Rio Tinto and Juukan Gorge: how one blast ended three careers

On 24 May 2020, Rio Tinto detonated explosive charges in the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara and destroyed two rock shelters that had been in continuous use for around 46,000 years. The blast lasted seconds. The fallout has run for years, and it cost three senior executives their jobs, including a chief executive who by most accounts had been considered one of the steadier hands in Australian mining.

I've sat through a fair few parliamentary hearings in this job, and most of them generate more heat than light. The joint standing committee inquiry into the Juukan Gorge destruction was different. It produced a genuinely damning account of how a resources giant with a stated commitment to Indigenous heritage came to legally, and knowingly, blow up two of the oldest documented sites of continuous human occupation in Australia.

What was destroyed at Juukan Gorge

The rock shelters sat on the traditional lands of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) peoples, roughly 60 kilometres from Rio Tinto's Brockman 4 mine. Archaeological work commissioned ahead of the blast, and later detailed to the inquiry, found evidence of continuous human occupation stretching back some 46,000 years, including a 4,000-year-old length of plaited human hair believed to be genetically linked to the PKKP people living in the area today.

The inquiry's final report, tabled in October 2021 and titled Never Again, found the shelters were among the most significant Aboriginal archaeological sites in Australia. They survived successive ice ages. They did not survive a mine expansion approved under Western Australia's outdated heritage laws.

How the approval happened at all

The uncomfortable finding, one the committee returned to repeatedly, was that Rio Tinto did not break the law. The company held a formal consent under section 18 of Western Australia's Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972, granted back in 2013, which permitted the disturbance of the sites. That consent predated later archaeological findings that dramatically upgraded the shelters' significance, and predated, too, growing internal awareness at Rio Tinto of just how significant the site actually was.

The committee heard that Rio Tinto's own reports, commissioned years before the blast, had already identified the exceptional value of the site. The PKKP had raised concerns. Alternative mine plans that would have preserved the shelters were, according to evidence given to the inquiry, put to Rio Tinto and not adopted. The company proceeded under a legal approval it held the right to use, even as the case for not using it grew stronger by the year.

This is the part of the story that separates Juukan Gorge from a simple compliance failure. Nothing here required a court to find wrongdoing, because the inquiry wasn't a court and the destruction wasn't unlawful. It was, in the committee's own words, a failure of process, culture and communication inside one of the world's largest mining companies, operating under a state heritage regime the report itself described as no longer fit for purpose.

The inquiry's findings

The joint standing committee, chaired by Warren Entsch, took evidence over more than a year, including from Rio Tinto's then chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques and chair Simon Thompson. The final report made a series of findings and recommendations, among them a call for a new Commonwealth cultural heritage protection Act, an overhaul of the WA heritage regime that had allowed a decades-old consent to override contemporary archaeological knowledge, and a form of restitution and reconstruction for the PKKP people.

The committee was notably blunt about corporate accountability. It found Rio Tinto's internal systems had allowed information about the site's significance to be known in parts of the business without triggering a halt to work, a communications failure the report treated as symptomatic of a broader cultural problem rather than a one-off breakdown. Rio Tinto's own internal board review, released before the parliamentary report, reached similar conclusions and directly preceded the executive departures.

The leadership fallout

By September 2020, three of Rio Tinto's most senior executives were gone. Chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques announced he would step down, alongside iron ore division head Chris Salisbury and corporate relations executive Simone Niven. It was, by the standards of ASX-listed mining companies, a rare case of a heritage and community failure reaching directly into the executive suite rather than being absorbed at a lower level and quietly forgotten.

Chair Simon Thompson later also announced he would not seek re-election, following continued shareholder pressure, including from major Australian and UK institutional investors who argued the board's initial response, docking bonuses rather than removing executives, had understated the seriousness of what had happened. It's a pattern I've watched play out in other governance failures on this masthead's patch: boards reach first for a financial penalty, and only shift to genuine accountability once investors and the public make clear that isn't going to cut it.

Rio Tinto subsequently entered into an agreement with the PKKP people intended to address remediation, heritage protection and future engagement, and the company has said publicly it accepted the parliamentary committee's findings. I'd note, for what it's worth, that accepting a report's findings and rebuilding the trust it documents losing are two different projects, and the second one takes considerably longer than a press release.

Why the heritage law mattered as much as the company

What makes Juukan Gorge different from, say, a straightforward safety or environmental prosecution is that the villain of the piece, in the inquiry's own framing, wasn't only corporate conduct. It was a regulatory framework under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 that gave traditional owners no genuine right of appeal once a section 18 consent was granted, no matter what new evidence emerged afterward. The committee's recommendation for a new Commonwealth Act, and for the WA government to overhaul its own regime, reflected a view that similar destruction could recur under the existing rules almost anywhere in the state.

Western Australia has since moved to replace the 1972 Act with new Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation, though the reform process itself has been contentious, revised and, at points, wound back following pressure from landholders and industry. That, too, is a live story, and one I expect to return to.

A failure that wasn't about the law

I keep coming back to a line from the committee's report: that Rio Tinto had the legal right to destroy the shelters, and destroyed them anyway, with full knowledge of what was there. That's a harder story to tell than a straightforward corporate crime, because there's no charge sheet, no verdict, no clean ending. There's a parliamentary finding, a chief executive's resignation, and a rock shelter that no longer exists.

Juukan Gorge sits alongside a run of Australian corporate reckonings that forced a similar reassessment of what boards are actually responsible for policing. Readers who followed the Hayne Royal Commission or the Crown Resorts inquiries will recognise the shape of it: an institution operating within the letter of a permissive framework, until a public inquiry made clear that wasn't good enough.

More of these stories, and how the inquiries that produced them actually worked, sit on our Scandals & Reckonings hub.