Australia lodges world heritage submission for 50,000-year-old Burrup Peninsula rock art

The decades-long campaign to secure world heritage listing for Australia’s largest collection of rock art has finally been taken to Unesco.

The federal government on Friday lodged a submission for the Murujuga cultural landscape on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula to be included on Australia’s world heritage tentative list, the first formal step toward achieving global recognition for the 50,000-year-old gallery of more than one million petroglyphs.

Peter Jeffries, the chief executive officer of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC), said the listing was “thousands of years in the making”.

“Murujuga is a place of truly global significance and this is an important step in securing international awareness and protection of our incredible landscape and unique culture,” he said.

Related: Burrup peninsula rock art: Western Australia to seek world heritage listing

MAC represents five clans who are traditional custodians, or Ngurra-ra Ngarli, for the Burrup Peninsula, and who have taken over its care since the Yaburara people, the traditional owners, were devastated by a massacre in the 1860s. Those groups are the Ngarluma, Mardudhunera, Yaburara, Yindjibarndi people and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo peoples, but Jeffries said that MAC would “welcome anyone with links to this special place to now participate in the world heritage nomination process alongside us”.

The WA Greens MP Robin Chapple, who has campaigned for world heritage listing for Murujuga since the 1980s, said he welcomed the decision but said the McGowan government was undermining its efforts to secure a world heritage listing by not moving faster to curb emissions from heavy industry on the Burrup Peninsula, which have caused damage and discolouration of some petroglyphs.

“It will be very interesting to see how the government can manage the process of world heritage nomination at the same time as increasing industry on the Burrup,” Chapple said.

Establishing a formal monitoring program for potentially damaging emissions is part of the WA government’s rock art strategy. MAC and the Department of Water and Environment Regulation are currently assessing tender applications for a monitoring program and a government spokesman says it is “anticipated that a contract will be awarded shortly”.

The largest industrial emitter on the peninsula, gas giant Woodside, received approval from the Environmental Protection Authority in WA to build a 434km pipeline from the Scarborough gas field near Broome to its processing facility on the Burrup Peninsula, extending the life of that facility by 25 years.

The EPA’s consideration of the full expansion project, which Woodside says will create almost 5,000 jobs in construction and 2,000 ongoing jobs, and boost Australia’s GDP by $414bn between 2019 and 2063, is open for public comment until 12 February.

Related: ‘The rocks remember’: the fight to protect Burrup peninsula's rock art

“It’s going to be very, very difficult to say [to the world heritage committee] that industry and the rock art can coexist,” Chapple said. “We know the increased acidity from emissions is already starting to damage the rock art.”

Judith Hugo, the co-convener of Friends of Australian Rock Art, said it was “completely farcical” to nominate Murujuga for world heritage listing while also encouraging further industrial development on the peninsula.

The WA environment minister, Stephen Dawson, said there was a “a broad level of support from stakeholders, including industry and the local community, for world heritage listing”.

The federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, said she was proud to support the nomination.

“Murujuga, which includes the Dampier Peninsula and surrounds, has the largest, densest and most diverse concentrations of petroglyphs in the world,” Ley said.

The submission will be considered when the world heritage committee meets in Fuzhou, China, in June and July this year.

If the submission is accepted it has to sit on the tentative list for at least 12 months before the listing is formalised.

However, because Australia currently sits on the world heritage committee, and has promised not to progress any of its own listings until that term is up, the earliest that Murujuga could be formally added to the world heritage list is 2022.