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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend on a property with cave art here in the hunter valley of Australia. We really don't do enough to preserve it at all. He's responsible and ensures no harm but it's still weird to own private land with 10k+ year old art and have no one really give a damn about it.

Compare it to European attitudes, eg. Lascaux where they closed off the cave completely and only allow tourists near the modern reconstruction.

We really do take 10k+ year old history for granted here.

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I think it's because of a sense of ownership and belonging (or lack thereof). People who made the art in Lascaux are, in a distant sense, ancestors of the present-day French. Most of Australia is of British ancestry, transplanted in the past few hundred years. The majority of them, including their government, obviously don't consider the Aboriginal heritage as their own.

I dunno, if I had a property with art that is 10,000 years old, I will try my best to preserve it. Regardless of whether they were made by my ancestors or not, because it doesn’t matter.

It was made by humans. So in a way, they are my ancestors, whether they spoke French or some other language doesn’t matter to me

The point is you’re in the enlightened minority.

No most Europeans, including those in Australia care deeply about cultural preservation. In this case every European involved, the government, media and owner of the land all do. The odd thing is how the aboriginal people have done nothing to preserve this art for thousands of years. I would be curious to know if the previous vandals mentioned in TFA were leaving European or aboriginal names behind. One of the complaints the aboriginals had was lack of access to the cave. Europeans may be the ones more interested in preserving the ancient markings, the non-Europeans may be the ones more interested in making their own. Can anyone blame them?

Europeans everywhere care mostly about owning and profiting off of artwork, preservation of a work is important insofar as it allows Europeans to hoard the art and sell it, or grant prestige to their museums and galleries compared to other museums and galleries.

The cultural preservation is utterly unwanted - that's why things like the Benin bronzes have been forever broken and split up amongst Europeans in pieces, rather than retained as the one cultural work of being a history book for people to actually use in benin.

The same happens with Europeans in British Columbia. Rather than cultural preservation, the Europeans put totem poles on metal brackets to make sure they stay up forever and will never fall down, removing the intended time component of falling down, decaying, and being made anew. The intention of Europeans is to remove the cultural component and traditions, and turn it into an ownable artifact.

How was the Australian government profiting from installing security measures at the prehistoric cave art in TFA? I agree Europeans value history and sometimes see things as too static, but this is because Europeans are a thoughtful and sentimental people not because we are somehow profiting from putting delicate cave artifacts behind a gate.

Out of curiosity, what would you do, put an electric fence and surveillance cameras around it?

It's a hypothetical, but a couple cameras and a sign letting people know the area is under surveillance will probably do.

According to the article:

> The vandals forced their way past barbed wire and dug under a steel gate

so I doubt cameras and a sign sign would've deterred then.

In fairness, that same article suggests cameras would have helped.

> “The failure to build an effective gate, or to make use of modern security services, such as wildlife monitoring cameras that operate 24/7, has in many ways allowed this vandalism to occur,”

The US also has significant protections around the Native American rock art at California’s Lava Beds National Monument.

https://www.nps.gov/labe/learn/historyculture/rockart.htm

I think National parks and monuments get better funding.

They get really mad at you when you tell them their acknowledgment of land / country to the Gadigal / other peoples is just a way to pay lip service and not actually do what’s required.

If they really actually cared, they would have protected these sites.

It absolutely is just lip service. So was Rudd's apology, milestone that it was.

"We acknowledge we're on stolen land"

"Are you gonna give it back?"

"Nah"

Imagine if I pinched my neighbour's TV, plugged it in and said "I acknowledge the traditional owner of this television" before switching it on. Wonder if he'd be cool with it.

I'm a fan of the frank honesty of Uncle Jack Charles:

> His criminal life saw him break into many homes in the "posher districts of Melbourne" - a deliberate choice, he says: "I robbed as rent collection for stolen Aboriginal land!"

> "Those mansions were on my mother's land, but I'm sure if I told the judge I was a rent collector, not a robber, I'd have been given another two years on my sentence."

( Bastardry (2008) is a funny and moving biographical documentry )

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48702542

This is what pisses me off about the acknowledgements cropping up everywhere now. "We acknowledge this land was never ceeded". Ok, so isn't the next rational step to give it back then?

I've never met a white person who spouts "it's still their land" who actually gives back their 700sqm they worked to buy.

People in France now are barely related to the people who were there 10k years ago. Heck, I'm not even sure there are a lot of descendants of the Gauls left.

The thing is it’s the Gauls that are not much related to the people that drew cave art. European hunter gatherers were replaced by eastern farmers in the Neolithic.

My point was that the Gauls, who were much closer to us than 10k years ago, have been replaced too.

The law is such that if an immovable aboriginal artifact is found on your property you're shit out of luck. You become responsible to keep it intact, you have to allow access to various people and likely be limited in your land use, all with no compensation.

This creates an incentive to destroy such artifacts (i.e. scarred trees, petroglyphs etc) and not tell anyone.

It also exists in a wider context of "history wars", where federal institutions take sides on quite controversial subjects, further alienating the stereotypical farmers.

I presume the first thing to do is to record a high res 3d scan and photos of the cave, as vandals aren't the only threat (natural elements).

At least for the cave in the article it's thousands of square meters of art. The art looks like parallel lines made by dragging fingers over the surface.

