August 26, 2025 • 19 mins
After years of work led by traditional custodians, Murujuga on the north-west coast of Australia became a World Heritage listed site last month, with its ancient rock art recognised as a ‘masterpiece of human creative genius’.
You might remember our visit there, in the heat of December 2021, when I spoke with Clinton Walker, Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi man, Traditional Custodian of Murujuga, and CEO and Founder of the award-winning Ngurrangga Tours. I was actually only able to release the conversation in full for the first time in January this year. And while more than one million petroglyphs, some dating back about 40,000 years, should have meant the judgement was as near a shoe-in as possible, industry expansion plans were creating tension.
In the end, the Australian government managed to negotiate to have its cake and eat it too, achieving both World Heritage and industry expansion for the area. It’s a moment of undeniable and deserved celebration, and yet the tensions remain about the limits of protection World Heritage might afford.
Welcome to the 7th instalment of Vignettes from the Source, the short form series featuring some of the unforgettable, transformative and often inexplicable moments my guests have shared over the years.
We pick up this 15 minute slice of the conversation with Clinton about seven minutes into the full episode. It forms a powerful snap shot of the place, why it is now World Heritage listed, what it means to the people there, and the uncertainly that remains.
If you’d like to hear or revisit this conversation in full, including Clinton’s brilliant story, head to episode 245 – ‘Cultural Economies at the Greatest Rock Art Gallery in the World’ (links in the show notes, and photos on the website of the original partial release for episode 109).
Recorded at Murujuga, 13 December 2021.
Title image: Clinton at Hearson’s Cove (pic: Anthony James).
Music:
Stones & Bones, by Owls of the Swamp.
The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests.
Pre-roll music: Heartland Rebel, by Steven Beddall (sourced from Artlist).
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Clinton (00:00):
So some people may already know what songlines are,
but basically I'll go into thata little because that'll help
explain this area.
But a songline is a series ofsongs that tell a story, and a
lot of people heard aboutDreamtime Stories, but what they
don't realise is those storieshave songs as well, and the
(00:20):
songs basically they sing aboutthe story, but they connect the
story to landmarks.
And Murra Duga, from a songline perspective, is a beginning
point.
It's where a lot of song linesbegin, that start here, that end
up on the other side ofAustralia, and so, as a place of
(00:44):
significance, it's one of themost important sites in
Australia from a culturalperspective, dreamtime
perspective, but not only that,because we have all those
songlines that begin here.
Those stories need to be toldin other formats, and so the
format that was chosen waspetroglyphs or rock carvings.
(01:05):
A lot of people say rock art andthere's so many out here.
It's crazy how much is out hereOver a million, I mean.
I've seen a lot and stillhaven't scratched the surface.
I've lived here my whole life.
I'll be 40 next year, so inthat almost 40 years I've lived
(01:25):
here, 30 odd of those years arespent in this area, learning
about it all you know.
Yeah, just when I take peopleout and show them, it's like
it's unbelievable for for a lotof people.
And then you tell them the ageof some things, so like we've
got rock art that's.
You know they're made 100 yearsago or so.
(01:46):
That's the youngest peoplethink 100 years is old, but in
the scheme of things it's reallyyoung, especially when it comes
to this rock art yeah.
AJ (01:55):
No, in a way, it's the fact that it's still being going.
It's the interesting thingabout that.
Yeah, it didn't stop wheneuropeans got here.
Clinton (02:02):
Yeah that's right.
And with the age of them, likewe've've got, yeah, rock artists
are about 100 years old andthen you go up from there, then
you start hitting 1,000 or 500to 1,000.
Then you start hitting a coupleof thousand and the next minute
you're like in your tens ofthousands.
So you've got rock art thatwould have been made around
(02:22):
seven to ten thousand years agoand that's when we had one of
the biggest climate events inhistory of the world and that
was the rising of the sea levels, which inspired many stories
across the world to do withgreat floods.
Some people are aware of Noah'sArk.
Well, no more people and manyother Aboriginal people also
(02:45):
have a flood story thatcoincides with that same time
and scientists now have beendoing lots of studies and they
reckon it happened between thatperiod that I said.
But the rock art when you seethe rock art that's to do with
that flood event, you'll getcarvings of, say, a kangaroo or
an emu or something.
