It is high time Bathurst council respected traditional owners' wishes and found another site for a go-kart track

Given the global outrage and corporate shame stemming from the destruction of precious Indigenous heritage at Juukan Gorge, you’d think any organisation poised to damage sacred Aboriginal property might be experiencing a little cautionary soul-searching.

It remains to be seen if this is the case with Bathurst regional council which had, on this very International Women’s Day, planned to turn the first sods on a $4.5m go-kart track on a sacred Wiradjuri women’s site that is a timeless centrepiece of the local Wiradjuri creation story.

Related: Federal government steps in to halt Bathurst go-kart track three days before construction to start

On Friday two critical things happened that have captured the attention of Indigenous people the continent over who are also seeking to protect their sacred heritage from the ravages of development and mining of the type that destroyed the ancient caves at Juukan. First, federal environment minister Sussan Ley halted planned construction of the proposed track for 30 days pending further consideration and, second, the New South Wales supreme court injuncted the council with a cease work order.

“Council has agreed to this cease-work order. Council continues to consider its options in regards these two matters,” is how council general manager David Sherley responded.

That is a more equivocal response than the council intransigence that has largely marked the bitter six-year fight over the proposed track.

It is now high time council moved on, respected the wishes and the cultural sensibilities of the local Wiradjuri – who have long accommodated the main Wahluu/Mount Panorama race car track – and found another site on which to put the go-kart circuit. The local custodians are more than willing to accommodate a go-kart track elsewhere on their country.

Ley, meanwhile, will inspect the contested ground later this week to determine whether to certify it a designated Indigenous site under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act and afford it permanent protection from development.

Controversy over the go-kart track proposed for a shoulder of Wahluu/Mount Panorama – home of the 6km track that hosts Australia’s premier Supercar events, the Bathurst 1000 and the 12-hour races – has consumed the community and council of Bathurst in central west of NSW.

Church and other community leaders, as well as local Aboriginal elders, have been lobbying individual council members to drop the plan to impose the new track on the women’s site. The Bathurst Wiradjuri Traditional Owners Central West Aboriginal Corporation last year appealed to Ley to protect the site under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act, while the NSW parliament’s upper house last month unanimously supported a Greens motion to protect the women’s site from development.

In correspondence to Ley, the traditional owners’ solicitors appropriately invoked the desecration of Juukan Gorge, a 46,000-year-old sacred Indigenous site in the Pilbara, Western Australia, where mining monolith Rio Tinto blew up ancient rock shelters to access high-quality iron ore deposits.

“The question of protection of Wahluu pursuant to sections 9 and 10 of ATSIHPA [the protection act] bear a striking similarity to the well-publicised destruction of Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto in May 2020. Whilst time is short, the department and the minister have the opportunity to protect Wahluu and its cultural heritage from destruction by the BRC [the council],” King & Wood Mallesons wrote on 26 February.

In what is evolving into one of the most shameful single episode of corporate contempt for Australian Indigenous heritage, Rio’s chairman Simon Thompson, recently stood down having accepted responsibility for the cultural vandalism of Juukan, amid suggestions the miner may yet have to pay as much as $250m in compensation.

Hello – Bathurst council! Are you listening?

It is understood Ley’s office has received numerous applications from other Indigenous custodians across Australia seeking to protect sacred cultural sites from development in the wake of the corporate vandalism of Juukan.

The Bathurst car racing track was imposed on Wahluu/Mount Panorama long before Australia began its glacial moves towards recognition of Aboriginal cultural heritage and connections to country. While the main track itself dissects numerous dreaming tracks (or songlines), the Wiradjuri have ultimately embraced it as broadly consistent with the ancient Indigenous use of the mountain as a place of mens’ initiation.

“The main track itself is not a problem. We’ve learned to live with it and then embrace it: it is an ancient Wiradjuri initiation place and it is also the same for other young men who now come here, from different tribes – Ford and Holden and others – to prove themselves on the mountain,” says Dinawan Dyirribang, a Wirdyuri elder, also known as Uncle Bill Allen.

“The go-kart track is a different proposition. It would be on a sacred women’s place already been fenced off and will be used all of the time. Our women have already been excluded from this place, so they are being denied their ceremonial rights. We liken this to the desecration of a church. This is our church.”

Elders have proposed an alternative site. Council has rejected it.

Related: Rio Tinto investors welcome chair's decision to step down after Juukan Gorge scandal

The name Wahluu (meaning “young man’s initiation site”) has been officially accepted in the NSW Geographical Names Register alongside Mount Panorama. Both names have been used since 2014 – an acknowledgement of the mountain’s rich Indigenous history and a small act of conciliation in an area where some of the worst excesses of colonial violence against Aboriginal people were perpetrated in the “Bathurst War” of the 1820s.

Indeed, Dinawan is a direct descendant of Windradyne, the famous Wiradjuri warrior who led the resistance against the British troops who murdered by poisoning and shooting many hundreds of Aboriginal men, women and children during the war.

I’ve written extensively here about the proposed go-kart track and Wahluu in the context of the district’s violent colonial history.

The imposition of the go-kart track on the sacred women’s site would be in contempt of local Indigenous sensibility, culture and countless millennia of Aboriginal history. It would be a retrograde step in conciliation between the Wiradjuri and local authorities in a war that has not, as far as the dispossessed local Aboriginal people are concerned, ever truly ended.

In terms of the contemporary fight over the go-kart track, Dinawan and his people have just won a battle. They – and Indigenous groups from all over Australia – anxiously wait to see if they can win the war.