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.
I am a non-Aboriginal Australian who lived in a remote community for many years and I can tell you that when white people go somewhere where we are not the dominant culture we struggle. People being told they need to ask permission to go to the beach, or go camping in a certain spot really rubbed so many people the wrong way. Yet if a kid walked into their yard, that kid would get scalded. What if this were compared to a farmer who has a popular waterfall on their property and they stop letting the public go there. They wouldn’t need a reason to give, but they would probably say safety or disrespectful behaviour, because there would be backlash from people who felt they had the right to go there. This will outrage white people because it inconveniences them.
Aboriginal Australians had their land stolen and have had to unfairly use the systems of the culture that stole that land to try and reclaim it. It is taking time with court cases and education, and sometimes, they have a small win. So many people only want Aboriginal cultures to be seen and not heard. Respect means saying an acknowledgement of country, and dusting your hands of that. So much pearl clutching when a genuine concession is made. If you want to go anywhere on someone else’s property then open your house to the public.
I love this line:
Critics fear ban will reduce visitor numbers
It’s sort of like…yes, that’s the point. You don’t want stinking tourists at a holy site.
Remote doesn’t even approach it.
I thought to myself, I been in Western Australia. Let me see how far is away from Perth it is, result is about 2200 km or 24h of non stop driving to get in the vicinity.
Nearest road is more than 30 km away
Good news!! Not everything needs milked for profit.
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.
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.
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 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.
Strip the supernatural aspect out and just call it “important to the local culture”.
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.
Does the relationship invoke supernatural forces driving the phenomena?
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.
the local people’s reason for leaving the area alone was wrong unless it was specifically understood that it was a reservoir for biodiversity
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.
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.
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