That's a land-based animal thatpeople were hunting on the land
(03:06):
and then all of a sudden thiswater started coming in and
flooding the country wherepeople once lived and their diet
had to change because thelandscape changed, so they
weren't just eating kangaroo andemu anymore, they started
eating turtles, dugong, mud crab, you know all the different
fish species, barramundi, etcetera.
And so they carved theseanimals over the top of those
(03:30):
kangaroos or those emus orwhatever, to note the changes in
the landscape, in theenvironment.
And so when I tell people thiswas like 10,000 years ago, you
know, and that is mind-blowingenough for them, because when
you look at a rock art and youtell them, yeah, all this water,
like where we're sitting now,you know it used to be 150km
(03:50):
away this coastline they're likewhat it's like.
Yeah, my ancestors lived outthere once upon a time.
AJ (03:55):
And that Australia, well as we know it today, was like a
third bigger or something.
Clinton (03:59):
Yeah, yeah, it was huge .
I mean already huge.
AJ (04:02):
Exactly.
Clinton (04:03):
But yeah, it was literally about a third larger,
and people find it so difficultto comprehend, especially that
are from overseas, let aloneAustralia, because they're like
they can't trace their ancestryback even a couple of hundred
years.
Yet I can tell you what myancestors were doing 10,000
years ago.
Yeah, they were getting readyfor some great big changes.
(04:27):
And then we can tell you evenfurther back from there.
We can go back 20, 30, 40, 50,60,000 years.
I can tell you my history andthat's the connection we have to
this place as traditionalowners?
AJ (04:42):
No, it does.
For a Westerner, it boggles themind a bit that those stories
are mapped out in country likethat and last through those
changes and that's a huge storyin itself, isn't it?
That the cultures have shiftedwith those massive.
When we talk about sea levelchanges today and climate
changes today, I mean a hundredmeters plus sea level change.
(05:03):
This has been navigated byhuman cultures before and the
stories are here for us to read,if you like.
Clinton (05:09):
yeah, and people are like I hear, like you know, I
hear all this stuff today about,um, climate change and a lot of
people.
People are either for oragainst it, or some people think
it's just a conspiracy theoryor whatever.
But the fact of the matter is,climate change is real.
It's happened many timesthroughout history.
(05:30):
We've all adapted to it ashuman beings.
The difference is my peoplehaven't forgotten about it.
We've kept that alive theentire time we've been here.
I get asked a lot of differentquestions, but one of the
questions I do get asked is thatdid your people war with each
other?
And I tell them no, not like inother countries.
(05:50):
You know we had skirmishes.
People fought.
It's human nature.
But in order for us to haverock art that goes backwards in
time and the stability thatwe've had, to stay here and
carry those song lines and shareit with other peoples right
across the nation, that means wedidn't fight with one another.
(06:11):
Very often I think life was toocruisy, to be honest.
AJ (06:16):
Well, this is some of what we're learning, and about
Indigenous cultures globally toothat the idea of a day where
you work all day wasn't part ofthe thing.
I mean this is how the artended up here.
It wasn't working all day.
Clinton (06:30):
No Rock art was done like basically people's work.
You know their daily activity,especially at this time of year
in the summer where it's like 45degrees or 46 or whatever you
know, mid to late 40s, nobody'sdoing anything during the day.
You go and lay under a treelike a kangaroo and just stay
(06:51):
there all day until it coolsdown.
You know those Spanish neverinvented the siesta.
Our original people did.
AJ (06:59):
So, speaking of navigating big changes, europeans arrive.
We've got these places likeBarrett Peninsula the English
name, as you mentioned beforefor these places and it was
actually an island.
It's only been what?
60 years or something, thatEuropeans decided to fill it in,
and pave it.
Clinton (07:19):
Yeah, so it's been an island for thousands of years.
Before that it was a range.
But yeah, it has been an islandand it wasn't until Rio today.
But dampier salt back in theday decided they wanted to build
a salt pond so they couldextract salt from the ocean and
(07:39):
sell it as like a package withthe iron ore.
And yeah, they changed thelandscape.
They turned what was an islandinto a peninsula and it's named
after this bar.
I'm pretty sure his name wasjames, but don't quote me on
that.
You'll have to.
You'll have to go and have alook we could probably google it
right now, um, this guy, he wasa, a teller or a banker or
(08:05):
something in Robe, and he washim and a few others.
They were murdered and no moneyor anything was taken.
