Welcome to Nuclear Matters, a podcast exploring
the use of nuclear technologies in Australia.
I'm your host, Liz Williams. I'm a nuclear physicist
and lead of the nuclear systems discipline in
the Australian National University School of
Engineering. To begin our first episode, I want
to acknowledge that the topic we're exploring
can be contentious. With that in mind, I'll take
some time to set the scene. My aim here is to
create a space where diverse perspectives about
nuclear technology and their uses in an Australian
context can be shared openly. My views will,
of course, shape the questions I ask, but so
will my lived experience as a woman working in
nuclear science and engineering. I've had many
conversations over the years about nuclear technologies
and heard about people's fears, as well as their
hopes and dreams, about the role these technologies
might play in our future. As for my own view
on nuclear matters, my perspective on whether,
when, and how to use and manage nuclear technologies
is complicated and is ultimately shaped by the
context and use case in question. With that in
mind, I've invited Dr. Jessica Urwin to help
us explore Australia's nuclear history. Jessica
is a lecturer in environmental history at the
University of Tasmania and recently completed
her PhD focusing on nuclear colonialism in Australia
here at the ANU. Her research reveals the long
history of Australia's engagement with nuclear
technologies and materials and its impacts on
Aboriginal communities in South Australia. This
history continues to shape discussions and decisions
about the use of nuclear technologies and the
ways we manage their byproducts in this country
today. Thank you for joining me and thank you
for coming to share the work that you've been
doing with us. No, thank you. I'm very excited
to be here. Let's start with the term nuclear
colonialism. Can you tell us what that means?
Yeah, so nuclear colonialism more generally has
quite a standard definition. It comes from the
North American or largely North American idea
of environmental justice, which was a movement
in the 1980s from mostly people of colour who
were protesting the siting and polluting of their
neighbourhoods, etc. So the standard definition
of nuclear colonialism is, and I've got a quote
here, a system of domination through which governments
and corporations disproportionately target and
devastate Indigenous peoples and their lands
to maintain the nuclear production process. And
so with that, it is quite North American centric.
So a lot of what I've tried to do with my work
is think about what does nuclear colonialism
look like in Australia, which has a very deep
and enmeshed settler colonial history and what
that might mean. So for me, I think of nuclear
colonialism as a multi -directional process.
It's a process in which colonial forces, colonial
mechanisms, the kind of mesh of settler -clonial
society have intersected with nuclear processes,
whether that be prospecting for radium in the
early decades of the 20th century, uranium mining,
nuclear weapons testing, waste dumping, current
debates over nuclear power, etc. But also the
way that it has been forced to adapt by communities
who protest. or resist colonialism in their everyday
lives. So that's really how I see it. It's quite
a long -winded way of answering that question,
but I think it has a simple definition, but there
are much more expansive ways to think about how
nuclear colonialism shows up in the everyday
and how it has historically as well. I'm wondering
what this system traces back to in Australia.
Like, is there a beginning? Can we label a beginning
to this whole process? Yeah, the beginning is
a funny one because a lot of scholars We'll look
at nuclear colonialism and see it as relating
to what many refer to as nuclear imperialism
was this new era of empire that started with
the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And there was this idea that with the beginning
of the nuclear age in 1945, we entered this new
period of history dominated by militarization
and nuclear technologies. My slight issue with
this idea of this being the beginning of nuclear
colonialism or nuclear imperialism is it leaves
behind a lot of what came before that, which
is the very fabric of nuclear colonialism, really.
So for me, I've tried to trace nuclear colonialism
as back as far as we can. For me, that's the
introduction of radioactive minerals in Australia
as an idea. The Curies, when they're looking
for radioactive materials to do their experiments
in the late 1800s, early 1900s, kick -started
a really big push to find radium in Australia.
And while at that point we didn't have the notion
of nuclear physics or nuclear weapons and the
nuclear age was 45 years away, it's the beginning
of this idea of radioactivity as a marvel of
science. ends up becoming really fundamental
to how it is considered in the 1940s, 50s, 60s
and onwards. So I tried to trace it right back,
but scholars are all disagreeing about this,
whether it's 1945, whether it has to be to do
with nuclear weapons or whether it can also be
traced back to... minerals that on their own
might not be considered nuclear materials, but
are fundamental to the nuclear fuel cycle. So
radium, for instance, you look at the naturally
occurring isotopes of uranium and it's part of
the decay chains, right? So when you're finding
radium, you're also finding uranium. So what
was radium used for? Why was it such a sought
after thing? So radium's an interesting one in
that eventually it would be used for medicine.
