The Horizontal Falls are one of Australia’s strangest natural attractions, a unique blend of coastal geography and powerful tidal forces that visitors pay big money to see up close.
But all that is about to change.
Located at Talbot Bay, a remote spot on the country’s northwestern coastline, the falls are created when surges of seawater pour between two narrow cliff gaps, creating a swell of up to four meters that resembles a waterfall.
For decades, tours have pierced these gaps on powerful boats, much to the dismay of the area’s Indigenous Traditional Owners, who say the site is sacred.
It’s not the only reason the boat tours are controversial. In May 2022 one boat hit the rocks resulting in passenger injuries and triggering a major rescue operation. The incident led to calls to halt the tours for safety reasons.
Although the boat trips have continued, the concerns of the Indigenous Traditional Owners have now been heeded, with Western Australia, the state in which the falls are situated, saying they will be banned in 2028 out of respect.
Safety? Sure, I’ll bite.
It being “sacred”? C’mon. Any place that looks unique and had ancient folks living by it is probably going to be considered sacred to them, from Everest to Niagara Falls to the Giant’s Causeway.
I don’t understand your point, it makes perfect sense for ancient cultures to have spaces considered sacred around them.
Are you casually suggesting that a culture that has lived in an area far longer than anyone else doesn’t have the right to consider parts of the landscape around them sacred?
Just because the land was stolen from indigenous cultures doesn’t mean they don’t still rightfully have a claim on it. At a bare minimum they should be able to demand preservation of the sacred places among the land stolen from them.
If you want to come after “people trying to make everything into sacred spaces” or something, sure, let’s talk about the way churches can completely dodge taxes and other laws that the rest of us have to adhere to (at least in the US), why waste your breath saying “c’mon” about a devastated indigenous population protecting a beautiful and highly unusual natural feature?
As a last point, do you honestly NOT understand how this place or Everest or Niagra Falls or the Giants Causeway are sacred places? You don’t have to subscribe to spirituality of that culture or even believe in god at all to understand when a place is sacred. Do you look at a place like Niagra and think “meh, just another place who cares”? Do you think the tallest mountain in the world should have so many tourists shuffling along to climb to the top that the mountain is inundated with trash?
When an indigenous culture identifies a place as sacred, those are the people that know that land better than anyone else and have passed down a culture of stories born out of that landscape, we should listen.
Too fucking bad. Religion is a mental illness.
So is our pathological disregard for destroying our most precious natural spaces, and I will take belief in a higher power as a mental illness over utter destruction of the only planet we have.
Maybe I was too subtle then. To spell it out more clearly: I don’t think the majority of places that any ancient culture considers sacred should be blocked from the public. I can understand not wanting folks traipsing over burial mounds that were actually built by their ancestors, but if someone is going to say “No you can’t go to Niagara falls!”, because their 35th great grandpa thought the view was divinely inspired, that’s just dumb.
It is the privilege of the oppressor to decide when history begins.
I’m paraphrasing a fictional character from a book, but the point stands.
You’re saying that their history and beliefs don’t matter because it infringes on a public good, but you leave out the context where these “public lands” were stolen from the indigenous people through a multigenerational campaign of genocide, and racial subjugation.
So… you find this meager apology and repatriation of some sacred lands to the wronged party here to be intolerable, and unjust?
What if their 34th, 33rd, 32nd, 31st, 30th, 29th, 28th, 27th, 26th, 25th, 24th, 23rd, 22nd, 21st, 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st great grandpa along with their father too all see a place as sacred to their culture?
Are you suggesting that because a place was declared sacred long ago that it has some kind of statute of limitations on being sacred that expires after a certain amount of time? Or, using the US an example, are you suggesting that because the native peoples and cultures that lived here before Europeans invaded were subject to a genocide and mass land theft that their claim to a place being sacred is now forfeit? What are you actually saying?
Your argument is nothing more than a hollow appeal to being willfully ignorant, and crucially you utterly fail to realize how vitally important indigenous cultures have been to preservation of precious natural spaces all over the world. Without indigenous people defending the lands they consider sacred there would be an unbelievable amount more of irreversible ecological destruction wrought by modern capitalism by this point and that is just simply a fact. If you don’t care about the preservation of beautiful, natural spaces… well then I am damn happy there are indigenous land protectors out there who are devoted to pissing people like you off by refusing to let the cultural context of the landscape around them be erased by lazy people who can’t be bothered to understand history or environmentalism.
Sure, if you want to consider native beliefs silly or dumb, whatever, I could care less but you are just factually wrong if you don’t understand the immense material benefit to us all (and our children) from indigenous cultures defending the preservation of our most beautiful and rare natural landscapes.
They didn’t build it anymore then 35 did, so I’m not understanding what counterpoint you’re trying to put forth here. My point was fairly clear, and if you’re only going to willfully misinterpret it, then I’m not sure you’re someone I want to engage with.
Oh ok, so your argument is if indigenous peoples built Niagra Falls thennn they could claim it was sacred site to their culture.
…got it
That makes total sense, it is a commonly accepted fact among all major religions and cultures of the world that something can only be sacred if it was built by human hands. Forgot about that one!