It was really like suspicious,like there was no reason they
should be dead really.
But anyways, so he was one ofthese guys that were killed, so
they named this place after him,but, like I said, it's known as
Murujuga to my people, to allour people right across the
(08:27):
Pilbara all the way to Uluru.
A lot of people know about thisplace and Murriyuga means hip
bone sticking out, and it'sbecause we've got this nickel
bay area and the peninsula partof it and some of the islands
they poke out in that sort ofnortheast direction, pretty much
(08:48):
northeast, and the way thatthey're shaped it looks like, if
you were looking at it fromabove, it looks like a hip bone,
specifically a woman's hip bone.
AJ (08:58):
Such a feature, isn't it of the well, a lot of the artwork
too that we know today thatthere was aerial view at play
without drones?
Yeah, drones and airplanes andeverything else that's?
Clinton (09:09):
right and that hip bone sticking out name, looking at
it from like, as a woman's bodypart, like if you look at a
woman's hips, they're forchildbirth.
You know that's the way they'reshaped, which means women are
creators, they create life.
So this as a place is acreation place and that means
(09:32):
from a Dreamtime perspective.
We believe that everythingstarted here and that's why the
songlines start here and thesonglines they're mapped out
right and humans today keep thatmapping alive by practising our
Lauren culture going out,singing the songs, putting boys
through initiation and in otherplaces women go through that and
(09:55):
that initiation process teachesthose young people the songs
and as they get older and theylearn the songs more and more,
they start to understand whatthe songs are about and that
you're not just singing aboutyour own country, you're singing
about other places, that it'ssomeone else's land, where other
people are from.
You know, and that's theconnection we have with one
another.
(10:16):
But as a place itself, murujuga,it's the birthplace of our
creation beings, it's where theycame from, it's where we
believe they created the earthand then they created the rock
art, the original rock art,which was a tool to teach us how
to preserve and record ourhistory.
(10:38):
And then they passed everythingon to us and then they left,
they went up into the heavensand told us, gave us a few rules
to live by.
You know, be kind, all thistype of stuff.
You know, like your TenCommandments kind of thing, look
after one another.
But the main things was lookafter the land, look after each
(10:58):
other and look after all thethings within the land.
You do all that stuff.
You can come and join us up inheaven, basically.
AJ (11:06):
And you ended up going through these processes yourself
as a young fellow?
Clinton (11:10):
Yeah, I've been initiated and you know we call
it law law time, and there wasthis throughout my life I've
gone out and I've, you know,followed my law really, really,
really strongly.
But then some years, like whenI was working on mining and
stuff, and what would happen iseveryone else gets their time
(11:32):
off at the end of the year.
You know they go leave and theygo on a holiday or something.
It wasn't the case for me.
I'd go on leave, I'd spend sometime with my family, but I'd
mostly go out and I'd follow mylaw and learn about my history
(11:52):
and my culture.
And I used to do that for likea lot and then I was like, oh,
you know what, I need a littlebreak for myself and my family
and take them on a holiday.
So I started doing a fewholidaying things, a couple of
years here and there.
You know, just skip a couple ofyears from the law.
But I'd always go back, alwaysgo back, and this thing of
following the law is what theelders call it.
(12:13):
What we're taught is followingthe law is so important to us as
a society because it teaches usour connection to our land,
where we're from, our history.
It gives us our identity as apeople, but also it helps us to
connect to our neighbouringgroups and how we're all
(12:35):
connected to them through thesesonglines.
So we might be singing about aplace in a songline that we're
taught that we have to teachyoung people, but that song
might be about Uluru or Burunga,you know, mount Augustus, or
something like that.
It's not our country, it's notwhere we're from, and singing
(12:56):
about those places.
Understanding the story ofthose particular sites where
these songs take you is soimportant.
And then, because you knowabout that place and you know
that song and we're saying knowthe song, know the country, it
makes you want to go and seethat place.
But you know that if you wantto go there you can't just go
(13:19):
there just nilly-willy.
You've got to go and seekpermission from the traditional
owners of that area.
And because you also know that,where you're from, you know
your country, you know that songline, you know that story, you
know that hill, you know what'sgood, what's dangerous, et
cetera, et cetera.
So when you go in someoneelse's land, you know that story
, you know that hill, you knowwhat's good, what's dangerous,
etc.
Etc.