So a lot of early discoveries of radium were
being used for experimentation to figure out
how one might cure cancer or treat cancer. A
lot of dermatological ailments were being treated
with radium. Radium therapies such as, you know,
you'd go to a radium spring and soak yourself
in these radium infused waters and it would bring
you health. And so early on, it really was a
bit of a wonder mineral, really, that people,
scientists were speculating that it had all sorts
of applications. But it was also at a period
when people were searching for things that would
make them a lot of money, that would be the new
marvel of science. And radium, early on, it was
clear that radium emitted energy and there was
a sense that it could be used for power potentially,
but also that it had... the potential to become
an explosive. That really didn't materialize
into a real desire until the world wars, when
there was a sense that we might be able to create
a new bomb with these minerals. Very early on,
it was very much a case of this can help us in
hospitals, it can help us in clinics. And because
there were so many question marks around what
radium could actually do, scientists were desperate
to get their hands on this. seemingly special
metal that they might be able to figure out what
they could do with it. But at the time, in the
first decade of the 20th century, there was only
one known source of radium. And so in somewhere
like Australia, where we have so many minerals
and we had made so much money off minerals, even
by the first decade of the 20th century, there
was a sense that, well, if there's going to be
radium anywhere, there's probably going to be
radium in Australia. So there were a lot of people
keen to find it because it would lie in their
pockets. They'd be able to export it. to the
Curies and others who would then use it for medical
therapies. The other thing it was used for, and
people might know this story, but it's glow -in
-the -dark properties were used for watch faces
and clocks. So that's how you end up with the
story of the radium girls of the United States
who were painting clock dials and watch faces
and licking the paintbrushes and ending up getting
very, very, very sick. So this idea that Australia
would have this because we had everything, this
was prompting an interest in prospecting for
this. I'm interested in your work. You look at
how Aboriginal communities were both involved
in but also impacted by that work. So can you
tell us a bit of that story? The story of radium
in Australia really is that it was discovered
in Australia by prospectors in the early 20th
century, so in 1906. a man called Arthur Smith
was scrabbling around for some tin and he came
across an ore that he didn't recognise. And so
at this time, most state governments, because
at this time we had federated, so we were no
longer under colonial governments, but previously
colonial governments and then state governments
had incentivised finding new minerals. So if
anyone found new minerals that ended up being
of any worth to the Crown, they would receive
really significant royalties. So if you saw a
mineral you didn't know, you sent a sample to
the State Department. geology. So he sent off
this sample and even the geological department
of the government didn't know what it was. So
they sent it to Douglas Mawson, who at the time
was lecturer of petrology and geology at the
University of Adelaide. And he was purportedly
good friends with Marie Curie, who had told him
that he needed to be looking for yellow and green
in these minerals and that he may have found
what would be radium, you know, the child of
the wonder mineral uranium, as she kind of put
it. So this then led to a big rush of people
because at that time you could just buy a miner's
right. So for a very small fee, you'd buy a miner's
right, which gave you right to mine a little
patch of land. And people would just buy up the
land around where the mineral had been found
in the hope that their patch struck gold or radium,
so to speak. And so Douglas Mawson and a bunch
of other people headed into the Flinders Ranges
to look for this mineral. Unfortunately, mining
then as it is now is really backbreaking work.
The Flinders Ranges are incredibly hard to access.
And so there were a lot of stations around the
Flinders Ranges who had for a long time been
distributing rations to Aboriginal communities.
A lot of Aboriginal communities lived on the
fringes of these stations because it was a source
of food, it was a source of employment, and it
was a place that they could gather on their country
after their country had been taken and there
had been lots of European incursion into their
country. So there was a particular camel depot
in the Flinders Ranges where Aboriginal people
found employment as cameleers. Yeah. And they
would go out with the prospectors. They would
work the camels. They would handle the camels.
And in the case of Douglas Mawson, his company
actually hired a number of people to handle camels,
one of whom, I believe, would have been an Adnaman
Yaman, who they referred to as Claypan George.
