What it's really like to visit the 50,000-year-old rock art in WA

The road to the main viewing area for Murujuga's 50,000-year-old art is past Woodside's giant gas mining and export hub.

As you listen to the ancient stories of lore and culture carved into rocks before you, the tangle of cranes, tanks, buildings and towers typical of huge industrial facilities sit at your back.

The Murujuga petroglyphs and their landscape have just been World Heritage listed, less than two months after the federal government handed Woodside a provisional licence to extend its north west gas operations by 40 years to 2070.

The carvings - at least one million of them - are spread over a series rock outcrops on the Burrup peninsula and surrounding islands just outside Karratha in north-west Western Australia.

"This is like a massive database," our guide, Ngarluma woman Sarah Hicks, says.

History and knowledge are recorded in each image.

A dissected kangaroo is an instructional image showing how to carve up the animal and use its parts for food, blankets, pants and combs.

An emu, or jankurna, engraving reflects the emu-shaped spaces and dust lanes of the Milky Way in the night sky, a guide to the seasons and when to hunt.

A Tasmanian tiger records the extinct marsupial's presence thousands of years ago on the Australian mainland.

A prehistoric fat-tailed kangaroo, mangguru, is depicted standing on four legs in its massive megafauna state, long before it evolved to hopping.

As we walk and talk, small rock wallabies navigate the hardy red stones on the outcrop peaks.

Ms Hicks says the presence of living animals on our visit is a good sign.

There are carvings everywhere, some more faded - and older - than others. There are whales and stingrays, mice and fish tails, dingoes, quolls, goannas, spears - and people.

Though we are asked not to take photographs of depictions of people.

The outback collection - the world's largest, densest and most diverse collection of rock art engravings - is still revealing its secrets.

A women's business carving of a hand was newly discovered and catalogued only weeks ago, Ms Hicks said.

A Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation senior ranger, she shares the stories not only of the art but of the uses of plants around the base of the rocks.

The bloodwood sap boiled with water to treat illness, the sticky spinifex grass (baru) burnt to make strong glue for spears and axes, the flowers that reveal when to fish depending on their bloom, and the bush tomatoes that taste like a mixture of squash and capsicum.

She's assisted by young Ngarluma man Riley Sebastian, a ranger still learning.

He confesses he's never tried a bush tomato or sap medicine, but Ms Hicks says local elders still consume both.

As the talk ends, our small group of well-to-do east coasters and European tourists pass a team of air quality monitors checking emissions levels from the nearby gas and fertiliser plants and iron ore and salt export facilities.

It is "highly likely" these operations are contributing to higher acid levels in the air which is deteriorating the carvings, a recent report found.

We turn back to the dystopian landscape dominated by the machinery of natural resource extraction.

The contrast could not be more stark.

Woodside says it's committed to "protecting and managing this precious and culturally significant place".

"Woodside has taken and continues to take proactive steps - including through emissions reduction, data sharing and ongoing support for the Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program (MRAMP) - to ensure we manage our impacts responsibly," a spokesman said.

He said recent research shows the landscape and its ancient art can live alongside the gas operations with responsible management.

For at least 47,000 years the Ngarluma, Mardudhunera, Yaburara, Yindjibarndi, and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo peoples have slowly, carefully managed their relationship with the Pilbara land, sea and their wildlife.

That record of management exists in the Murujuga petroglyphs.

If the elders were still carving records into the rocks today, I wonder how they would tell the story of the oil and gas operations on their doorstep.