A controversy about rocks hits Mumbrella
It’s been an interesting time at Mumbrella over the past week as we grapple with a question a little out of our media and marketing comfort zone, involving Aboriginal custodians, vast reserves of natural gas (presumably increasing daily in value at the moment), ancient rock carvings, climate change and cultural power politics.
On Friday the Guardian and Crikey joined the fray, reporting a legal threat and a dropout from our upcoming CommsCon conference. Editorial director Hal Crawford explains what’s going on.
Photograph of a petroglpyh (rock engraving) from the Murujuga National Park brochure (DBCA)
In October last year, Mumbrella called for submissions from the communications and PR industry for sessions at CommsCon, our annual comms conference.
Among the submissions was one that looked intriguing: a presentation from Orizontas and the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC) on a campaign to counter opposition to a Unesco World Heritage listing for the Murujuga rock art.
Murujuga, in north-west WA, includes the Burrup Peninsula. It’s right next to the resources hub of Karratha, and it’s home to an ancient collection of rock art. The earliest engravings are believed to be tens of thousands of years old. This antiquity is almost beyond imagining: some of the images, made by the ancestors of the local Indigenous people, record animals long since extinct.
The Burrup is also home to industry: including salt farms, a fertiliser plant, and a gas plant. The latter is part of the enormous North West Shelf gas project operated by Woodside.
Here then, we have two powerful currents of the modern world meeting in one place. Indigenous heritage, recognition, and power on one hand; and the extraction and use of fossil fuel on the other.
The session from Orizontas and MAC that we accepted for CommsCon promised to tell the story of how the local Indigenous authority navigated these turbulent waters and to win a Unesco World Heritage listing.
Last week, Mumbrella received an email from Save Our Songlines, an organisation on the other side of the Orizontas/MAC campaign that is also a strong Indigenous voice (and is led by a former chair of the MAC). They had serious concerns that their views on the issues were being represented as “misinformation”.
The letter said that Save Our Songlines didn’t oppose Heritage Listing per se, but only this particular listing: because they had wanted to increase the protection for the rock art.
At the heart of the dispute is the interpretation of a scientific report into the impact and monitoring of the effects of industrial pollution on the rocks.
So I downloaded the report and read the readable bits. The PDF of Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program 2024 is 807 pages long, and packed with tables, graphs, scatterplots and photographs of rocks. Just rocks.
It’s dense stuff, and I wasn’t confident in my interpretation, so I called the lead scientist on the project, Ben Mullins from Curtin University, and we spoke for an hour. The ideas I had formed by reading weren’t a mile off, and Professor Mullins gave me valuable context and what seemed to be a more detached perspective.
I came away comfortable that we could go ahead with the session. That’s all I needed. It’s not Mumbrella’s position to vouch for or verify the perspectives of everyone who gets up on one of our stages. That’s not only impossible: I think it’s wrong.
We changed the wording of the session — removing the term “misinformation” — and offered Save Our Songlines the right of reply on Mumbrella, if they could make that reply relevant to an industry audience. In other words: what was their communications point of view?
As a result of our position, a panelist from another session, Cheek Media’s Hannah Ferguson, pulled out. She told me she was a personal friend of the head of Save Our Songlines. I told her I understood completely.
On Friday, Amanda Meade in the Guardian published a piece in her media wrapup noting Save Our Songlines’ objections (and a “legal threat”, which was somewhat more than I read into the concerns letter). Then Daanyal Saeed in Crikey found the Hannah Ferguson angle.
Something you’ll note from both pieces: it’s not a particularly easy situation to sum up succinctly.
So we’re going ahead with the session. Our commitment is to the craft and community of the industry we observe and are part of. The toughest communications challenges are not going to come in neat situations.
I don’t know exactly what Orizontas and the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation are going to tell us on stage next Wednesday — it’s a panel discussion — but I know it’s going to be important for you to hear.
UPDATE:
We had to cancel the session at CommsCons at the last minute after the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC) and Orizontas told us they were no longer able to present.
It was a great disappointment to me — as the resistance to the session ground on, I became more and more interested in the case study.
An independent panel of industry experts awarded Orizontas and MAC the prize for Best Use of Strategic Communications at the CommsCon Awards a few hours later. Orizontas co-founder Vanessa Liell won PR Leader of the Year.
This headline is ridiculous, demeaning and completely diminishes the issue. This is not about ‘rocks’. It is an issue of cultural heritage and the big corporations who continue to disrespect and work to erase 50,000 years of history. It is about the power lobbyists have over the Australian Government. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Orizontas was founded by a former Minerals Council lobbyist… What an utterly disrespectful headline. Shame on you.
This isn’t just a poor headline. It’s a credibility problem.
Calling this “rocks” isn’t a throwaway line — it sets the frame for everything that follows, and in doing so trivialises an issue of Indigenous cultural heritage before the reader has even begun. That’s not a slip. That’s editorial judgement.
And it’s hard to square that with a publication that positions itself at the centre of the communications industry.
If you can’t recognise how language shapes meaning — especially on an issue like this — then what exactly are we learning from you about communications?
This is precisely the kind of framing failure we spend our careers advising clients to avoid.
At a minimum, this deserves acknowledgment. In reality, it warrants an apology.
Because when the industry’s own publication gets something this fundamental wrong, it doesn’t just weaken the article — it undermines trust in the platform itself.
Let’s leave aside the gratuitous CommsCon ticket sell at the end of this piece… why should Save Our Songlines only have right of reply if they can make it relevant to the communications industry? It’s not their job to help Mumbrella build their conference.
Surely they are entitled to the standard right of reply, regardless (especially when as a grassroots First Nations organisation they might not have the same communications infrastructure that Orizontas and co has…)
Hi WTF – I believe Save Our Songlines will be able to get their point of view across and share an experience that may be valuable to our specialist audience at the same time.
Maybe next time instead of just clarifying the science of rocks with an independent source you could make another phone call and clarify the nuance of Indigenous culture? Might have avoided the whole “comfort zone” ickiness.