Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine | Hacker News Reader

Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine

theguardian.com

49 pointsMaysonL16 comments

A day later and the usual playbook gets rolled out "lessons learned", "very sorry", "genuine mistake" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-52869502

One hundred and thirty odd (provable) generations of family history blown up. Fifteen hundred generations of continual occupation gone.

All in favor of responsible investigation of historical significant finds.

But at some point, we live in this world or turn it into a museum. There is so much human activity over so long a period, you can't walk along a riverbank some places without tripping over a Tudor brick or Roman coin.

There's definitely a tension between exhaustive investigation into every find, and getting on with a business. Its never going to be a perfect win for either effort.

I've been to a Rio Tinto mine in the Pilbara and talked to some people there about a large doughnut shaped piece of work they were doing avoiding some aboriginal site. They do more than just pay lip service to the idea of preserving this stuff.

I'm obviously a bit biased, but I don't expect 40,000 year old sites riddled with artefacts are actually that rare in the Pilbara. It isn't the sort of place where things change quickly. It is much more likely that this is one of the few they've found because it has a mine on top of it that was paying for an archaeologist to fly out and look.

As can be seen from the article - the aboriginals have no idea how old these sites are or what is in them when the mine approvals are negotiated. It makes sense, nobody is keeping a 4,000 year inventory of what practically amounts to buried junk of no value to anyone outside of one small tribe of people. Possibly not even them if I let my usual cynicism seep through.

It is easy to see Rio shouldn't have blown the cave up. It is appropriate to change the legislation. It is reasonable to pay the locals money. If the reporting is accurate that the site was historically rare then it is a loss to the historians. But it isn't international news or an international loss - if it hadn't been in the path of an active mine even the traditional owners wouldn't have known what it was, or cared about its historic significance.

This is utterly false. The original land owners definitely knew it was there and wanted Rio Tinto to protect it. They decided not to, and blew it up instead - the reason given was 'the explosives are already in place and its too dangerous to remove them'.

Australians try to cover up their racism and heinous history with erasing the worlds oldest extant culture, but there is a rising tide that is moving against Australian complacency and wants them to put a higher priority on protecting human heritage over extracting mineral wealth. The original land owners of the Australian continent have a huge case for the return of their lands - these acts are only designed to make it harder for that to occur. Rio Tinto didn't even need to mine in that area - it was merely a convenient way to remove cultural heritage that would've made the original land owners case for native title stronger.

Latest evidence is showing that 'modern' Australian Aboriginals are only 4,000 years old:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/14/most-...

Basically a second wave of colonisation from New Guinea that conquered/destroyed/assimilated the existing, older humans.

>Latest evidence is showing that 'modern' Australian Aboriginals are only 4,000 years old:

In your gleeful rush to discount humanities oldest extant civilisation, you seem to have made the fatal association:

   human language = human being

The original land owners have been on the Australian continent for 60,000+ years, and they have maintained oral traditions that are over 40,000 years. No amount of blathering from racists is going to change that fact: its a matter of geological record.

> ...the explosives are already in place and its too dangerous to remove them...

I hadn't heard that before, but it is actually a really good reason. It would be risking people's lives to try and defuse an active shot. Once the explosives are in the ground the shot was going to be fired one way or another.

The aboriginals needed to, and a presume probably did, raise concerns before explosives were loaded.

Rio Tinto should have paid to have them removed, plain and simple.

It isn't a matter of money; someone could have died. To do that over a historical curio is not responsible.

Your characterising this as a 'historical curio' is ridiculous. By the same reasoning we should just leave the bombs dropped in German cities where they are - 'someone could die, disarming them' ...

Someone could also die leaving them where they are. There are circumstances where it makes sense to risk defusing a shot, but protecting a historical site in the middle of the Australian Outback is not one of them.

I'd rather tell someone I blew up a 4,000 year old heritage site and get yelled at than tell them I got their son killed protecting 4,000 year old refuse.

The debate should centre entirely around what happened before the shot was loaded.

The original owners of the Australian continent were a 60,000 year old human culture. The current owners are occupied by these industries.

It is factually a human rights violation to destroy the cultural artefacts of other cultures. Remember when ISIS bombed the Buddhas of Bamyan?

If China were to, say, demolish the opera house to get at the fish underneath, would you be so happy about it?

If someone is choosing between bombing people and blowing up the Buddhas of Bamyan you'd have to be a monster to say the Buddahs are more important.

My advice to you if you argue this with anyone else is pick a different hill to make your stand. I'm not sure how this ended up being a discussion of the cultural heritage vs life or death matters as that was never a real issue here. Mines don't move very quickly, there would have been plenty of time for Rio to do the wrong thing and be critiqued between archaeologists being on the site and the shot being loaded.

The difference between "shot is loaded therefore the caves are condemned" vs "shot is fired therefore caves are condemned" isn't important.

I don't need your advice - you have demonstrated callous disregard for the cultural heritage of a group of people who have experienced nothing but callous disregard for centuries. Such authoritarian attitudes as you espouse here are counter-productive to a healthy society.

Your much loved mining company KNEW that the cultural heritage site was there - they dug the holes and placed the explosives regardless. Then when they were confronted, they made up the bullshit excuse that the 'explosives are too dangerous to remove' - which is of course, utter bollocks.

My advice to you: confront your covert racist attitude and start to understand the violence that is being enacted on a people who do not deserve it, plain and simple. Real Australians should be furious about this destruction of the country's very, very valuable heritage. More valuable than a few sticks of gelignite, anyway...

>The difference between "shot is loaded therefore the caves are condemned" vs "shot is fired therefore caves are condemned" isn't important.

Maybe its not important to those who wilfully display a callous disregard for more ancient cultures than their own, but for those of us who are paying attention to the cost to humanity of this kind of behaviour, it is very, very important that this never happens again.

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