But his role was to look after the camels and
help. put ore into the baskets on the camels
so the camels would carry all of the ore out
of the flinders. So in this way, they were involved
in the labour of radium extraction, but this
extraction was happening on their country at
the same time. And so the other thing that is
included in the story of nuclear colonialism
at its earliest stages, I suppose, is the way
in which Aboriginal knowledge of mineralisation
was used by prospectors. A lot of prospectors
credited their understanding of certain minerals
as being important to the Aboriginal people they
spoke with or hired who knew that there were
minerals in this area because they traded them
themselves or they extracted them for themselves,
ochre, for example. So there are many ways the
story is intertwined, but largely by virtue of
occurring on lands where mining was essentially
opening up new lands to settlers who hadn't yet.
ventured as far. But because there was this promise
of mineral wealth in these seemingly untouched
by settlers reaches of the country, they end
up going out with prospectors, employing Aboriginal
people to help them find ore, extract the ore,
and then they export that back to the cities.
Right. Okay. So in some sense, they are benefiting
because they are being employed to do this kind
of work in some sense their their knowledge about
their country the mineral wealth etc is being
exploited on some level by these prospectors
who are using that knowledge to line their own
pockets do you have a sense of how the communities
now view that kind of activity Not particularly.
It should be said that around the Flinders Ranges
at the time that this would have been happening,
there were a number of communities that now are
contemporarily referred to as the Adenomania.
So they were much further afield. But what was
happening in this period at the same time is
concurrent with mining. The colonisation of Australia
had led to stations and missions and other settler
kind of hubs, I suppose. encouraging Aboriginal
people to gather around them. It made the management
of Aboriginal people much easier for colonial
authorities. It meant that land was freed up
for settlers and prospectors and pastoralists
in particular. So while a lot of these people
may have found some kind of employment on stations,
they were actively paid far less than European
prospectors and they were reimbursed small increments
essentially. because they were living on the
fringes of settlements that were occurring on
their own country. So it meant they still had
access to country by virtue of working on this
land, but it was essentially a payoff that in
order to maintain access to country, access to,
I should also say resources, because stock was
massively impacting traditional food sources.
As I'm sure people will know, there are no native
animals in Australia that have hooves. So to
bring hoofed animals to Australia had a massive
impact on traditional food and water sources.
Water holes became contaminated by stock. And
so a lot of food that Aboriginal people would
have relied on was being taken out of their traditional
food cycle because of stock and incursion by
settlers. So it meant that rations became a way
of not only... feeding communities who were otherwise
not able to access a lot of the traditional food
sources they would have done. But it was a way
of encouraging people to gather in spaces where
they could be controlled by authorities. So this
is one way I've been looking at how colonialism
and nuclear processes intersect, because while
they seem very separate, mining is facilitated
by these systems that are. pre -existing because
of settler colonialism but we'll later see as
well that the nuclear testing was able to work
in the same kind of way yeah through existing
colonial mechanisms such as pastoralism stations
missions in particular yeah well that maybe we
should go to that story um Because that's actually
where I usually start this conversation with
my students about the British weapons tests at
Maralinga and Emu Field. And so can you tell
us about how do these patterns that we're starting
to already see in these radium prospecting kind
of era where you're seeing massive changes, I
would imagine, to the Flinders Ranges in the
country there. Like, how do we see those same
patterns in the early days of leading up to the
weapons tests? Yeah, so the way I kind of think
about this and some of the people who worked
on the Royal Commission to the nuclear tests
have thought about this is that really in order
to pave the way for the nuclear testing, authorities
capitalised on missions, stations and superstitions.
So in the central deserts where the inland testing
sites were selected, there was a big Aboriginal
reserve through the middle of the deserts. And
there were lots of debates over whether it was
morally right to put a nuclear testing site right
through the middle of an Aboriginal reserve.