So when you go into someoneelse's land, you know those same
things that you know that applyto where you're from must also
(13:42):
apply there.
So you know that you can't justgo here and there and wherever.
So you understand that in orderto access that place belonging
to those people, you have to askfor permission, for status, and
then they'll take you out andthey'll show you all the same
things you would do with anybodyelse in your country.
And that was the thing thatAboriginal people right across
(14:03):
Australia practice is first ofall looking after country,
learning the songlines, thestories, taking care of each
other in different ways and alsomaking sure people following
the rules.
But part of life was alsoleaving home and following
someone's and learning thosesong lines.
(14:25):
You already know the song, butyou don't know the country.
You got to go see the place inorder to understand the story
more, understand the song more.
You know can't just stay in oneplace and by doing that you
become more knowledgeable, moreexperienced, and then you get to
know your neighbours better.
So you have a betterrelationship with other people
(14:46):
and once you do that, you don'twant to fight them.
You respect each other, youknow.
AJ (14:51):
Yeah, it's huge how that's just embedded in the whole thing
.
Clinton (14:54):
Yeah and that's, and so what I was talking about that
we never warred with one anotherand all that type of stuff, and
why we have such a strongconnection to our rock, art, et
cetera is because we've got agood relationship with other
people and that we share allthis knowledge with each other
and that people don't want tojeopardise, that, they don't
(15:14):
want to have a bad relationshipwith someone because it could
mean that they can no longeraccess that place and learn
about those stories.
That's how important country isto Aboriginal people and
songlines.
AJ (15:28):
And right now there's a World Heritage application for
this place.
Do you know where it's at?
Clinton (15:34):
It's gone to the national level.
So how it works is people haveto apply for it, the area has to
apply for World HeritageListing, gets on the tentative
list, so it goes to state level.
State government basicallyapproves.
Then they have to carry itforward to the national level.
(15:55):
So federal government, thenthey have to carry it forward to
the national level.
So federal government then hasto then put that forward to
UNESCO.
So that's where it's at at themoment, and then UNESCO then
decide whether the place,according to a list long list of
things, items whether the placeis worthy of being in the World
(16:17):
Heritage listing, and so someof the things that are part of
the list.
The tick of approvals is theimpact of modern things on this
ancient stuff.
So right now we've got allthese gas plants built out here
and mining facilities and thestate government wants to build
(16:37):
more.
They want another fertiliserplant out here and all this sort
of stuff, and that couldjeopardise us gaining world
heritage listing, which issomething that should have
happened 20 to 30 years ago.
AJ (16:50):
It's as much of a gimme as any application that's ever been
, isn't it?
Unless something gets in theway of things like that.
Clinton (16:58):
Yep, and so that's one of the things that we're worried
about is that more industrybeing built is going to
jeopardise our application and,honestly, if we gain World
Heritage Listing, I'll be sohappy that people will finally
know about this place and howimportant it is In terms of the
(17:20):
significance of Murriyuga.
There's a lot of sacred sitesin Australia, a lot of very,
very sacred sites.
The most well-known is Uluru,but Uluru's stories, part of
their songlines, come from here.
So some people may already know what songlines are,
but basically I'll go into thata little because that'll help
explain this area.
But a songline is a series ofsongs that tell a story, and a
lot of people heard aboutDreamtime Stories, but what they
don't realise is those storieshave songs as well, and the
(00:20):
songs basically they sing aboutthe story, but they connect the
story to landmarks.
And Murra Duga, from a songline perspective, is a beginning
point.
It's where a lot of song linesbegin, that start here, that end
up on the other side ofAustralia, and so, as a place of
(00:44):
significance, it's one of themost important sites in
Australia from a culturalperspective, dreamtime
perspective, but not only that,because we have all those
songlines that begin here.
Those stories need to be toldin other formats, and so the
format that was chosen waspetroglyphs or rock carvings.
(01:05):
A lot of people say rock art andthere's so many out here.
It's crazy how much is out hereOver a million, I mean.
I've seen a lot and stillhaven't scratched the surface.
I've lived here my whole life.
I'll be 40 next year, so inthat almost 40 years I've lived
(01:25):
here, 30 odd of those years arespent in this area, learning
about it all you know.
Yeah, just when I take peopleout and show them, it's like
it's unbelievable for for a lotof people.
And then you tell them the ageof some things, so like we've
got rock art that's.
You know they're made 100 yearsago or so.
