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Thursday, 07 June 2007 |
At the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, Britain’s then Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, approached Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies with a view to using Australia’s north-western coastline for atomic bomb tests. Menzies agreed, without consulting cabinet or Parliament, and soon afterwards the Monte Bello Islands atomic tests took place. Two years later the next British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, requested permission to test, this time in the outback. Between 1953 and 1965 the arid rangelands of South Australia were subjected to the detonation of nine major nuclear bombs, and many smaller bomb trials.
The first mainland atomic test in Australia, ‘Totem 1’, which took place on 15 October 1953 at Emu Field, South Australia, was 10 kilotons (Hiroshima was around 15 kilotons, the equivalent of 15,000 tonnes of TNT). Emu Field was soon abandoned and from 1956 tests were conducted at Maralinga, where a service village housing up to 17,000 staff was established.
In order to carry out the tests, thousands of Maralinga, Pitjantjatjara and Kokatha people were forcibly removed from their land by ‘Aboriginal Protectors’.
Nuclear weapons contain radioactive substances that are poisonous for up to 250,000 years and contaminate land and water systems. The radioactive exposure of the tests was extensive: dense radioactive clouds travelled far and caused much sickness and death across the deserts. Traditional owners speak of the ‘black mist’ that caused blindness and cancer.
However, before Australian citizenship was granted in the 1967 referendum, Indigenous people were neither counted in the Australian census nor accounted for in medical records kept. Thus there is a complete absence of records of the impact, health effects and deaths that occurred as a result of the tests.
During the mainland tests many army personnel were deliberately exposed to the blasts, to gauge the effect of radiation on troops. The testing range boundaries were not properly monitored, allowing people to walk in and out. Any signs were in English, which the local Indigenous population could not read. Fallout from the ground blasts led to massive contamination of the Australian interior; and the fallout from Maralinga even reached Adelaide and Melbourne. Some places are still heavily radioactive, due principally to the presence of 22 kilograms of plutonium, the most toxic element known to humans.
The test area remains unsafe for habitation for the next 250,000 years.
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There's been a little discussion about shifting focus from creating discreet workshops in town to finding points of community engagement in the myriad events and work that we have before us. This week we mapped out the next 18 months of the project and were excited and overwhelmed at how much we have on our communal plate, including the production of a documentary, upcoming filmmaking workshops in Ernabella in July and the SA/NT tour in September/October. We received funding through the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) to develop a mobile gallery to house and share the images and text produced by project participants throughout the project and started the first of a series of workshops in the newly renovated community building in Abbott's camp. And long-term project participant and established watercolour artist Elton Wirri flew to Melbourne last week to co-present with Company Director Scott Rankin at the Deakin Lectures.
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Clara Iaccarino
December 20, 2007
In a faded blue T-shirt and jeans, Trevor Jamieson flashes on to the
computer screen, swatting flies from his face as he welcomes
participants to Ngapartji Ngapartji's online community.
He is framed in a desert scene, the sun beating on his back as he
acknowledges the native landowners upon whose land he stands, flitting
between his indigenous tongue, Pitjantjatjara, and English.
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The family behind the Festival hit Ngapartji Ngapartji is finding the play is healing old wounds, for the family and the audience. |
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