But there were a lot of authorities at the time
who were trying to encourage Aboriginal people
to assimilate into Australian society. So what's
important to the story of nuclear testing in
the centre of Australia really is that it's at
a turning point. Aboriginal welfare policies
in Australia, where we're moving from protectionism
or segregation, where Aboriginal communities
are being kept on reserves, they're being separated
out from the settler society to avoid what authorities
understood as corruption, but really was just
to separate Aboriginal people out, to a process
of assimilation where they want to move people
off their lands, into communities, onto settlements,
into what they see as meaningful work. And this
was seen as a really important part of the post
-war modernisation of Australia. It was this
idea of moving Aboriginal people into the Australian
way of life. So it was felt that actually closing
the Aboriginal reserve in the middle of the central
deserts and allowing nuclear testing to happen
there would allow Australia to move into this
modern era in two ways. One, by assimilating
Aboriginal people and two, by testing weapons
and being involved in the development of nuclear
weapons for the British Commonwealth. So the
way it ends up working really is that this desert
landscape was very much inhabited, but a lot
of authorities understood it as this arid, seemingly
uninhabitable place, this notion that no one
could possibly live in the desert because it's
really, really sandy and it's dry and there's
nothing there. But for those of you who might
be listening who don't have a sense of what the
Australian Central Deserts look like, it is an
incredibly vibrant ecosystem of lots of plants
and grasses and animal species. So it was very
much inhabited. But colonisation hadn't done
a particularly good job with desert spaces because
they felt like they weren't particularly usable.
But nuclear weapons testing provided utility
to spaces that had previously been considered
completely unable to be utilised. We can bomb
these places and now they have worth to the system,
which is really sad. But you see this across
the world. You see this in the United States
and other places where testing has taken place
in the desert. And so in order to make sure that
people were not in the area when the testing
occurred, authorities... capitalized on missions
that were stationed around the edges of the central
desert. They encouraged mission staff to bring
as many people to the missions as possible, discourage
movement in and across the central deserts. So
that's missions. Stations was the second one.
So the distribution of rations, again, even 40,
50 years after the early radium prospecting period,
using rations to encourage people to stay on
stations or even withholding rations to prevent
people from moving around. So that was very common.
And then thirdly, superstitions, which is probably
one of the sadder. are methods that was used
but it is there's lots of evidence to suggest
that missions as well as stations and or and
people in control of Aboriginal movement through
the central desert's welfare officers as or native
patrol officers as they were called then They
would dismantle totemic sites. They would dismantle
sacred sites. They would actually enlist young
Aboriginal people to show them where sacred sites
might be so they could dismantle them to try
and essentially remove any reason people might
go into these spaces. Right. Yeah, so missions
actively discouraged. A lot of missions actively
discouraged Aboriginal people practicing their
culture. Some of them didn't. There were some
that actively encouraged it, but many discouraged
it because there was a sense that Aboriginal
people needed to be trained to go and work as
domestic workers or stock workers, and that would
contribute to the modern nation state. There's
an implication of only these various tasks are
valuable and you can contribute to those without
an acknowledgement of any other potential worth
or perspectives or values that might be driving
why people do what they do. For sure. And a complete
lack of acknowledgement. I don't think it's a
lack of understanding. I do think there was an
understanding of how Aboriginal people were using
country to a certain extent in the 1950s, but
it was a devaluing of that use of country. So
we do end up with stories of Aboriginal people
who ended up in the testing sites during the
tests. We know that happened. And that was because
authorities hadn't accounted for the fact that
what Aboriginal people were doing was, you know,
they weren't living this kind of nomadic lifestyle
that white authorities assumed they were, just
kind of wandering around, not knowing where they're
going. They used waterholes, they used country
to move in very particular ways in particular
seasons. And so there were multiple cases of
family units, entire groups of people travelling
using waterholes through the central deserts
from one mission to another, as they would have
done every year for the decade previous, not
knowing that this is now a 100 ,000 square kilometre
military exclusion zone. And so this then leads
to a lot of... within communities because of
the way this information was withheld. So people
had very little understanding of what was happening.
There were attempts to prevent people from entering
the central deserts by suggesting that there
was poison there, mamu or bad spirits. And so
once again, this use of superstition to try and
prevent movement. And I suppose my... point in
explaining these stories that seem to be not
so related to the nuclear is to demonstrate how
these colonial mechanisms that were in place
well before the nuclear testing but also persisted
after were fundamental to facilitating them going
ahead in the central desert at this time. Yeah
it also seems correct me if I'm wrong but it
seems like there there was not that clear discussion
of like this is what we're planning to do with
this land that we've decided to put aside for
this purpose. It is going to be very dangerous
to be in this area while we do these things.
