaic heritage laws, drafted back in 1972, before the site’s true wealth was recognised in an archaeological dig a year later. This act, born in ignorance of the true significance of the world’s oldest living culture, cannot go on.
How do we protect Australia’s incredible heritage?
One way is for all Australians to connect into the vast knowledge we have at our fingertips – the collective wisdom of First Nations people that could be tapped through a voice to Parliament, and through education.
If we had a voice to Parliament, the outcomes could be vastly different. There is no need to destroy sacred sites. Mining can continue to generate wealth but in ways that don’t destroy the unique beauty of our continent.
Many Australians would welcome the wisdom Aboriginal people bring around caring for country and cohabitation with the land. Our nation could be so enriched by this wisdom which is, after all, more than 40,000 years old. The mining giants could also benefit from this knowledge. We can gain wealth without this kind of wholesale destruction.
If we’d had a mechanism like the voice to Parliament, could this wisdom have also influenced the management of the terrifying bushfires all of us, people, animals and fauna, experienced this summer? I don’t know, but I suspect it might.
Secondly, we could do so much more to educate all Australian children as to the incredible cultural heritage they are all heirs to.
Education can end the destruction of sacred sites. Education can end systemic racism.
Education can fling open the doors to the shining light that is the ancient and enduring knowledge of First Nations Australians.
That’s why World Vision wants to see traditional knowledges and practices embedded in schools as an educational standard.
But we don’t just want this taught within four walls. World Vision is calling for cultural immersion programs that go beyond the classroom, with students taken on excursions by First Nations people and exposed to the living, breathing history around us.
An initiative like this would build real world experiences and ensure a meaningful connection and interactions between the world’s oldest living culture and young students – students who are tomorrow’s leaders.
It could help carry us further and faster towards reconciliation and harvesting the profound knowledge that has so much to offer.
Twenty years have passed since Australians united in a historic walk for reconciliation. Following this past Reconciliation week, if there’s one thing I would hope that Australians could learn, it’s that great losses like this don’t just affect First Nations people, they affect us all. We must find new spaces in Parliament and in schools for First Nations knowledge.
We have an opportunity to start building a vision for a wiser Australia that is inclusive of all its peoples.
Photograph above: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation/AFP/Getty Images