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Indigenous rangers join WA's Burrup Peninsula underwater heritage survey
Caleb Pitt-Cook is drifting just above the ocean floor, running his fingers through the soft sand.
The 24-year-old Ngarluma man is searching for the stone tools his ancestors used thousands of years ago.
"If you told me I'd be doing this work two years ago, I would have laughed in your face," he says.
"It's one of the coolest parts of our job. I'd say it's my favourite part right now."
Mr Pitt-Cook is contributing to research that has already made history.
"There's only ever been two submerged Aboriginal archaeological sites mapped in Australia," Flinders University maritime archaeologist John McCarthy says.
"Those were found by our team here."
When humans first populated the Australian continent about 65,000 years ago, the sea level was much lower.
"There's a huge area of archaeological landscape that's been lost to sea level change," Dr McCarthy says.
Since 2019, Dr McCarthy's team has been trying to find artefacts from that time, submerged off the coast of the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia.
The region's traditional custodians call the peninsula Murujuga.
"The initial discoveries made in Murujuga were stone tools. They're very common — the sort of knives and forks of their day," Dr McCarthy says.
"They survive very well through sea-level change because they're made of igneous rock, which is very hard and durable."
Maritime archaeology of this kind is still in its infancy in Australia.
Dr McCarthy says it is almost certain there are significant sites all across the continent's perimeter, and mapping where they are is the first step to protecting them.
This year's round of underwater surveys is the first time in Australia that Indigenous rangers have accompanied maritime archaeologists.
It is the culmination of more than a year of training for a handful of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation rangers.
"First, you start off with pool dives and it's a big jump up to actually get out on the water," Ngarluma ranger Malik Churnside says.
"Once you're out there in the water and there's actually animals … sharks swimming around, [it] can be quite a scary sight, at first."
One of the submerged sites Mr Churnside surveyed was an area that thousands of years ago would have been a freshwater spring.
The spring is referenced in a Ngarluma cultural song his elders still sing today.
"It's just like evidence and a connection to something they've talked about and sung about for such a long time," he said.
Back at camp, Yindjibarndi man and Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation director Vincent Adams pulls on a virtual reality headset.
It transports him from the hot Pilbara afternoon to the silty depths of Murujuga, where he can look out at the seabed alongside the divers.
The goggles connect to a live feed from a remote operated vehicle (ROV), allowing elders and knowledge holders to identify artefacts in real time.
Mr Adams says the technology is a big hit among the community elders.
"It's like 20 years ago when the mobile phone came out and they were all frightened of it," he laughs.
Mr Adams says several of the artefacts he has helped classify trace back to ancient hunting, crafts, and ceremonies; practices that still exist in some form today.
"When they bring this up from under water, we can see that this is history from here, culture from here," he said.
It is also an opportunity to inform researchers of the local lore and rules behind the tools.
"If it's men's stuff [that] comes up, women can't see this, kids can't see it. Only men that have been through law," Mr Adams says.
"We've been practising for years on land. This culture now is under water."
The ROV will allow the team to rapidly survey larger and harder-to-reach areas.
Mapping these sites is a new frontier for cultural heritage protections and could prove pertinent for waters crisscrossed by bulk carriers and offshore pipelines.
Murujuga intersects with the Carnarvon basin, which is home to Australia's largest gas reserves.
Geoff Bailey, a world authority on submerged landscapes, says robust information is essential to ensure industry can navigate the uncharted history off the Burrup Peninsula.
"If somebody puts a hole in the seabed … they're quite likely to expose something that is of relevance and interest to the environmental history of the landscape and the cultural history of that landscape," Professor Bailey says.
"The key to this is good communication and understanding."
Earlier this month, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape was granted World Heritage status by the United Nations in recognition of its outstanding universal value.
In UNESCO's unanimous ruling, member countries lauded the underwater archaeological work as a critical part of the nomination and called for further study.
Mr Vincent Adams says the research is laying important groundwork as more gas projects look to come online.
"This has popped up a lot of times in conversations with elders, saying what about the pipeline?" he says.
"There's no law, there's no rule for any of this.
Beyond the enormity of the task at hand, Mr Pitt-Cook's time below the waves is one of reflection.
"Our culture is an oral-based tradition so it's all passed down through generations of speaking, songs and teaching," he says.
"A lot of people are really sceptical because we don't have anything written down on paper.
"But to actually go out and explore these places where the stories originate from is really special.
"It's a whole different world under the water."
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