It sounds like that discussion wasn't there.
It sounds like they use these other methods to
sort of try and shift how people use that land.
Am I interpreting what you're saying? Yeah, there
was absolutely no attempt to sit people down
and say, this is what's happening. I think there
were some attempts. There is historical evidence
to suggest that the native patrol officer who
was enlisted to look after this 100 ,000 square
kilometre, and bear in mind, he would have had
a single Land Rover to do that. Aboriginal people
do tell stories of him drawing missiles or weapons
on pieces of paper and trying to explain this
to communities. But for some of these communities,
this is a very early stage of... colonialism
for them. Their communities had previously not
necessarily been impacted by the waves of colonialism
that had come through the East Coast, for example,
a hundred years prior. It means that there are
also simultaneous traumas that are happening
at the same time and the nuclear weapons test
happened but also huge measles outbreaks occur
because a lot of white scientists and other personnel
coming into the central deserts leads brings
more disease to people who wouldn't have otherwise
been exposed to those diseases and so there becomes
a lot of conflation in people's memories as to
what happened in this period and there are people
who talk about being in town near Coober Pedy
and hearing for the first time about the weapons
test because there is an announcement on the
radio to say that there is going to be a bomb
test and they need to stay out of the area. And
this would have largely been due to the secrecy
with which the nuclear tests were conducted.
And there would have been very little information
for a lot of people. And so it was assumed that
mission stations and others on the periphery
would do their part in trying to prevent people
from traveling. They did some aerial patrols,
but again, such a huge area of the desert. And
for people who know this landscape incredibly
intimately, not particularly hard to hide from
a plane. And so, yeah, there was absolutely no
attempt to sit everyone down or really brief
everyone as to what would be happening. And partly
this is that prior to the nuclear testing, A
large swathe of this land had also been set aside
for ballistic missiles testing. And it was felt
that the probability of a missile dropping out
of the sky was so low that it didn't really warrant
people being warned that these might be unsafe.
But obviously, once you add... the element of
a nuclear weapon the dangers are far greater
than a single ballistic missile this is an era
where you know nuclear weapons as a thing are
relatively new right so what kind of awareness
would there have been not just in these communities
but like you know before the first tests were
done like what was the awareness on the ground
of what it meant to test these weapons in this
area that's a really good question and i think
It's always good keeping in mind when you're
talking about nuclear testing that they are ultimately
experiments. They're scientific experiments and
often people don't know what's going to happen.
That's the point of doing a scientific experiment
is to see what might happen. We know that in
certain cases the meteorological conditions were
not great for dropping weapons and there were
cases of Geiger counters picking up fallout incredibly
far away from the testing site. But I don't think
there was a huge sense of what would happen.
In fact, at this time, a lot of nuclear tests,
the main fear was that they would fail and therefore
make whichever global power was conducting them
look weak by virtue of having led to kind of
a fizzled weapon. So the other thing that was
occurring at the same time as... physical detonation
of nuclear weapons was a series of minor tests.
And they refer to them as the minor tests, but
there were hundreds of them. And these themselves
were experiments to see what would happen if
an accident occurred with a weapon. So we're
talking about setting fire to plutonium, dropping
plutonium from a great height, exploding plutonium,
anything you could think of that might accidentally
happen to a weapon was essentially done to...
these nuclear materials to see what might happen,
say if a plane crashed with a nuclear weapon
on it or someone set fire to a facility with
a nuclear weapon in it. And these are the tests
that really spread a huge amount of contamination
throughout the deserts. And these were not the
nine inland big tests that happened. And so I
get the sense there wasn't a huge amount of understanding
of what would happen. There was a hope these
would be big explosions. There was a hope that
these would demonstrate that Britain had developed
the technology to build a nuclear weapon successfully
and detonate it properly. But there was very
little broader discussion among the broader population
about what this would mean for the Central Desert
region, largely because the assumption was that
these weren't lands that necessarily needed to
be inhabited. And we can talk about this a little
bit later if you wanted, but the cleanup efforts
that... really demonstrates the extent to which
there was a little bit of umming and ahhing over
whether these lands really needed to be inhabited
in future anyway. Nine major tests. In land.
There were several off the coast of Western Australia
as well. And those were designed to determine
what would happen if there was a submarine attack.
