Unsettling truths about Australia’s uranium and nuclear history

a few unsettling home truths about Australia, as a far-flung outpost of what the writer B. Wongar has called the ‘Nuclear Empire’.

the plunder of native land for its enormous reserves of uranium has entrenched the country’s problematic engagement in world nuclearism and undermined its international credentials as a leading proponent of nuclear non-proliferation.

Anzac, New Mexico: Placing Australia in the Nuclear Empire, Meanjin, Robin Gerster, Dec 13 It is a lament that many Australian readers will recognise: an indigenous narrator is telling the story of colonial dispossession, from the time of white settlement to the rampant mining activity of today, expressing his helplessness in the face of an implacable force that reinscribes the very landscape it has taken over, mapped and mined………….

In August 1945, unable to boast a military role in such a king-hit to its hated enemy Japan, Australia sought another way to take a small slice of the wretched glory. Two days after the Hiroshima bombing, the claim was circulated that ‘Little Boy’ was fuelled by Australian uranium: ‘Uranium from S.A. source’, ran a story on page one of the Sydney Morning Herald. But the text itself says nothing more than the fact that uranium is vital to nuclear fission, that it had been mined at Mt Painter in South Australia, and (portentously) that supplies of the element had been ‘flown out’ from the mine’s newly constructed aerodrome. The Herald soon retracted the story, quoting Prime Minister Ben Chifley to the effect that ‘though Australia attempted to secure uranium for the atomic bomb, the production stage was never undertaken’. This was a minor humiliation in the scheme of things, but a reminder that Australia’s part in these epochal events was essentially peripheral. Undeterred, a Courier-Mail correspondent on 9 August, the day of reckoning for Nagasaki, claimed that Australia ‘gained prestige’ from the advent of the atomic bomb merely by being one of the world’s leading sources of the element.

Soon enough after the war, Australia became a major supplier of uranium to the United States and Britain, through its mines at Radium Hill in South Australia and Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory. In helping fuel the nuclear programs of its two major international patrons, Australia gained a place on the military and ideological battleground of the Cold War. It saw itself as a force to be reckoned with. When Prime Minister Robert Menzies opened the treatment plant at the Rum Jungle mine in the Northern Territory in September 1954, he made a point of asserting the defence role of Australian uranium in ensuring ‘the superiority of the Free World’. Sitting on the official dais, having made the journey to what must have seemed the Back of Beyond, were the American ambassador and the British high commissioner. No doubt Menzies was directing his words at them as well at the assembled guests, several of whom apparently ducked for cover when a large hopper truck capped the proceedings by dumping a load of uranium ore into the new treatment bins, creating a disturbing cloud of dust. ³ The setting and symbolism were both immediately telling and prophetic, for Australia’s atomic muscle-flexing was in the process, even then, of being compromised by its neocolonial willingness to accommodate the postwar nuclear testing program of Britain—a telegrammed request seems to have done the trick—and, in the long term, by its dutiful support for the geopolitical missile defence strategies of the United States.

That obscure placename ‘Anzac, New Mexico’ has since come to signify to me a few unsettling home truths about Australia, as a far-flung outpost of what the writer B. Wongar has called the ‘Nuclear Empire’. ⁴ For the spatial narrative of the nuclear colonisation of the Southwest is mirrored in Australia, where the plunder of native land for its enormous reserves of uranium has entrenched the country’s problematic engagement in world nuclearism and undermined its international credentials as a leading proponent of nuclear non-proliferation. Sometimes, as the cliché says, you have to go away to know what’s going on in your own back yard.

The main site of the Manhattan Project that developed ‘the bomb’, New Mexico remains the core of a national and indeed global military, scientific and industrial complex. This archipelago of nuclear and defence installations pockmarks the continental United States, extends to Hawaii and the distant atolls of the Pacific, and embraces faraway client nations such as the Japanese islands and the island continent of Australia. …….

The tortuous cultural politics of uranium mining in New Mexico look very familiar to an Australian. The clash of settler and native cultures, the racial hostility, the mesh of morality and legality: these have long marked the cultural, political and judicial battles fought over the mining and export of Australian uranium.

Australia’s Mount Taylor is Mount Brockman, a flat-topped sandstone escarpment not unlike the mesas of New Mexico, located in the Alligator Rivers region of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Called Djidbidjidbi by local Aborigines, the mountain is rich in sacred significance as the dwelling place of a totemic relative of the Rainbow Serpent. Disturb it at your peril. The place’s spiritual import, as the American writer Tom Zoellner reminds us in his work Uranium (2009), has long been lost on white Australia. Passing through the nearby country in 1840s, the doomed explorer Ludwig Leichhardt complained of ‘a most disheartening, sickening view over a tremendously rocky country’.

Geologists surveying the area in 1969 found the mesa much more attractive, especially after they located one of the richest lodes of uranium in the world, a line of which runs directly under Mount Brockman itself. When drilling a few years later confirmed the find, they became even more excited. ¹⁴

What proceeded from this fortuitous discovery turned into a national farce, albeit one that highlights the stark contrast in ways of seeing and using the land that divides European from Black Australia. Having acquired a lease to the ore bodies, located on the traditional lands of the Mirarr people, the Rio Tinto subsidiary Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) commenced operating the ‘Ranger’ mine in 1980, after being given the go-ahead by the recommendations of the Fox Report, as the published findings of the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry of 1976–77 are generally known. The Fox Report, as a contemporary commentator noted, spoke in ‘two tongues’. ¹⁵ Enthusiastically recognising Aboriginal land rights and noting the local indigenous opposition to mining, it recommended the proclamation of Kakadu National Park while also paving the way for mining in the same uranium-rich country.

Thus a national park was created with a uranium mine located on its fringe, serviced by a new town, Jabiru, located within the park itself—even though, as the report admitted, the possibility of this coexistence meant that ‘some of the spiritual and psychological benefit’ to the Aborigines granted by the national park ‘will be lost’.¹⁶ For many years Kakadu became a magnet for tourism, especially after the movie Crocodile Dundee (1986) popularised it for metropolitan audiences. However, the number of visitors has fallen drastically in recent years. ¹⁷ The Ranger mine has fared rather better, expanding into one of the world’s biggest, exporting some 10 per cent of the world’s uranium. At the same time, it has been plagued with controversy, especially over water management issues, including the radioactive contamination of the area’s celebrated wetlands. More than once, Kakadu’s prized UNESCO World Heritage listing has come into question……..http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/anzac-new-mexico-placing-australia-in-the-nuclear-empire/

December 31, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, history, Northern Territory, South Australia

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