18th December 2012
By Andy Whiteley
Co-Founder of Wake Up World

Background

Throughout 2012 Ryan and I (the founders of Wake Up World) have been working closely with a group of Australian colleagues to understand – and to help make public – the significance of a series of archaeological findings in bushlands of the Kariong/Gosford area on the Central Coast of NSW Australia. An area, I should add, that is under threat of being destroyed by large-scale residential development.
Findings in and around this site include early-indigenous and early-Egyptian hieroglyphs, 8-foot stone carvings, ancient jewellery, ochre caves, and remarkably, a recently-discovered series of underground tunnels and chambers which have yet to be explored in their entirety.

The validity of these findings has been confirmed by the local indigenous Elder ‘Aunty’ Bev Spiers, the keeper of lore for the local Darkinjung tribe, while the “hoax” theories relating to the site have been refuted in detail by David Fitzgerald, an indigenous man who previously worked as a sites officer for the National Parks & Wildlife Service.
More details of our findings can be found in a 3-part Wake Up World article series by our friend and colleague Steven Strong.

Media Involvement

In an effort to share these new findings with the wider community, we took Mary-Louise Vince, a reporter from ABC News (the Government owned news outlet in Australia) to the historical site and presented details of our findings.
Despite my skepticism of government-controlled media, at 6:00am on 10th December 2012, ABC Radio National News featured a 40 second story which presented some of our findings. The story was also covered by the ABC’s affiliate station Triple J Radio, and at approximately 8:30am an accompanying online article was posted on the ABC News website.
Strangely, by the afternoon, something had changed. The story was not mentioned on either ABC National News or Triple J News that afternoon, and – in an unprecedented move – the accompanying written article was withdrawn from the ABC News website along with two earlier (less controversial) ABC articles that relate to the Kariong site.
Inquiries were made of the ABC following the article’s removal from the site, and we were advised that – in accordance with “ABC policy” – a “more balanced” approach was needed to the topic, and that a statement from the National Parks & Wildlife Service would therefore be sought before the article was re-published.
I understand the concept of due-diligence. What I don’t understand is why that “diligence” was not done before the article made it to local ABC radio… before it reached the national ABC network… or before a online article was published on the ABC’s national news website.
Four more days passed, and our team wondered if our story would ever see the light of day. Eventually, on Friday 14th December, a “revised article” appeared on the ABC News website… entitled “Egyptologist debunks new claims about ‘Gosford glyphs’”.
Hmmmmmm……