“It’s deeply felt within the organisation, and I think we’ve got to use that to move us institutionally forward,” Barton told The Australian Financial Review’s mining summit on Wednesday.

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The PKKP Aboriginal Corporation said it was a sad day marking a “devastating loss” that would never be recovered.

“The destruction of our most significant cultural heritage site should not have happened,” PKKP Land Committee chairperson Burchell Hayes said.

Although the traditional owners’ loss could “never be recovered”, Hayes said remediation works were beginning to take shape.

Recent rehabilitation activities included seeding and replanting the area to revegetate the Juukan Gorge landscape with native plants, the PKKP said.

The traditional owners have sought a co-management agreement with Rio Tinto that would give them a greater say over future works on their ancestral lands.

“To ensure that we will never experience this senseless feeling of loss and devastation in the future, we are driven towards achieving a co-management process of Country with mining companies,” Hayes said.

“We have already started to see minor aspects of the co-management model working at Juukan Gorge, through rehabilitation works of some of the surrounding areas.”

Ancient artefacts unearthed at the Juukan Gorge shelters – including grinding and pounding stones, a 28,000-year-old marsupial bone sharpened into a tool and a 4000-year-old belt made of plaited human hair with DNA linking it directly to today’s PKKP people – had placed the caves among the most significant archaeological research sites in Australia as the only site to show evidence of continual human occupation through the last Ice Age.

“We have always said that we are not opposed to mining, but it needs to be done in the right way, involving traditional owners, and first of all, gaining our free, prior and informed consent,” Hayes said.

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