The point is you’re in the enlightened minority.

No most Europeans, including those in Australia care deeply about cultural preservation. In this case every European involved, the government, media and owner of the land all do. The odd thing is how the aboriginal people have done nothing to preserve this art for thousands of years. I would be curious to know if the previous vandals mentioned in TFA were leaving European or aboriginal names behind. One of the complaints the aboriginals had was lack of access to the cave. Europeans may be the ones more interested in preserving the ancient markings, the non-Europeans may be the ones more interested in making their own. Can anyone blame them?

Europeans everywhere care mostly about owning and profiting off of artwork, preservation of a work is important insofar as it allows Europeans to hoard the art and sell it, or grant prestige to their museums and galleries compared to other museums and galleries.

The cultural preservation is utterly unwanted - that's why things like the Benin bronzes have been forever broken and split up amongst Europeans in pieces, rather than retained as the one cultural work of being a history book for people to actually use in benin.

The same happens with Europeans in British Columbia. Rather than cultural preservation, the Europeans put totem poles on metal brackets to make sure they stay up forever and will never fall down, removing the intended time component of falling down, decaying, and being made anew. The intention of Europeans is to remove the cultural component and traditions, and turn it into an ownable artifact.

How was the Australian government profiting from installing security measures at the prehistoric cave art in TFA? I agree Europeans value history and sometimes see things as too static, but this is because Europeans are a thoughtful and sentimental people not because we are somehow profiting from putting delicate cave artifacts behind a gate.

Out of curiosity, what would you do, put an electric fence and surveillance cameras around it?

It's a hypothetical, but a couple cameras and a sign letting people know the area is under surveillance will probably do.

According to the article:

> The vandals forced their way past barbed wire and dug under a steel gate

so I doubt cameras and a sign sign would've deterred then.

In fairness, that same article suggests cameras would have helped.

> “The failure to build an effective gate, or to make use of modern security services, such as wildlife monitoring cameras that operate 24/7, has in many ways allowed this vandalism to occur,”