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Sacred implies supernaturality. Since that isn’t actually a thing, nothing is sacred. It’s as valid for one person to say they think something is not sacred as it is for someone to say they think it is.
At the end of the day, the argument should be that it is unique and should be preserved because of its uniqueness. That’s a much more palatable and understandable position to take.
People in Congress refer to the US Capitol as a “Sacred” space. Yes, that’s right. It has nothing to do with gods or supernatural things. It is referred to that way specifically because it is so important to the people.
How about you set aside your “palatability” of an idea and instead respect other’s truth about it instead? Or is that too selfless for you?
You’ve decided that you have the right to impose your view over the views of the people who have traditionally lived in these places. You have decided that your view is the one that matters and damned those who have always occupied a space.
That is what it boils down to doesn’t it.
Sometimes you can get these fools mad enough by simply asking them to explain their logic that they just come right out and say it which is always funny. It’s like keeping this mask on of empathy and understanding for others is an uncomfortable burden that they just have to rip off when they get mad enough because they can’t take one more second of it.
These people always seem so self righteous and oddly relieved in the moment they finally rip their mask off and stop pretending to care or have empathy. It is like watching someone rip off a N95 in relief after they walk outside into an open space where they can safely take their mask off after being inside a crowded space for hours.
Irish person here: Giant’s Causeway isn’t a sacred place. It’s a bunch of igneous rock. And, get this: nobody lives or ever lived on Everest. You know whose view is ruined by rubbish on Everest? The people paying to go there.
This is an utter waste of human energy.
Ancient folks? Indigenous people are still around, you just don’t give a fuck about them, and you don’t give a fuck about their most sacred places.
Wow people actually downvoted you over pointing out that they exist and have rights.
I feel the same way. If I’m going to be an atheist, I can’t draw the line at which primitive superstition is nonsense. Either they all are or none are.
I get it, it’s a natural wonder that nobody at the time could comprehend. That doesn’t make it “sacred”.
Banning it for safety? Sure. This is why we can’t have nice things.
And beyond safety banning for obnoxious destruction of the peace.
This is literally their area(well 50% state gov). Just because you are atheist doesn’t mean you can go into their place & do what you want. Would you do a burnout in a church? Would you break a foreign countries laws because they aren’t yours? Being atheist doesn’t absolve you from humanism or courtesy.
Strip the supernatural aspect out and just call it “important to the local culture”.
That’s pretty much exactly what “sacred” means, yes. For the average westerner, religious or not, the term “sacred” smells of holy water created by someone in a fancy dress mumbling and waving their hands while for others it simple means “place of significance that should be honoured”. These kinds of terms don’t easily translate between cultural barriers even if everyone is, on the face of it, speaking the same language, see also e.g. the Native American use of the word “medicine”.
Metalheads call the site of the Wacken Open Air festival “Holy Ground”, and they have all the right in the world to do it. On the part of the people of Wacken you can be sure that they won’t build anything on it, it’s gonna stay a pasture – a very well maintained one, the water management system is extensive to make sure rainfalls during the festivals won’t turn it into a mudpit. Maybe, in case the villages around it grow together more, make some pathways through it and plant trees along the paths, but they certainly won’t put a mall there. The vast majority of Wackeners, even if they don’t partake in the religion of metal, don’t mind a bit selling beer to the pilgrims so the site gets respected, just as the metalheads respect the site: They’re cleaning it up perfectly each and every year. Right now it might seem a bit mundane, it’s thinkable (if Wackeners weren’t Wackeners) that someone would put a mall there, but give it 100 years of continued yearly ritual use and it’ll become unthinkable.
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Our Abrahamic concept of “religion” bundles together a lot of tendencies that aren’t necessarily linked, anthropologically. If we translate another culture’s relationship with some natural phenomenon as “sacred”, that doesn’t mean it has the same specifically religious connotations for them that the term would imply in our culture. And it doesn’t mean that our attitude toward religion should carry over to their relationship with their environment.
Does the relationship invoke supernatural forces driving the phenomena? Then it’s superstitious nonsense and has nothing to do with abrahamic religions other then them also invoking superstitious nonsense. Does someone own the land and want to keep people out for idiosyncratic reasons? Fine, rule of law says they get to control the land for whatever reasons they want. Is it public land? Then only safety concerns or preventing the degradation of a natural wonder should affect who can visit and for what purpose.
that’s the thing, we need to invoke superstitious nonsense to strong arm the colonial government into respecting the land they stole. do the elders believe it? who cares, get off my lawn.
Then petition to get it made a heritage site or something, get controls put in place to stop obnoxious and abusive use of it such as the reckless rafting trips such that the area isn’t been degraded for future generations, but if it’s open to anyone to enjoy it should be open to everyone to.
Not necessarily. And even if, that doesn’t mean that those supernatural forces are considered to be real in the same sense that some Christians might consider prayer to have a physical effect.
