Mining company convicted of desecrating sacred Aboriginal site
A mining company has been convicted of desecrating a sacred Aboriginal site in a remote part of Australia's Northern Territory, in the first successful prosecution under laws aimed at protecting one of the world's oldest cultures.
Mining taking place and a large blast being prepared along the western pit wall ending in front of the sacred site, at the Bootu Creek aboriginal rock site, north of remote Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. Photo: AFP/GETTY
By Bonnie Malkin, Sydney
12:27PM BST 02 Aug 2013
The company was fined $150,000 (£88,000) for damaging the spiritual significance of a group of rocks at Bootu Creek that are known in English as "Two Women Sitting Down".
Blasting activities dislodged an outcrop in 2011, triggering a rockslide that wiped out half of the site. At the time, mining company OM Manganese Limited was convicted of causing physical damage to the area.
But on Friday, in a historic ruling, a Darwin magistrate found that the site had also been desecrated and fined the company under federal sacred sites laws.
Magistrate Sue Oliver accused OM Manganese of "wilful blindness" to the potential for damage. The court had been told that the company was cleared to work at Bootu Creek in 2004 but was advised that there were sacred sites in the area. Despite the warning, some blasting took place just 80 feet from the sacred site.
"The defendant company made decisions that involved the sacred site that favoured business and profit over the (cultural protection) obligations they had," Ms Oliver said in the ruling.
OM Manganese accepted the decision but said that the damage was unintentional.
The site is considered to be sacred by the local Kunapa people because it forms part of their "dreaming", stories handed down through the generations over thousands of years that relate physical features of the landscape to Aboriginal mythology.
Kunapa representative Gina Smith said the changes to the site had severed it from its dreamtime "songline" and that the community would no longer be able to use it in their mythology.
"It will always remain a sacred site to us, but it has been ruined and we don't know what to do," she said.
"It's been significantly changed, which makes it much harder for Aboriginal people to recognise the dreaming."
Aboriginal culture is one of the world's oldest continuous cultures, with genetic studies showing Aboriginal Australians are descended from the first people to leave Africa up to 75,000 years ago. Today, Aborigines are by far the most disadvantaged group in Australia.
