Dampier Rainwater As Acidic As Beer: Csiro (Orientation) (Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation‪)‬

On 25 July 2002, in direct response to a report about the destruction of Dampier rock art (Bednarik 2002), the State Government of Western Australia announced that it would conduct a four-year study of this issue. On 16 October 2002, the then Premier, Dr G. Gallop, announced a committee of nine members, the Rock Art Monitoring Reference Committee (RAMRC), to oversee this project. Exactly four years later, on 17 October 2006, the government released a report on the results of only the first of these four years of study, conducted by a supposedly independent team from CSIRO (The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation). This raises some very pertinent questions: why did it take four years to present the outcomes of just the first of four years of research? Is the project team that produced this report free of influence from government agencies? Does this report exonerate the government from the accusation that its policies are destroying the Dampier rock art, or from the responsibility of managing this world-class cultural monument? These are the principal questions examined here.