Somewhere in some Asiatic mountains don’t remember where there’s a tribe which practices slash-and-burn agriculture. Western visitors were worried, telling the tribe “we’ve heard of many tribes doing slash-and-burn, it depletes the earth over time, there’s other ways to do it”. The tribefolk said: “We’ve been doing this for at least a thousand years in this small area and never had a problem, look around you, things are lush, our harvests are plentiful”. They invited the westerners to look all over the place and see for themselves, but not enter some specific sacred place.
That sacred place? The whole reason why the scheme worked: It was left untouched, completely to itself, a refuge for nature, meaning that each time an area would be burned, it was very quickly re-populated from that very place. The site of the site didn’t really matter, all that mattered was that it’s there, and that it was taboo to disturb. Is it supernatural? You might say no, a Daoist might say yes – I got that story from a commentary seminar on the Dao De Jing, as an example of what the text meant with the “eternal feminine”. The physical representation might be physical, but without the supernatural principle, physics wouldn’t exist in the first place.
And we have these kinds of places here in the west, too. Though we generally let the appropriate kind of priests (ecologists or adjacent folks) enter it to commune with the spirits there.
Except you have a false equivalence, we don’t have sacred sites that are left undisturbed so as to keep the forest spirits happy and the scientists who go there are not communing with anything. Your parable of the sacred site functioning as an ecological reservoir doesn’t change the fact that the local people’s reason for leaving the area alone was wrong unless it was specifically understood that it was a reservoir for biodiversity and not some supernatural explaination involving spirits.
It was understood as the sacred source of life. People by and large aren’t stupid, just because not everything is coated in a veneer of materialist jargon doesn’t mean that interrelations aren’t understood. It’s a specifically western trait to be so adamant about that distinction, making it a hard delineation people don’t want to think across, want to keep separate, and that has something to do with the church retreating to matters of the spirit when science figured out how to explain the material world better than Aristotle. That left a deep scar in our collective psychology and frameworks that’s still not even remotely healed.
Consider psychosomatics: It’s a discipline all of its own only because people first decided to make a harsh distinction between psyche and body and analyse them independently of each other, the more reductive the better, while in truth it’s a deep interrelationship, so now we need a third thing to somehow connect them up again. The same is true about cultures and the places they live: In reality, there’s no boundary between the two, so you get ecology to somehow connect them up again. The difference between that tribe and us isn’t the level of understanding about what’s happening, but them not having had the hare-brained idea to see themselves apart from nature in the first place.
As to ecologists communing with spirits: If you talk to an animist, yes they very much are. Doesn’t matter what the scientists believe they’re doing, they’re still doing communing with spirits stuff. If you don’t think so then you’re using another idea of “spirit”, that’s all.
You insisting they are the same doesn’t make it so, an ecologist studying the effects of leaving an area fallow or untouched leads to greater understanding and allows optimisation and application to other areas. Believing the spirits reside in a particular grove does not allow the same and confers no greater understanding because the basis for the practice is incorrect even if the practice itself is sound. But sure, you tell yourself that they do to justify holding onto supernatural explaination despite the fact they have little corelation to reality.
Are you expecting that everyone looking at their fields come up with the whole backlog of western philosophy and science before you allow them to come up with conclusions that are in perfect alignment with their observations? Is it immoral to conclude “things fall down” without simultaneously explaining the movement of the planets?
Then, western science itself is not at all free from supernatural explanations: Because at the end of it, we don’t know everything, either. The tribe has an understanding of ecological interrelationship, but preciously little about chemistry and none about quantum physics, while we have preciously little justifications for choices such as disliking Boltzmann brains: Yes, that is a supernatural belief. “The universe dreaming itself, that’d be silly”.
So not just is your stance here hypocritical because science itself holds on to supernatural concepts at the edge of our understanding, it’s also arrogant as that kind of attitude makes you prone to ignore perfectly correct insight just because it’s expressed in a language you don’t like.
This isn’t public land
So what you’re really saying is that they don’t deserve their history and to have sacred spots. That, it seems, is only for others to have.
I heard stories that whenever the Australia government want to do anything. Say they find aluminium and want to mine it. Aboriginals will come from all around and say that it’s a burial ground, or it’s sacred or something because then they can get more money because the government has a system for pay off the Aboriginals. I don’t know how true that is but I can believe it.
I chatted to an elder and he said they was building something in town so they asked him to come and ceremony for it. He refused. He said that as far as he knows no one ever lived there. He said sure people lived there, pointing over there, and there. But no one lived here. It’s no body’s land how can I talk about my ancestors if my ancestors didn’t live here. He then went on a rant about how he hates everyone saying they are aboriginal and getting free funding or money and stuff. Then there some black kid (they soemtimes described themselves as black or blackfellers in this part of Aus) not having access to a school or any funding for them.
It was really interesting.
But I got to admit there is a lot of shit the aboriginal get away with and they need both the government and the elders to treat people more like grown ups rather than as someone has been slighted and now has loads of excuses to act in shitty ways. Like recently seen a video of lot of damage done to Alice Springs, just because. So how sacred this thing is I don’t know.
But also me and my girlfriend was talking about how our housemates judged us for going out and doing stuff on Easter Sunday. But you could easily argue from a Christian point of view enjoying God’s creation is a form of worship. Wonder if they have different opinions like that in Australia.