Friends of Australian Rock Art has called for the Western Australian government and industry to be held accountable after a delayed monitoring report found that damage to Murujuga’s ancient rock art had spread to more petroglyphs across a wider area.
Murujuga, also known as the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, was designated a World Heritage site by Unesco this year. It contains what archaeological experts describe as the world’s largest and oldest collection of Aboriginal rock art, with up to two million carvings.
The organisation’s co-convenors, Judith Hugo and Susan Swain, said the latest Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program report also found that scientists could not rule out further or continuing damage caused by industrial pollution.
The 2025 report was released last month, about a year later than expected. Friends of Australian Rock Art said successive reports had been issued increasingly late and with greater secrecy.
Concerns over industrial pollution at Murujuga
The group said an earlier monitoring report had identified damage to rock art close to industry, while the latest findings indicated that the impact was more extensive than previously understood.
It also questioned the Western Australian government’s previous attribution of damage to emissions from a small power station that was decommissioned more than two decades ago and was more than 10 kilometres from the sites showing the greatest impact.
By contrast, Woodside’s North West Shelf gas plant is located within the area identified by the monitoring report as experiencing the greatest damage, the campaigners said.
Professor Benjamin Smith, of the University of Western Australia, has previously said current industrial emissions were “five times higher” than historic levels. Professor Adrian Baddeley, the monitoring programme’s lead statistician, resigned after publicly criticising what he called “unacceptable government interference” in the presentation of scientific findings in the previous year’s research.
Friends of Australian Rock Art also raised concerns about the programme’s independence, saying it is funded by industry responsible for pollution at Murujuga.
The organisation said the Western Australian government had withheld the monitoring results until after key decisions approving an extension to Woodside’s North West Shelf project, described as the largest source of industrial emissions at Murujuga.
Legal challenges over the North West Shelf project
The campaigners said more than 20 tonnes of industrial acid-forming pollution are released over Murujuga each day by Woodside’s liquefied natural gas processing facilities.
Friends of Australian Rock Art is challenging approvals for the facility in the state and federal courts. It is contesting federal approvals allowing the LNG export operation to continue until 2070, as well as a separate Western Australian government approval in the state’s Supreme Court.
The group said the federal assessment was made possible by Murujuga’s National Heritage listing in 2007, which it helped secure alongside traditional custodians.
Hugo and Swain said Murujuga’s status as a World Heritage-listed cultural landscape of Outstanding Universal Value meant it should not be exposed to some of the most damaging and polluting industries.