So they wanted them to be underwater. Well, underwater,
I say in scare quotes. No one can see me, but
I'm doing scare quotes. Essentially, they wanted
a water -based testing site so that, say, a nuclear
submarine or a submarine armed with nuclear weapon
was to come into a harbour in the United Kingdom
and to explode. They would be able to tell what
some of the effects of that would be. So those
were the first tests and those were established
over, those were done at the Montebello Islands
of the West. coast of Western Australia, and
then nine major inland tests at Emu Field in
Maralinga. Okay. All right. And so what was the
arrangement between the UK and Australian governments
for this particular initiative? This is an interesting
question. A lot of people tell this story as,
you know, the British came to Australia and asked
Then Prime Minister Robert Menzies, if he would
be happy to host some tests, whether he was happy
to host some tests. And because he was described
as a sycophantic anglophile, he said yes. And,
you know, people describe him as British to his
bootstraps. And he immediately said yes and didn't
consult cabinet. And that was the arrangement,
really, that Australia would have a few. scientific
experts who were involved in order to gain some
scientific information for Australia more generally,
and that Australian personnel would also be involved.
It is more complicated than that, in that earlier
in the 1940s, Australia had been involved in
lots of conversations with the UK and other dominions
of the British Empire and Commonwealth about
being involved in Commonwealth defence. And it
was very clear after the Second World War with
Germany's use of the V2 rocket that ballistic
missiles was the future of warfare. And so the
idea was that Britain desperately needed to develop
and wanted to develop ballistic missiles. But
there was also an umming and ahhing about whether
those missiles would one day be armed with a
nuclear warhead. So Britain actually asked Australia
if Britain and Australia came to an arrangement.
that Australia would give up some land to test
ballistic missiles because the UK needed a huge
stretch of land to be able to test those missiles.
So before they said yes to Maralinga and Emu
Field, there was the sense that Australia would
be heavily involved in testing British ballistic
missiles, which from the evidence that I've read
and a lot of the archival material, especially
from the UK. It is clear that nuclear was on
the agenda at the same time as that. It was not
as clearly talked about because of security implications
and the desire to keep a few cards close to the
empire's chest. But there was very much a sense
that if Australia was going to be involved in
imperial and Commonwealth defence, that would
eventually involve being involved in nuclear
testing in some capacity. I see. Though Australia
doesn't end up... gaining nuclear weapons from
this arrangement there didn't ever seem to be
too much I think the British were very clear
early on that it would not lead to Australia
having their own nuclear posture. But there was
a hope that scientists could be involved and
therefore Australia would gain important scientific
knowledge to apply to, say, civilian nuclear
energy needs. Yeah. Well, I mean, some people
over on campus were involved in some of those,
like they were there for the tests and doing
all kinds of measurements from what I understand.
Yeah, that's right. So Ernest Titterton, who
was hired by the ANU in 1952, just after it was
opened. Mark Oliphant was the foundation head
of physics here at the ANU. And for those who
know Mark Oliphant, he worked on the Manhattan
Project. And he actually was Ernest Ticheton's
supervisor at the University of Birmingham. And
he hired Ticheton. Brought him over from the
UK. Titterton had been at Los Alamos. He'd worked
on the Manhattan Project and had also been in
the UK working on tube alloys. So he was very
much in the anglosphoric nuclear kind of network
that was being built in the 1950s. Came to ANU
and he was actually asked by Robert Menzies personally
if he would be involved in the nuclear testing.
Now, it's very clear that he was. specifically
asked for by the British government. And later
it was suggested that it was maybe because he
was a very, very, very recent migrant to Australia
and was British. But he also had experience that
almost no one at this time would have had in
that he'd worked on both US and the UK's nuclear
programs by 1952. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That would
be a small club. Yeah. Very small club. Maybe
we can go to the cleanup now. So this is moving
forward, right, in time. Around when were discussions
around the cleanup after these tests occurred?
