MEDIA STATEMENT: State unlawfully removes Protections for Registered Heritage Site, Blackwood River
The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has removed tributaries and associated water places from Registered Aboriginal Site, the Blackwood River.
The boundary amendment has been undertaken without consultation with Karri Karrak Aboriginal Corporation (Karri Karrak)
DPLH has failed multiple times to meet the statutory timeframes for Karri Karrak’s Freedom of Information request, seeking documents relating to the amendment
Karri Karrak Aboriginal Corporation has condemned the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage (DPLH) for removing tributaries and associated water places from Registered Aboriginal Site, the Blackwood River, known as Goorbilyup*, a deeply sacred waterway to Wardandi, Pibelmen and Kaneang People, without meaningful consultation with Traditional Custodians.
The amended boundary has stripped protection from parts of the registered Aboriginal Place, including Dry Brook Tributary, Tanjannerup Creek, Lightning Gully and Pinch Gully. These are only the first identified removals within the Nannup section of the Blackwood River boundary. The Department has already indicated that further amendments to other sections of site and waterway are planned. Furthermore, DPLH has confirmed that other registered river places across the South West are being, or are proposed to be, "reassessed and remapped". This raises serious concern that the quiet reduction of heritage protections for the Blackwood River are part of a broader departmental program to redraw culturally significant river systems across Noongar Boodja (Country) without Traditional Custodian consultation, consent or scrutiny. Those rivers include, but may not be limited to, the Harris River, Collie River, Sabina River, Margaret River and Preston River.
From the Chair of Karri Karrak Aboriginal Corporation, Professor Stephen van Leeuwen:
“DPLH has stripped protection from the Blackwood River’s cultural landscape without proper consultation, disregarding decades of Noongar knowledge and its own heritage records. This decision undermines the cultural authority of Noongar people and contradicts the commitments made under the South West Native Title Settlement.”
Karri Karrak calls for full transparency, reinstatement of all removed tributaries, and an immediate halt to further boundary changes. No government should be allowed to quietly cut back Noongar heritage through administrative shortcuts. These actions test the integrity and commitment of government to the legislated recognition of Noongar peoples as the traditional custodians of Boodja, who hold enduring cultural responsibilities and rights as the traditional owners of Noongar land.”
State Government decides what is and isn’t Aboriginal Cultural Heritage
While DPLH has described the decision as a "boundary clarification", Karri Karrak says that description is misleading. This is not a technical mapping matter but rather, the State making its own determinations about what legal and practical protections are afforded to Noongar Cultural Heritage, without proper regard to Traditional Custodian rights and knowledge that gives that heritage its meaning. More than two decades of heritage reports and Traditional Custodian consultation submitted to the State, have recorded the Blackwood River, its tributaries, and the Yarragadee aquifer as part of an integrated cultural landscape of mythological, customary, historical and environmental significance. By cutting tributaries and associated water places out of the registered boundary, DPLH has disregarded the cultural evidence in its own records and has imposed an artificial mapping logic over a living Noongar riparian system.
Karri Karrak is deeply concerned that the Department has relied on internal ACMC action items to "review and remap" the Blackwood River boundary, despite those action items not expressly authorising the removal of tributaries from the registered place.
No record of consultation
Serious questions have also emerged about the accuracy of DPLH's consultation record.
The Department has stated that it relied on correspondence from the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC) as evidence of consultation in relation to the Blackwood River site. Karri Karrak's enquiries indicate that this correspondence did not concern any proposal to amend the registered boundary, or to remove tributaries from it. Rather, it concerned an unrelated Section 18 notification about bridge works. DPLH later confirmed that its earlier advice about receiving a SWALSC response in relation to the Blackwood River site had been given in error. This raises serious questions about the consultation record relied upon by the State heritage regulator to support or explain the remapping.
Changes give hotel development green light
The boundary change has already had real consequences. A proposed archaeological and anthropological survey near Nannup, being progressed under DPLH's own Aboriginal Heritage Survey Program, was withdrawn after the proponent was advised by the Department that the survey was no longer required following its remapping. In practical terms, DPLH's own boundary change undermined its own heritage survey program. This decision has reduced heritage protection and wasted significant Corporation time and resources.
FOI deadlines disregarded by the State
On 13 April 2026, Karri Karrak submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act 1992 (WA) to DPLH seeking documents relating to the amendment of the Blackwood River boundary. DPLH did not meet the 45-day statutory timeframe for dealing with the FOI application and requested a further three-week extension. That extended deadline has since passed, with no documents provided, no further explanation, and no update from the State.
For a decision with such serious consequences for Noongar Cultural Heritage, DPLH should be putting every decision record, map and justification on the table.
Karri Karrak says DPLH's failure to provide the requested documents within the statutory timeframe, and then within the agreed extended timeframe, deepens concerns about the legal authority, consultation process and evidentiary basis for the remapping.
Karri Karrak is calling on the Department to immediately release the updated spatial data, methodology, consultation records and legal basis relied upon for the remapping; reinstate the tributaries and associated water places already removed from the registered boundary; and suspend any further amendments to the Blackwood River Aboriginal Place, or any comparable amendments to other Noongar waterways, until properly resourced consultation with the affected Traditional Custodians has occurred.
Transparency should not have to be forced out of the State through the Freedom of Information Act.
The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 is supposed to protect Aboriginal places, not enable them to be quietly cut back through opaque administrative processes. If the Department intends to alter the registered extent of protected rivers, Traditional Custodians must be appropriately notified, resourced and consulted, long before any change is made.
Noongar people should not be left to investigate, long after the fact, how protection for Boodja has been stripped away by the State heritage regulator after its own unilateral decision-making has exposed those places to irreparable harm.
*Goorbilyup is the Wardandi name for the lower Blackwood River entering to the estuary
Media Contact:
Dr Anna Fagan
Specialist Heritage and Agreements
Karri Karrak Aboriginal Corporation
anna.fagan@karrikarrak.org.au
0407 831 511