Push for safe removal of Aboriginal artefacts

By Shaun Inguanzo
RESIDENTS and councillors will fight to ensure 35,000-year-old Aboriginal artefacts are carefully removed and preserved to make way for a bypass construction.
The concern over the artefacts’ fate comes a week after a 400-year-old river redgum tree was lopped down by Dandenong Southern Bypass workers.
Thiess John Holland confirmed last week that the artefacts that halted works are about 35,000 years old.
City of Greater Dandenong mayor Peter Brown said he was sad to see the tree go and hoped a more ‘constructive engineering approach’ would be applied to the artefacts.
“I think it is important that prior to construction as many artefacts as possible should be retrieved and archived,” he said.
“I believe the road will not go over a majority of the aboriginal site, so it seems reasonable to me that people could be employed to recover artefacts from the relatively small area to be sealed.”
Alan Hood, the president of the Bangholme Rural Land Owners Association, said the artefacts outdated some of the most recognised artefacts in the world, such as the Pyramids of Giza.
“But you don’t see them building roads through the pyramids,” he said.
Meanwhile, councillors this week discussed the fate of the lopped-down redgum, with Dandenong North Ward councillor John Kelly recommending that the tree should be preserved in one piece.
Cr Brown said he visited the tree at council’s storage depot and was told it would need to be chopped into pieces in order to preserve the wood.
Cr Brown said community groups and private companies wanted the 17.5-tonne tree for various uses, but a future resolution of council would decide its fate.