WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

and the remains of a forge was cited to have been found (R Anderson pers. comm.
March 2010). If similar artefacts were recovered at Careening Bay, they may not
provide more information than has already been gained from these other sites. As
such, it is unlikely Careening Bay would yield additional information of national
importance.
In summary Careening Bay is considered to be below threshold under criterion (c).
This is due to the lack of demonstrable archaeological evidence at the site and the
uncertainty as to whether the archaeological evidence, were it actually found, would
offer additional information of national significance.
On the basis of current evidence Careening Bay and Karrakatta Bay is below
threshold under criterion (c) for their potential to yield information that will
contribute to an understanding of Australia's natural or cultural history.
CRITERION (d) – The place has outstanding heritage value because of the place's
importance in demonstrating the principal characteristics of
i. a class of Australia's natural or cultural places; or
ii. a class of Australia's natural or cultural environments.
ANCIENT LANDSCAPES, GEOLOGICAL PROCESSES
The Kimberley coast from the Helpman Islands in King Sound to Cambridge Gulf is
very intricate in plan form, with a rugged, deeply embayed, coastline including
sounds, narrow inlets and archipelagos, as well as inundated terrestrial (fluvial)
landscapes of the Pleistocene reflected in bathymetry. It is a ria coast – the result of
post-glacial flooding of a fluvial landscape which itself developed with strong control
by folding, faulting and jointing bedrock structures (Sharples 2009; Maher and Copp
2009). Consequently, much of the coastline, the archipelagos and the bathymetry are
strongly controlled by large-scale bedrock folding structures (for example, the
Buccaneer Archipelago region and Yampi Peninsula) or fault and joint structures (for
example, the Prince Regent River) which are the result of deformation, faulting and
metamorphism during the Hooper, Yampi and King Leopold orogenies in the
Proterozoic and earliest Palaeozoic eons (detailed separately below under criterion
(a)). The complex morphology of the modern coastal and subtidal seafloor landscapes
is inherited from these ancient earth movements (Sharples 2009; Wilson 2009a).
A ria coast is a four-dimensional entity with a modern form expressing both its
history and the processes that have shaped it. Along the Kimberley coast over the last
two million years, sea level changes during each Pleistocene glacial/interglacial cycle
inundated ranges, upland valleys and river gorges to form narrow peninsulas, long
inlets, deep embayments and submarine canyons, and the hills that once rose above
lowlands are now islands and submerged rises, in a repetition of earlier sea level
changes (Maher and Copp 2009).
Specialist coastal geomorphologists attending a workshop examining the heritage
values of Australian rocky coasts, organised by DEWHA in July 2009, established
that the Kimberley ria coast is among the top six rocky coasts (because of the
processes that shaped and continue to shape it) and arguably the most important ria
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