(01:46):
That's the youngest peoplethink 100 years is old, but in
the scheme of things it's reallyyoung, especially when it comes
to this rock art yeah.
AJ (01:55):
No, in a way, it's the fact that it's still being going.
It's the interesting thingabout that.
Yeah, it didn't stop wheneuropeans got here.
Clinton (02:02):
Yeah that's right.
And with the age of them, likewe've've got, yeah, rock artists
are about 100 years old andthen you go up from there, then
you start hitting 1,000 or 500to 1,000.
Then you start hitting a coupleof thousand and the next minute
you're like in your tens ofthousands.
So you've got rock art thatwould have been made around
(02:22):
seven to ten thousand years agoand that's when we had one of
the biggest climate events inhistory of the world and that
was the rising of the sea levels, which inspired many stories
across the world to do withgreat floods.
Some people are aware of Noah'sArk.
Well, no more people and manyother Aboriginal people also
(02:45):
have a flood story thatcoincides with that same time
and scientists now have beendoing lots of studies and they
reckon it happened between thatperiod that I said.
But the rock art when you seethe rock art that's to do with
that flood event, you'll getcarvings of, say, a kangaroo or
an emu or something.
That's a land-based animal thatpeople were hunting on the land
(03:06):
and then all of a sudden thiswater started coming in and
flooding the country wherepeople once lived and their diet
had to change because thelandscape changed, so they
weren't just eating kangaroo andemu anymore, they started
eating turtles, dugong, mud crab, you know all the different
fish species, barramundi, etcetera.
And so they carved theseanimals over the top of those
(03:30):
kangaroos or those emus orwhatever, to note the changes in
the landscape, in theenvironment.
And so when I tell people thiswas like 10,000 years ago, you
know, and that is mind-blowingenough for them, because when
you look at a rock art and youtell them, yeah, all this water,
like where we're sitting now,you know it used to be 150km
(03:50):
away this coastline they're likewhat it's like.
Yeah, my ancestors lived outthere once upon a time.
AJ (03:55):
And that Australia, well as we know it today, was like a
third bigger or something.
Clinton (03:59):
Yeah, yeah, it was huge .
I mean already huge.
AJ (04:02):
Exactly.
Clinton (04:03):
But yeah, it was literally about a third larger,
and people find it so difficultto comprehend, especially that
are from overseas, let aloneAustralia, because they're like
they can't trace their ancestryback even a couple of hundred
years.
Yet I can tell you what myancestors were doing 10,000
years ago.
Yeah, they were getting readyfor some great big changes.
(04:27):
And then we can tell you evenfurther back from there.
We can go back 20, 30, 40, 50,60,000 years.
I can tell you my history andthat's the connection we have to
this place as traditionalowners?
AJ (04:42):
No, it does.
For a Westerner, it boggles themind a bit that those stories
are mapped out in country likethat and last through those
changes and that's a huge storyin itself, isn't it?
That the cultures have shiftedwith those massive.
When we talk about sea levelchanges today and climate
changes today, I mean a hundredmeters plus sea level change.
(05:03):
This has been navigated byhuman cultures before and the
stories are here for us to read,if you like.
Clinton (05:09):
yeah, and people are like I hear, like you know, I
hear all this stuff today about,um, climate change and a lot of
people.
People are either for oragainst it, or some people think
it's just a conspiracy theoryor whatever.
But the fact of the matter is,climate change is real.
It's happened many timesthroughout history.
(05:30):
We've all adapted to it ashuman beings.
The difference is my peoplehaven't forgotten about it.
We've kept that alive theentire time we've been here.
I get asked a lot of differentquestions, but one of the
questions I do get asked is thatdid your people war with each
other?
And I tell them no, not like inother countries.
(05:50):
You know we had skirmishes.
People fought.
It's human nature.
But in order for us to haverock art that goes backwards in
time and the stability thatwe've had, to stay here and
carry those song lines and shareit with other peoples right
across the nation, that means wedidn't fight with one another.
(06:11):
Very often I think life was toocruisy, to be honest.
AJ (06:16):
Well, this is some of what we're learning, and about
Indigenous cultures globally toothat the idea of a day where
you work all day wasn't part ofthe thing.
I mean this is how the artended up here.
It wasn't working all day.
Clinton (06:30):
No Rock art was done like basically people's work.
