Crowmanic

If Stonehenge were bulldozed for a McDonald’s, or the collections of the British Library were burnt to heat the Hilton, there would be a furore in the press. But a site of equivalent spiritual, intellectual and artistic importance to Aboriginal people – referred to as an ancient university, part of their ritual, sacred culture and songlines – is under similar threat, and the chances are you won’t have heard of it.

The site includes what is probably the oldest artistic representation of the human face anywhere in the world. Pause on that a moment. That fact alone makes it iconic for all human beings. Carved with huge, haunting eyes and an expression of vivid intensity, it is one of hundreds of thousands of rock carvings in Western Australia’s Burrup peninsula, known as Murujuga to Aboriginal peoples. Some carvings are at least 30,000 years old and it is even possible that the site is twice the age of the famous Lascaux cave paintings. But there are plans to site a liquid natural gas plant here, and parts of the area have already been destroyed, with images either pulverised or ripped away from where they belong. When this happens, Aboriginal people say, part of a songline is destroyed forever, it is “like our Bible torn apart”.

The World Monuments Fund has named it as one of the world’s most endangered sites, and archaeologists want it listed as a World Heritage Site, but so far haven’t been successful. Why? Because it’s part of a long story, what I’d call the “intellectual apartheid” which the dominant culture operates towards indigenous people, refusing to believe that indigenous philosophy is worthy of the title, that the Amazon has its rigorous medical schools, or that a Chartres could exist, in ritual, in the Australian outback. Tellingly, until 1967, Aboriginal people were legally classed as “flora and fauna” – ie not capable of rising from nature into culture.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of CP Snow’s lecture The Two Cultures, which argued that to be culturally literate it is not enough to know only about the arts, but about sciences too. It prompts a far bigger question: the dominant culture today renders itself culturally illiterate by not paying attention to the world’s cultures. In the days of empire, European history began making its false claims that there was an “expansion of the known world” which heralded an “age of discovery”. The truth was the opposite – in destroying human cultures everywhere, the sum of the world’s knowledge was reduced.

Edward Said referred to “the universalising discourses”, which only infrequently acknowledged “that the colonised people should be heard from, their ideas known”. London, intellectual and political driver of colonialism, is about to offer exactly that infrequent acknowledgement, in the shape of the inaugural Origins – Festival of First Nations. Opening with the crazy thunder of Maori performers, parts of the festival are wryly amusing, including the satirical docucomedy Qallunaat – Why White People Are Funny, an Inuit reversal of the anthropological gaze. A similar dynamic of reversal occurred in January 1988 when Aboriginal activist Burnum Burnum landed at Dover to plant the Aboriginal flag on the beach, claiming England for the Aboriginal people of Australia.

Perhaps with the advent of climate change, indigenous thinking is more necessary than ever, for it is characterised by an ability to interweave disparate ideas, such as environment, language and psychology. Moreover, it emphatically takes its energy from its relationship with land, which is why the breaking of that relationship in the Burrup will lead directly to illness and death, say local Aboriginal people.

Indigenous arts reveal the strength of something which Spanish poet Lorca referred to as El Duende, the life-force from the spirit of the earth, the thing which charges art with power, which gives indigenous art its wit and its depth, its tenderness and its teeth. And – if that art is desecrated – its tragedy.

• Jay Griffiths is the author of Wild: An Elemental Journey.

Source: Jay Griffiths
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 May 2009 19.30 BST