Category Archives: Australia

Juukan Gorge

In May 2020, while clearing the way for a mine expansion, the transnational mining company Rio Tinto set off explosives that destroyed a site sacred to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people in Western Australia. The site included the Juukan Gorge Rock Dwellings, which have evidence of human habitation dating back 46,000 years. The mining company placed their explosives meters from the rock shelters with full permission of the Australian government—and after misleading Traditional Owners.

Doongmabulla Springs – Australia

The Carmichael Coal Mine is a proposed development of six massive open-cut pits, five underground mines, a coal handling and processing plant, and associated infrastructure, in central Queensland, Australia. If developed as proposed, the mine would be among the largest in the world. Not only would the emissions from burning coal from this mine contribute to global climate change, which is already harming the nearby World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, but the mine would also destroy the ancestral homelands and sacred sites of the Wangan and Jagalingou.

Dampier Archipelago – Australia

Off the northwest coast of Australia, the islands of the Dampier Archipelago are home to perhaps the largest concentration of rock art in the world, along with Australia’s largest collection of standing stones.

Lake Cowal – Australia

Lake Cowal, often referred to as “the Heartland of the Wiradjuri Nation,” is the largest inland lake in New South Wales, Australia. Scar trees and river-stained gum trees told both the history of Aboriginal ceremonies and intermittent flooding that

Hindmarsh Island – Australia

According to southern Australian Aboriginal clans, the Dreamtime figure of Ngurunderi chased a giant cod with spear in hand through freshwater marshes, carving the Murray River around Kumarangk.