When did these start happening and how did those
discussions go? So to kind of put this in historical
context, Major nuclear weapons tests were in
the 1950s, but these minor tests I was talking
about occurred well into the 60s. So the nuclear
testing sites didn't end up being decommissioned
really until the middle of the 1960s when those
minor tests were concluded. So by this time,
you know, we've got nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Australians are very involved in protesting French
nuclear testing in 1966, for example. And Australia
has only just ceased allowing the British to
test. minor experiments in Australia. And I should
say, ceased allowing them. I believe the British
just decided they were done with their experiments
rather than being booted out. So it's after this
that there is a cleanup effort. There's a cleanup
effort in the late 1960s. But it becomes quite
clear in the 1970s that maybe those cleanup efforts
hadn't been particularly rigorous when over 20
kilos of plutonium is found at the site. Hanging
out? Yeah, lying around in the sand. And so it
turns out what this cleanup effort had really
entailed was essentially digging shallow trenches,
pushing everything that they'd experimented with
into these trenches and covering it up. So I've
seen quite haunting pictures of the experiments.
And what we're talking about is what happens
when you bomb a jeep or what happens when you,
you know, you're at this time, there was this
sense that maybe nuclear weapons would be deployed
in. warfare. So they had dummies who were wearing
military uniforms. They wanted to see what nuclear
weapons would do to a military uniform or to
a helicopter or to a plane. And so they had all
of these things out in the desert. They bombed
them and then they kind of scraped them into
these big trenches. In fact, some of them that
were used for these tests end up being redeployed
during the Korean War and other wars after the
nuclear testing is concluded. And a lot of these
planes end up in these graveyards and actually
are used as salvage. So people salvage parts
from them. So the cleanup efforts were quite
poor. And there were also some efforts from some
of the missions nearby. They were given permission
to go into Maralinga and salvage items that might
be useful for the missions. And I've been told
by people that Across properties all over South
Australia, there were random bits and bobs from
Maralinga because people would just go onto the
site and take things. So sheds, you know, drums,
all sorts of things that might be of use. Was
there any process by which they checked the safety
of this? No, and it wasn't until there was a
royal commission into the nuclear test that it
was decided that a far more rigorous scientific...
inquiry into the testing sites and their rehabilitation
needed to be done. And that wasn't until the
late 1980s and was not concluded until the 1990s.
So these sites that were used in the 1950s are
only really getting to a point where they can
be properly addressed in terms of whether they
are habitable, whether they are safe to go onto
these lands by the late 20th century. So we're
talking 40 years. And this is the backdrop with
the discussions around nuclear waste as something
that they would like to store, for instance,
in South Australia have happened more recently.
Is that right? The issue you're always going
to have with nuclear waste, especially in Australia,
is that even if we have a national repository,
it's going to have to be in someone's state.
And no one ever wants that nuclear waste to be
in their state. So the thing with the former
Maralinga lands and what is now the... Woomera
kind of prohibited areas, a defence facility,
is because it's a defence facility, it's federally
governed. So it's technically in South Australia,
but it's federal land. So you could establish
a national waste repository there and it would
be under the auspices of the federal government.
So there have been conversations about whether
Woomera was where they should store nuclear waste,
considering there's already some waste there
buried. But we've never really gotten right to
the end of a national waste repository conversation.
It's always been torpedoed at some point. But
there was an issue in the 1990s where in 1998,
John Howard's government was keen to establish
a national waste repository. And one of the sites
they thought could be Woomera. So they did actually
transport a lot of waste out there. But in the
process, they had a leak. And during a routine
inspection, they found leaked material. And that
led to obviously quite a lot of concern over
how this waste was being handled, how it was
being transported, what it would mean for that
waste to end up back on lands that have already
been subjected to so many different nuclear processes
over time. So it's always been a bit murky. I'm
wondering if there's a discussion to be had about
trust and nuclear technologies, given the pieces
of the history that you've just shared. And particularly
with regards to Aboriginal communities who may
have been impacted by these activities. You know,
how do we how do we start to think about that?