I guess you could take some pictures, but it's not the kind of art that really needs high res 3d scans. In this case it's more the concept of "there was a human that did something here a very long time ago", rather than how the art itself looks.

The vandalism only covered a small portion of it, but I suspect the vandals didn't even realize they were overwriting anything, since it's really not very obvious as art - it just looks like lines.

> Lascaux where they closed off the cave completely and only allow tourists near the modern reconstruction.

Video by Tom Scott, that talks about the similar Chauvet cave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zJbi9YatcA

Poignant explanation of why such pre-historic art is important:

> It shows that they have a life, they do have culture, they do have art as we do today. They may not have done it for the very same reason, but they do have it. And it shows that they do not just merely survive, they live.

> Compare it to European attitudes

Yeah... Can we swap? Or like find a middle ground?

Here in slovenia, we have socialist buildings from 1970s that someone decided to culturally protect, and the owners cannot renew the leaking facade and add insulation, because the outside has to stay the same, and puting insulation on the inside would reduce the inside space and make walkways and doors too narrow to pass (or carry a fridge through or drive through with a wheelchair).

Buildings like this: https://www.zurnal24.si/media/img/83/c3/35bf6005bfff08c83654...

More photos: https://www.zurnal24.si/slovenija/ne-smemo-narediti-fasade-k...

I guess it depends on what it is. A friend of mine’s family owns some land where Tanum carvings are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Carvings_in_Tanum.

The government probably knows the carvings are there but doesn’t really force his family to take any steps to protect the rocks as far as I’m aware. They are just chilling in the forest covered in moss and dead leaves all the time.

I suspect they would have something to say if his family tried to develop the land though.

We have the same issues with heritage buildings in Australia too, there's no silver bullet.

And a lot of those buildings just happen to accidentally burn down, such as the White Bay Hotel in Sydney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bay_Hotel

The solution to that is simple: Enforce an exact reconstruction to be paid by the owner in case of destruction of the original for protected-status buildings. That's usually more expensive than keeping the old building viable.

It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture, so I can sort of see their point. I'm surprised there isn't another option in that specific case though (Can they not just add doors to the stairwell? Or do they oppose that too?)

Too much brutalist architecture is being covered in tacky "neo-classical" plaster facades.

Brutalism is an interesting architectural movement, but speaking as someone who lives in a city that has human-scale architecture, lots of trees and lots of eclectic housing, I understand Europeans who don’t want their cities dominated by remnants of the misanthropic planning regime that was imposed on them.

If you want to preserve it, buy it yourself and keep it that way. Don't force others to live in depressing brutalist blocks if they don't want to.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the drive to preserve old architecture is just the hoarder mentality applied to literal buildings.

Not every piece of a particular architectural-style is a masterpiece worthy of preservation.

> It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture

Not really. Brutalism was a mistake, and one building is enough to remind us what it was. Maybe a scale model in a museum is enough.

Half of our cities have buildings just like that. There is nothing special about them... just ugly socialist reinforced concrete buildings. I would understand if there were just a few left over, but there are large neighbourhoods just like that.

> It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture

Why?

A lot of people thought that we should not preserve pre-war architecture, and that's why we now have a lot of modernist and brutalist architecture in its place.

I do agree that aesthetics and fitting into the neighborhood should come into the equation somewhere: the Barbican is probably worthy of preservation, some random shitty shoebox municipal library or housing estate probably isn't.

> Why?

Because history is as valuable to humanity as memory to the human.

History, yes. The actual obsolete building housing humans, no.

You don't need to preserve everything to remember history. If we never destroy old buildings, we'd have to abandon all our cities and find new places to build new cities, because we can't just keep living like it's the middle ages (or whatever time period you feel we need to preserve).

So is every building history, then? Are we not allowed to knock down any buildings, since they are all part of history?

what makes a building socialist?

Microdistrict type buildings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict

Microdistricts were good… new stuff is usually an unplanned cash grab.

Buildings in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact contries during the Cold War were often constructed with an ideological bent in mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_...

built by the government during socialist times, and built in the same was as pretty much all the other socialist buildings were built (reinforced concrete or from premade concrete blocks). A bunch of our cities were built during the socialist era, and pretty much all the buildings look the same, and some things (especially parking garages) are actually the same all over the country.

We need more of your mate. Too many people willing to clear willy-nilly to make a buck around.

Its kind of a false equality. European remains are interesting because they are from a point that the people grew past, a flash in our culture. Aboriginal artifacts are equivalent to aborigines when they were encountered (even as they are now to an extent). I can go look at an Aboriginal, they are nothing special, there is no mystery to their leavings.

Is it possible that the teenagers did not know that the "scratchings" (for lack of a better term) were actually ancient and wise and sacred and enlightened aboriginal art?

> The vandals forced their way past barbed wire and dug under a steel gate to get into the Koonalda Caves

I’m going to say they had some strong clues.

That's not my point. Yes they were aware of the cave. But they wrote something over wavy lines in limestone that could actually pass for a natural feature.

In any case yes it's probably stupid for them to write something there without consulting with their elders.

If you mean the case in the article? Almost no chance. The drawings were deep in the tunnel system which itself is essentially in the middle of nowhere.

Why would that matter?

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