Australia’s miserable history as part of the global nuclear empire
the outrage committed against the land and communities of Aboriginal Australia.
A small community of Aborigines at a nearby station was poisoned by the fallout, though it was unacknowledged at the time and for years afterwards.
Anzac, New Mexico: Placing Australia in the Nuclear Empire, Meanjin, Robin Gerster, Dec 13 “…………The Fox Report fiasco is indicative of contradictions in Australian political attitudes to the nuclear industry. Australia refuses to contemplate nuclear power plants on its own soil, but it is happy to peddle its uranium to numerous countries in Asia and Europe. The meltdown at Fukushima in Japan in 2011 (in a reactor complex owned and operated by a big buyer of Australian uranium) temporarily rocked the markets and embarrassed advocates of nuclear energy…..
The state governments of mining mainstays such as South and Western Australia have a cheerfully gung-ho attitude to uranium. Distant Fukushima is out of mind as well as well out of sight. In addition to hosting established mega-concerns such as BHP Billiton, operator of the Olympic Dam mine near Roxby Downs, South Australia is rolling out the red carpet for new players…….
At Four Mile in the northern Flinders Ranges, another mine has been given the go-ahead. It is majority-owned by a subsidiary of Heathgate Resources, operator of the existing mine at Beverley in the same region, which is itself an affiliate of the nuclear arms maker General Atomics…. ‘Nuclear-free’ Australia has some alarming business connections. …
After the Second World War, Australia wanted to keep some atomic stuff for itself in addition to supplying the product to the United States and Britain. In 1948, in a touch of the American West and mimicking the earlier initiative in the US government, the Chifley Labor government embarked on a campaign to stimulate the sourcing of uranium, offering a handsome bounty of £25,000 for discoveries. This encouraged a rush to rival the legendary gold rushes of the middle of the nineteenth century: indicatively, the Australian mining memoirs of the era have titles such as Frank Clune’s The Fortune Hunters (1957) and Ross Annabell’s Uranium Hunters (1971). The uranium fever spread beyond Australia, as far as the American south-west: as Alice Cawte reveals in her ground-breaking study Atomic Australia (1992), the Utah-based Uranium Magazine took a group of travellers to the Territory as part of a ‘uranium world tour’. 18
Uranium pioneering was conveniently integrated into the master Australian narrative of the European conquest of an alien continent, giving meaning to an Aboriginal landscape that had hitherto seemed beyond civilisation’s pale. Opening the treatment plant at Rum Jungle, Prime Minister Menzies remarked that before the uranium mine the Northern Territory was regarded as ‘so far on the outer as to be almost worthless to Australia’. 19 This official point of view was reinforced by several authoritative Australian writers of the day, such as Alan Moorehead in his book Rum Jungle(1953). The once-despised Territory was suddenly to be valued; the mine held out ‘the prospect that a new California will be created here on the Arafura Sea’. 20 Likewise the Woomera long-range rocket and missile range, a vast stretch of South Australian terrain bigger in size than England, the country into whose service it was pressed. Created in 1947 under the terms of the Anglo-Australian Joint Defence Project, Woomera was ‘no more than a dot on an empty map’ before the rockets and missiles, Moorhead observed. ‘Absolutely nothing had happened in this desert,’ he wrote, except ‘the roamings of the aborigines and the kangaroos and the interminable moochings of the white ants’: an interesting collection of native fauna. Loathing the ‘desolation’ and ‘nothingness’ of the Aboriginal landscape, Moorhead looked heavenward in locating Australia’s sunny national future. The rocket launchers lying outside Woomera township ‘point up silently into the sky like signposts’, worthy symbols of Australia’s vaulting postwar national aspiration. 21
Way out in the far south-west of what eventually became known as the Woomera Prohibited Area, the British nuclear testing sites also inhabited a vacuum before being dragged into the orbit of Cold War military one-upmanship. Writing pro-nuclear propaganda for the Canberra-based Australian News and Information Bureau in the 1950s, the novelist T.A.G. Hungerford observed that Maralinga village, the makeshift town servicing the main permanent testing site, was a place ‘where no people have ever lived—if they could help it’. The detonations at Maralinga ‘endowed’ useless land ‘with a purpose’. 22 The spin was necessary, for the British testing wasn’t going entirely to plan and the Australian government wanted to calm public disquiet. ‘Totem One’, the first of the mainland bomb tests, conducted in October 1953 at Emu Field to the north of Maralinga, produced a bigger-than-expected detonation that sent a radioactive cloud out over the continent.
A small community of Aborigines at a nearby station was poisoned by the fallout, though it was unacknowledged at the time and for years afterwards. The next day, a photograph of the ‘atomic mushroom’ surging into the sky was published on the front page of the Canberra Times, containing the caption that the plume ‘took the shape of the profile of an aborigine’. One has to use one’s imagination to see it, and the implication of the reference is no doubt unintended, but it is an apt enough image. 23 As has been thoroughly documented, the testing left a legacy of ill-health not only among service personnel but also local Aborigines (how many remains a matter of dispute), who were carelessly put in harm’s way……..
There were ‘only’ twelve major atomic bomb explosions on Australian soil, though these were followed by several hundred top-secret ‘trials’ and ‘experiments’ from 1959 to 1963, including the notorious ‘Vixen B’ series, which left a toxic legacy of plutonium contamination at Maralinga. Yet the testing was disregarded in Australia until the mid 1980s, until belatedly exposed by the findings of the McClelland Royal Commission. To this day, as Robert Drewe has recently observed, the general public remains ignorant about the big British nuclear blasts in the Montebello islands eighty nautical miles off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia. Now-infamous Maralinga occasionally makes the papers, usually involving reportage of the ongoing compensation claims against the British government, made by a small surviving band of ‘atomic veterans’, soldiers and civilians who worked at the testing sites.