You know their daily activity,especially at this time of year
in the summer where it's like 45degrees or 46 or whatever you
know, mid to late 40s, nobody'sdoing anything during the day.
You go and lay under a treelike a kangaroo and just stay
(06:51):
there all day until it coolsdown.
You know those Spanish neverinvented the siesta.
Our original people did.
AJ (06:59):
So, speaking of navigating big changes, europeans arrive.
We've got these places likeBarrett Peninsula the English
name, as you mentioned beforefor these places and it was
actually an island.
It's only been what?
60 years or something, thatEuropeans decided to fill it in,
and pave it.
Clinton (07:19):
Yeah, so it's been an island for thousands of years.
Before that it was a range.
But yeah, it has been an islandand it wasn't until Rio today.
But dampier salt back in theday decided they wanted to build
a salt pond so they couldextract salt from the ocean and
(07:39):
sell it as like a package withthe iron ore.
And yeah, they changed thelandscape.
They turned what was an islandinto a peninsula and it's named
after this bar.
I'm pretty sure his name wasjames, but don't quote me on
that.
You'll have to.
You'll have to go and have alook we could probably google it
right now, um, this guy, he wasa, a teller or a banker or
(08:05):
something in Robe, and he washim and a few others.
They were murdered and no moneyor anything was taken.
It was really like suspicious,like there was no reason they
should be dead really.
But anyways, so he was one ofthese guys that were killed, so
they named this place after him,but, like I said, it's known as
Murujuga to my people, to allour people right across the
(08:27):
Pilbara all the way to Uluru.
A lot of people know about thisplace and Murriyuga means hip
bone sticking out, and it'sbecause we've got this nickel
bay area and the peninsula partof it and some of the islands
they poke out in that sort ofnortheast direction, pretty much
(08:48):
northeast, and the way thatthey're shaped it looks like, if
you were looking at it fromabove, it looks like a hip bone,
specifically a woman's hip bone.
AJ (08:58):
Such a feature, isn't it of the well, a lot of the artwork
too that we know today thatthere was aerial view at play
without drones?
Yeah, drones and airplanes andeverything else that's?
Clinton (09:09):
right and that hip bone sticking out name, looking at
it from like, as a woman's bodypart, like if you look at a
woman's hips, they're forchildbirth.
You know that's the way they'reshaped, which means women are
creators, they create life.
So this as a place is acreation place and that means
(09:32):
from a Dreamtime perspective.
We believe that everythingstarted here and that's why the
songlines start here and thesonglines they're mapped out
right and humans today keep thatmapping alive by practising our
Lauren culture going out,singing the songs, putting boys
through initiation and in otherplaces women go through that and
(09:55):
that initiation process teachesthose young people the songs
and as they get older and theylearn the songs more and more,
they start to understand whatthe songs are about and that
you're not just singing aboutyour own country, you're singing
about other places, that it'ssomeone else's land, where other
people are from.
You know, and that's theconnection we have with one
another.
(10:16):
But as a place itself, murujuga,it's the birthplace of our
creation beings, it's where theycame from, it's where we
believe they created the earthand then they created the rock
art, the original rock art,which was a tool to teach us how
to preserve and record ourhistory.
(10:38):
And then they passed everythingon to us and then they left,
they went up into the heavensand told us, gave us a few rules
to live by.
You know, be kind, all thistype of stuff.
You know, like your TenCommandments kind of thing, look
after one another.
But the main things was lookafter the land, look after each
(10:58):
other and look after all thethings within the land.
You do all that stuff.
You can come and join us up inheaven, basically.
AJ (11:06):
And you ended up going through these processes yourself
as a young fellow?
Clinton (11:10):
Yeah, I've been initiated and you know we call
it law law time, and there wasthis throughout my life I've
gone out and I've, you know,followed my law really, really,
really strongly.
But then some years, like whenI was working on mining and
stuff, and what would happen iseveryone else gets their time
(11:32):
off at the end of the year.
You know they go leave and theygo on a holiday or something.
It wasn't the case for me.
I'd go on leave, I'd spend sometime with my family, but I'd
mostly go out and I'd follow mylaw and learn about my history
(11:52):
and my culture.
And I used to do that for likea lot and then I was like, oh,
you know what, I need a littlebreak for myself and my family
and take them on a holiday.
So I started doing a fewholidaying things, a couple of
years here and there.
