Classic Perth: Let's Build a Highway Over a 5,000-Year-Old Sacred Site

If Perth has one defining feature, it's the vast empty spaces between its urban and suburban centres. Forget cramped inner-city life—in Perth, you live in a big house with a big backyard that's an hour drive away from the CBD along a desolate highway dotted with skimpies bars and high rises. Paradise.

Town planning in Perth has become about connecting suburbs with long stretches of asphalt. This is how the Roe 8 project—a proposed $550 million highway extension connecting the city's industrial precinct with its coastal one—came to be. Unfortunately, like a lot of public works projects in Western Australia, Roe 8 is expensive, environmentally destructive, and requires demolishing land of spiritual significance to its traditional owners. In this case, the Beeliar Wetlands have been used by the Noongar people for more than 5,000 years.

Concerned citizens have been protesting Roe 8 for months, staging lengthy sit ins and placing their bodies in front of bulldozers. The #Roe8 protests are WA's version of Standing Rock. And as with the Dakota Pipeline, activists have had little success in changing the government's mind. Construction of the road has already begun, and a lot of the wetlands are already flattened. But none of this is exactly surprising: Building a highway on a 5,000-year-old sacred site is actually the most Perth thing ever.

"You'll find there's been a lot of care taken with some quite small bits of European heritage in Western Australia, but not so much with Aboriginal heritage," University of Western Australia archaeologist Dr Joe Dortch tells VICE. "It's certainly very confronting when Aboriginal heritage is treated so badly. Some of us try and acknowledge and record it, but other people seem to think it doesn't matter."

He's right. Perth's primary tourist attraction is the Bell Tower, an underwhelming blue triangle installed by the Swan River in 1999, which houses several "historic" bells imported from Trafalgar Square, London. Perth isn't a city that pays tribute to anything other than a colonial past—a massive public foreshore development completed only last year, Elizabeth Quay, was tellingly named after the Queen.

For an archaeologist like Dortch—one who's understandably more interested in studying artefacts from the oldest living culture on Earth than those from colonialists who docked their tall ships on the Swan River—work can be pretty tough in WA. The state government has long waged war on places of Indigenous cultural significance, literally changing the definition of what constitutes a "sacred site" in order to deregister several of them for mining. "Somewhere between 30 and 80 sacred sites have been taken off the register, and on top of that a grand total of 3,200 other significant sites were taken off the register in recent years. That's pretty unprecedented," Dortch says.

But the Beeliar Wetlands isn't just another archaeological site. In the 1970s, an expansive dig uncovered stone tools and carvings there that were estimated to be as old as the pyramids in Eygpt. The state government has attempted to discredit these findings, or claim that the area has been so disturbed in the decades since that its archaeological value has been lost. Dortch and his colleagues beg to differ. Led by prominent West Australian archaeologist Dr Fiona Hook, the team staged their own renegade exacavations in the Beeliar area to prove its academic and cultural significance. Although they've been barred from digging in the Roe 8 corridor, their cursory excavations in the immediate vicinity have revealed more stone tools that Dortch estimates to be at least 5,000 years old.

"There's nothing certain in archaeology," he explains. "But the artefacts are made of a certain kind of rock called chert, which is sourced from places that became submerged around 6,000 years ago."

Dortch stresses the team's investigation of the area was extremely superficial—but given more access and resources, who knows what else they could have found.  He also explains the state government did make its own archaeological investigation of the area, but didn't try very hard to find anything. "We dug 20 small pits, and found artefacts in six of them, so that's a one in three chance of getting artefacts. And they were only concentrated in one area," Dortch says. "They only did one 20 centimetre shovel pit, which doesn't tell you much at all."

Of course, to truly understand the special significance of the Roe 8 site, you need to speak to its traditional owners of the land. Beeliar Wetlands custodian and Whadjuk Noongar woman Corina Abraham has worked tirelessly behind the scenes of the Roe 8 protests, even lodging an unsuccessful legal challenge against the WA and federal government under section nine of the Aboriginal Heritage Act. "We're doing a white man's fight through the courts, but we're never going to win as First Nations people," Abraham says. "When elders were consulted [about Roe 8] back in 2010, sadly, a few of them didn't even come from this area—and yet they were allowed to make a decision on it."

The entirety of Perth is technically built on Noongar land, but the Beeliar Wetlands site is of particular significance to Indigenous people. "There are many cultural sites but this is the crucial one, the only one south of the river. The damage that this will do [to our community] is great," Abraham explains. "Our history there goes back over thousands of years. My ancestors lived and gathered on country around here, and our mythological significance to the area is through our dreaming, our spiritual connection to country. And that's the important thing. Bibra Lake is the resting area for our Wagyll, so that connects us to the Country as well. And we continue that through our stories and our song lines and in person."

Archaeologists like Dortch are fine with Roe 8 being built in theory—but at bare minimum, they want more time to study the area and archive what they find before the bulldozers come and destroy everything. But the area's Indigenous owners want the destruction stopped altogether, and you can't blame them. The Beeliar site is old, but it's also still being actively used by Noongar family communities in the present day.

"It's a birthing area for women, it's a men's area, it's an area where many clans congregated for corroborees, it's an area where ceremonial gatherings have occurred over thousands of years," Abraham explains emphatically. "This area is as significant to us as what a church is to Catholics or any other religion. It's our church, it's who we are, it's where we come from."

For many Noongar people, Roe 8 feels like the final straw. "It gets devastating, it stresses me out every time I drive out there and see the desecration of our country. What was left of our cultural heritage after colonisation, you know?" says Abraham. "It's about maintaining what we have left, the unique bushland that only grows here. That's unique to us as West Australians."

According to polls, WA's Liberal government is going to lose an election this month. If they do, the incoming Labor party has promised to scrap the Roe 8 project altogether. Whoever wins Government, both archaeologists and traditional owners want the heritage area investigated and preserved. If this doesn't happen, a little more of the uniqueness that Abraham talks about will have slipped away forever—in a pattern of destruction that, ironically, makes Perth pretty distinctive.

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