Yet even the McClelland Royal Commission, by being so intent on putting the boot into Britain and aberrant local political ‘lickspittles’ such as Menzies, tended to diminish Australian complicity in the testing, and the outrage committed against the land and communities of Aboriginal Australia. According to Graeme Turner’s analysis, the proceedings of commission, dominated by its unapologetically Anglophobic president ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland, turned into something of a ‘melodrama’ of ‘British lies, British stooges, British bastardry’. McClelland may have had a point, and a good one at that. But in this nationalist ‘narrative of postcolonial politics’, the domestic colonialist interface between White and Black Australia was conveniently overlooked. 26
Like the spectral Aborigine in the Canberra Times photograph, Australia’s national nuclear ambitions ultimately evaporated too. Historically anxious about its vulnerability to attack from the Asian north, Australia had once dreamed of developing a nuclear arsenal of its own: why provide the raw material for others when the bombs could be made at home? Menzies himself was reluctant for Australia to venture into the business of nuclear arms manufacture, but one of his near successors, John Gorton, was more enthusiastic. As prime minister during the fraught Vietnam War years of the late 1960s, Gorton was keen to build a reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium, at Jervis Bay on the NSW south coast, a plan supported by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. In 1999 he recalled that, ‘We were interested in this thing, because it could provide electricity to everybody and it could, if you decided later on, it could make an atomic bomb.’ The bomb was never made, and Australia had nothing to show for its nuclear ambitions but hundreds of square kilometres of poisoned native bush and thousands of tonnes of plutonium-contaminated debris. 27
Maralinga today stands as sad testimony to what might have been. Once it was a bustling community of several hundred service personnel and scientists, a ‘Los Alamos of the Commonwealth’. 28Now it is a ruined monument to the folly of Australian acquiescence in British nuclearism. The main street in Maralinga Village, appropriately enough called ‘London Road’ (given who was really running the place) bisects a ghost town. Among the tin sheds, water tanks, the concrete floors and foundations of dismantled buildings, the abandoned tennis courts and the crumbling amphitheatre of what was a swimming pool, a few Hill’s hoists circle dizzily in the desert wind: a telling icon of a project so embedded in the aspirations of 1950s Australia. Only the colossal airstrip, one of the world’s biggest, reminds the visitor of its glory days.
An ironic fate may be in store for the irradiated test sites of the 1950s and 1960s. Now that Woomera has outlived its military usefulness, the federal Labor government in 2011 announced that the Woomera Prohibited Area would be opened up to mineral exploration and resources development: uranium mining will almost inevitably follow. An even more unpleasant outcome awaits. A prominent Northern Territory indigenous politician, Japarta Ryan, the founder of the First Nations political party, has proposed that the nuclear waste dump slated for Muckaty Station north of Tennant Creek be relocated to Maralinga. The Northern Territory is ‘pristine’ and Maralinga has already been nuked, so why not? 29 Naturally, the local custodians of Maralinga, the Tjarutja people, aren’t exactly attracted by the idea. After all, they have only recently been handed back the decontaminated land, though just how ‘clean’ it is remains open to question: signs near the testing locations warn against the hunting and in-ground cooking of kangaroo. For years the Tjarutja have been wondering what to do with the land, including toying with the idea of opening it up to tourism, making it South Australia’s newest holiday ‘hotspot’, in the scornful phrase of the Adelaide Advertiser. 30 So, in a miserable footnote to what had promised to be the grand nation-building narrative of postwar atomic Australia, Aboriginal peoples are squabbling over who should play host to nuclear waste.
Driving into the ‘village’ at Woomera a few months after my visit to New Mexico, en route to the Olympic Dam mine at Roxby Downs eighty kilometres to the north, the pervasive air of desolation reminded me of … well, it reminded me of Anzac, New Mexico. In the 1950s into the 1960s, the Woomera community was several thousand strong, full of life and purpose, engaged in the visionary enterprise of air and space research, testing and development. At one time Woomera ranked second only to Cape Canaveral in the annual number of rocket and missile launches. Now it is a dismal place of a few hundred, a derelict suburb on the edge of a city that doesn’t exist. ‘Camp Rapier’, formerly the infamous Immigration Detention Centre shut down in 2003 amid allegations of systematic brutality, has been kept up as a Defence support facility, and seems to be the best maintained building in town, other than the pub, the church and a ‘Missile Park’ containing a modest collection of superannuated rockets and missiles, pointing somewhat futilely into the desert sky. Most of the houses have been removed or demolished. The suburban streets are rutted and deserted; several go nowhere. Shelves were empty in the grocery store on the day I visited, though the liquor section seemed well stocked. The despair was palpable.
Heading out of town on the highway to Roxby Downs, I stopped at the town cemetery. It contains the graves of numerous stillborn babies from the 1950s, though pride of place goes to the memorial to the larrikin surveyor and road builder Len Beadell, who first located the future bomb site at Maralinga and who was once a hero in these now forsaken parts. Further up the road, north towards Roxby, some apocalyptic wag had scrawled on the bitumen the definitive words, ‘The End’….http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/anzac-new-mexico-placing-australia-in-the-nuclear-empire/
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