You know, just skip a couple ofyears from the law.
But I'd always go back, alwaysgo back, and this thing of
following the law is what theelders call it.
(12:13):
What we're taught is followingthe law is so important to us as
a society because it teaches usour connection to our land,
where we're from, our history.
It gives us our identity as apeople, but also it helps us to
connect to our neighbouringgroups and how we're all
(12:35):
connected to them through thesesonglines.
So we might be singing about aplace in a songline that we're
taught that we have to teachyoung people, but that song
might be about Uluru or Burunga,you know, mount Augustus, or
something like that.
It's not our country, it's notwhere we're from, and singing
(12:56):
about those places.
Understanding the story ofthose particular sites where
these songs take you is soimportant.
And then, because you knowabout that place and you know
that song and we're saying knowthe song, know the country, it
makes you want to go and seethat place.
But you know that if you wantto go there you can't just go
(13:19):
there just nilly-willy.
You've got to go and seekpermission from the traditional
owners of that area.
And because you also know that,where you're from, you know
your country, you know that songline, you know that story, you
know that hill, you know what'sgood, what's dangerous, et
cetera, et cetera.
So when you go in someoneelse's land, you know that story
, you know that hill, you knowwhat's good, what's dangerous,
etc.
Etc.
So when you go into someoneelse's land, you know those same
things that you know that applyto where you're from must also
(13:42):
apply there.
So you know that you can't justgo here and there and wherever.
So you understand that in orderto access that place belonging
to those people, you have to askfor permission, for status, and
then they'll take you out andthey'll show you all the same
things you would do with anybodyelse in your country.
And that was the thing thatAboriginal people right across
(14:03):
Australia practice is first ofall looking after country,
learning the songlines, thestories, taking care of each
other in different ways and alsomaking sure people following
the rules.
But part of life was alsoleaving home and following
someone's and learning thosesong lines.
(14:25):
You already know the song, butyou don't know the country.
You got to go see the place inorder to understand the story
more, understand the song more.
You know can't just stay in oneplace and by doing that you
become more knowledgeable, moreexperienced, and then you get to
know your neighbours better.
So you have a betterrelationship with other people
(14:46):
and once you do that, you don'twant to fight them.
You respect each other, youknow.
AJ (14:51):
Yeah, it's huge how that's just embedded in the whole thing
.
Clinton (14:54):
Yeah and that's, and so what I was talking about that
we never warred with one anotherand all that type of stuff, and
why we have such a strongconnection to our rock, art, et
cetera is because we've got agood relationship with other
people and that we share allthis knowledge with each other
and that people don't want tojeopardise, that, they don't
(15:14):
want to have a bad relationshipwith someone because it could
mean that they can no longeraccess that place and learn
about those stories.
That's how important country isto Aboriginal people and
songlines.
AJ (15:28):
And right now there's a World Heritage application for
this place.
Do you know where it's at?
Clinton (15:34):
It's gone to the national level.
So how it works is people haveto apply for it, the area has to
apply for World HeritageListing, gets on the tentative
list, so it goes to state level.
State government basicallyapproves.
Then they have to carry itforward to the national level.
(15:55):
So federal government, thenthey have to carry it forward to
the national level.
So federal government then hasto then put that forward to
UNESCO.
So that's where it's at at themoment, and then UNESCO then
decide whether the place,according to a list long list of
things, items whether the placeis worthy of being in the World
(16:17):
Heritage listing, and so someof the things that are part of
the list.
The tick of approvals is theimpact of modern things on this
ancient stuff.
So right now we've got allthese gas plants built out here
and mining facilities and thestate government wants to build
(16:37):
more.
They want another fertiliserplant out here and all this sort
of stuff, and that couldjeopardise us gaining world
heritage listing, which issomething that should have
happened 20 to 30 years ago.
AJ (16:50):
It's as much of a gimme as any application that's ever been
, isn't it?
Unless something gets in theway of things like that.
Clinton (16:58):
Yep, and so that's one of the things that we're worried
about is that more industrybeing built is going to
jeopardise our application and,honestly, if we gain World
Heritage Listing, I'll be sohappy that people will finally
know about this place and howimportant it is In terms of the
(17:20):
significance of Murriyuga.
There's a lot of sacred sitesin Australia, a lot of very,
very sacred sites.
The most well-known is Uluru,but Uluru's stories, part of
their songlines, come from here.
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