Indigenous elder Shane Mortimer, a Nyamudy-Ngambri man, has described the act as "cultural vandalism" and believes the activity by the heavy machinery was deliberately timed so as to avoid any public attention or intervention.

But this claim is disputed by the developers, the Doma Group, with managing director Jure Domazet saying that construction of the development commenced prior to Christmas, including civil works and earthmoving, "as we satisfied the final preconditions of the approval that we had received from the Commonwealth some time ago".

Mr Mortimer has fought to protect the site which he says contain petroglyphs, tools and man-made markings tens of thousands of years old.

The elevated, former CSIRO site of 4.1 hectares was sold to the Doma Group, for a bargain price of $20 million in 2016.

The company has lodged plans to redevelop it as The Foothills, with eight-storey apartment buildings fronting Limestone Avenue and luxury apartments behind.

Mr Mortimer took his fight to rezone the area as one of significant Aboriginal heritage to the National Capital Authority which, in its consultation report of October 2019, was ambivalent as to its heritage value, and found no significance to the granite rock outcrops.

Mr Mortimer said that the site had been nominated for inclusion on the ACT Heritage Register and Navin Officer Heritage Consultants, in its report from November last year, investigated and assessed potential Indigenous heritage at the development site.

However, Mr Domazet said the rock formations were no longer being assessed by the council.

"The Commonwealth has jurisdiction over our site as it is national land, the site has been handed over to the construction team and we are carrying our development work in accordance with our development approvals," he said.

"We advised [the Heritage Council] when our site was first nominated as part of a much larger area in late 2020 that they had no jurisdiction over the site."

The Navin Officer report found one Aboriginal site, an artefact scatter. Two items of reported Aboriginal cultural significance were identified in the study area by Aboriginal representatives: a "pointer rock" and a boulder containing a reported Aboriginal petroglyph of a kangaroo motif.

At the time, the federal Environment Department said it had not consulted Indigenous groups because no world or national heritage sites had been identified on the land.

An NCA report acknowledged the developers' intention "to reuse the rock from the outcrops within communal landscape zones (for example, as part of ground cover or retaining walls)".

"The reuse of the rock is being considered as part of the detailed design for the site," it said in the report.

Mr Mortimer described the bulldozing of the rocks as distressing and disappointing, and urged an independent review.

"Just down the road we have police guarding some burnt doors of Old Parliament House that are not even 100 years old," he said.

"But these rocks are millions of years old; where were the police when they needed protection?"

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