‘We’re talking about 2,000 generations’: Mungo Man and Mungo Lady reburial divides traditional owners

Traditional owners in western New South Wales are divided over a decision to rebury Mungo Man and Mungo Lady without a public memorial or keeping place.

The 42,000-year-old remains, which are the oldest human remains ever found in Australia, will be reburied along with 106 others in 26 burial sites spread across Mungo national park and nearby lease areas.

But a number of members of the Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples, who have custodianship of the area, say that burying the remains in unknown locations, rather than interring them in a public keeping place, will undermine the value of the world heritage area and goes against the wishes of previous generations.

Instead, they say, the remains should be housed on country in a way that celebrates and memorialises the impact they have had on Australian history, and the scientific recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the oldest continuous culture on Earth.

Five traditional owners, as well as Jim Bowler, the geologist who discovered Mungo Lady and Mungo Man in 1968 and 1974 respectively, wrote to the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, on 14 April to demand that she explain her reasons for approving the reburial. As of Friday, they had not received a response.

The letter, seen by Guardian Australia, says the reburial proposal has caused "immeasurable cultural harm and soul sickness".

"If they go and do this, then our future generations are losing their cultural identity," one of the signatories, Mutthi Mutthi man Jason Kelly, tells Guardian Australia. "There has been no free, prior and informed consent from the community of this decision."

Prof Bowler also plans to write to Unesco to argue that if the reburial goes ahead as planned, the world heritage area should be considered an endangered site.

Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were central to the decision to grant the area world heritage status in 2007 on the grounds of outstanding natural and cultural values, Bowler says.

"Their disappearance of their confidential disposal into the ground is equivalent to the virtual closing off of the inspiration that provided the very basis for world heritage inscription," he says. "It will have a devastating effect."

Ley approved the reburial plan late last month, and said in a statement on 6 April announcing her decision that it was taken following a public consultation period and after she visited the Willandra Lakes and discussed the issue with traditional owners.

"I have found that while it is important that we are able to document history, it is equally important that we respect the cultural intent of the burial process and the heartfelt views of the descendants," the statement said.

Support for the reburial plan comes from the Willandra Lakes Region Aboriginal advisory group, a body established in 2015 to advise on the management of the world heritage area. It is made up of nine members of the three traditional owner groups.

But Kelly and others say the advisory group no longer represents the view of the broader traditional owner groups. He and his father, Danny Kelly, were both members of the Aboriginal advisory group until August last year, when they were removed for breaching NSW government guidelines by speaking publicly against the proposal.

Both disagree that they breached guidelines and say they adamantly support the reburial of the remains - provided that is accompanied by a firm commitment to design and build a keeping place.

The chair of the advisory group, Patsy Winch, is Danny Kelly's sister. She has declined all media interviews since the reburial decision was announced, but said in a statement issued by the NSW government that she was happy and relieved a conclusion had been reached.

"Finally, after all that time has passed, the voices of the elders have been heard and I am thankful that these ancestral remains will finally be laid to rest the traditional way, in Country," she said.

The advisory group did not hold public meetings for traditional owners on the reburial proposal. The public consultation process cited by Ley received 162 submissions. According to a summary published by Heritage NSW, just 10 were from either a traditional owner or traditional owner organisation for Willandra, and five more were from First Nations organisations or individuals.

One of those submissions was from Kelly. He says it was not a consultation process "that Aboriginal people are able to navigate or understand".

He also said the wording of the proposal misrepresented the plan for a keeping place - describing it as an alternative to reburial. Kelly says the wishes of elders had always been for the remains to be laid to rest and for a keeping place to be constructed - not contrary proposals, but existing side by side.

He spoke against the current reburial proposal after reading the minutes of meetings with elders about what should be done to return the remains to Country, dating back to 1982. His grandmother, Alice Kelly, was a member of the original consultation group.

The advisory group supported the establishment of a keeping place until 2018, when it was presented with a reburial plan by staff from the NSW office of environment and heritage.

"It was a 103-page document and the committee was asked to agree on the back of a 10-minute presentation," Kelly said.

A spokesperson for Ley said concerns the reburial proposal would deteriorate the cultural values of the world heritage area "misrepresents the spirit of the decision, the rights of traditional owners, and the outstanding universal value of the site under the world heritage convention".

They said the reburial would be done in a way that minimises the chances of natural decay and the locations would be recorded.

Barkindji man Michael Young, who also signed the letter to Ley, says the creation of a keeping place was "always the proposal".

Eminent architects have been approached over the past 20 years to provide a design, culminating in Glenn Murcutt, who visited the Willandra Lakes in the early 2010s and agreed to take on the job as one of the final commissions of his career.

Murcutt was accompanied to the region by Michael Ockwell, who was the chair of the Willandra Lakes region community management council for 20 years. That committee was disbanded in 2013 to make way for the yet to be realised Indigenous management of the park.

The proposal for a keeping place was developed by that committee in consultation with elders from the traditional owner group.

"The idea was that there would be a crypt or repository and it would have attached to it an education or cultural centre," Ockwell says.

The proposal had the full support of the three traditional owner groups at the time.

He says the failure to act on it "was always a question of funding". They hired a consultant to help develop a business case in an attempt to convince the NSW government.

"I think it's fair to say that as far as the NSW government was concerned it never made the case sufficiently well enough to justify government funding," Ockwell says.

Young says if the park was jointly managed by traditional owners, this would not have happened. Barkindji people were awarded native title over 80% of the national park in 2015, and have applied to be able to jointly manage the area. That application has been sitting unanswered with the NSW government for six years.

"Aboriginal people need to be custodians," he said. "We're talking about nearly 2,000 generations here. Why is it that this generation has to go out and destroy that presence and these icons of Aboriginal Australia?

"Any one of these 106 [other ancestral remains] could be older than Mungo Man or woman but we haven't even started scratching the surface."