How do we start to think about what that means
for how we need to really consider? whether when
and how to use these technologies. Yeah, I think
the conversation of trust and anxiety around
nuclear is really important. I think this is
a good starting point, understanding the history
of why people feel this way. In 1998, the reason
why they wanted a national waste repository in
some regards and what the government reports
into that demonstrated was that there's a significant
public anxiety around radioactivity and what
that means. The invisibility of radioactivity,
the seeming insidiousness of radioactivity and
the fact that at so many points in our history
and the inherent nature of... early development
of nuclear technologies, both for military and
civilian purposes, meant that there was so much
secrecy around it. People feel like they're not
getting the whole story. And then you have these
things come to light, such as the fact that Maralinga
and Emu Field were clearly not cleaned up adequately,
that it was unsafe for them to be inhabited,
or there had been seemingly some kind of underhanded
or secret way certain facilities had been come
to exist etc it means that there's this inherent
distrust around a lot of these issues and governments
have been encouraged in the past to think about
the fact that while they might think that public
anxiety is misplaced in that you know radioactivity
is not unsafe or we can handle it in safe ways
or you know you require nuclear medicine for
cancer treatment I think what these reports were
really encouraging the government to bear in
mind and others to bear in mind is irrespective
of all of those things, there is a public anxiety
that needs to be addressed. And telling people
they're uneducated or ignorant doesn't tend to
help in that regard. And I think with communities
in particular, what a lot of these communities
are demonstrating and what a lot of cases of
environmental injustice or nuclear colonialism
demonstrate is the same communities are... targeted
time and time again. And it might be because
they live in a desert environment and their environment
is considered pollutable. There's a phenomenal
scholar in the United States who refers to it
as wastelanding, the way we wasteland certain
environments. But for these communities, it's
their country. It is their culture, their tradition.
Everything is tied up in the environment that
they live within. And these phenomenal old women,
the Coober Pedy, Kungka Tjuta, or the Coober Pedy
senior women, when the way stump was being established,
they actually said, nevermind our country is
the desert, it's where we live. And they had
this notion that they understand the desert landscape
in a way that others don't and that they need
to preserve that. So I think there is a big conversation
to be had around trust and distrust. Also, the
value of having a conversation with someone,
seeking consent, having a conversation that details
exactly what is going to happen going through
due process. With the nuclear waste dumps that
have been posited in Australia, almost all of
them have been unsuccessful, not necessarily
because of any particular action from a particular
person, but because often the process by which
they were put up turned out to be not. legislatively
sound so a corner's been cut somewhere or someone's
just tried to go the easy way around and then
it you know someone decides they want to take
it to the high court and the high court then
rules yeah okay actually there has been some
breaching of protocol here or breaching of legislation
in order to get it to this point and often it's
because conversations aren't being had or particular
people aren't being consulted yeah I want to
go back to the perspectives of the desert and
its worth. And I think one of the things that
I'm getting from the stories that you're telling
is that there is almost a value judgment that
is made from a particular perspective that perhaps
we could begin to unpack in a different way.
Like, how do you begin to have conversations
where you can start from a place of understanding
how... you know, various communities value a
particular environment in this case. How do you
start from a place where those kinds of things
can be kind of an integral part of the discussion
and can be understood by all parties? Yeah, I
think that's a really great but tricky question.
And I think if it was easy to answer, hopefully
we would have done better by now. I think having
conversations with people who... live on these
lands, whose country this is in particular, if
we're talking about First Nations communities
globally, is really important. So something that
a lot of communities who are around the site
that had been earmarked for the national waste
repository that got shut down in the early 2000s,
they were very, very conscious of the groundwater
underneath the desert. So they were very concerned
that a nuclear waste repository may impact the
Great Artesian Basin. And yeah, if contaminants
got into the Great Artesian Basin, that would
be phenomenally devastating. And I think what
the community was encouraging was this notion
that it's not just what you see on the surface.
It's not just this desert landscape. But these
plants, these animals, they all feed off this
groundwater that in itself is inherently interconnected.
And that's what you see when you see these heavily
polluted areas where the interconnections between
certain animals, plants, and then humans has
not necessarily been understood at a base level.
But I think what is interesting is that from
a lot of the communities I've worked with or
I've spoken to or written about in my own work.
And this long timescale and the intergenerational
impact of this, not necessarily from a contamination
point of view, but from a cultural point of view
as well, and the passing on of culture is always
front of mind and perhaps has been less front
of mind for those who are coming at it from a
different perspective where it's like, well,
we can do this thing right now. We can test right
now. And then that means within a few months,
we've figured out. whether we can successfully
make a bomb or we're going to establish this
national waste repository that we'll be able
to store waste for the next hundred years. And
these are much smaller timescales than perhaps
some communities are thinking in. And so there
needs to be more of a conversation in terms of
if there are communities who are hosting these
particular things, such as a waste storage facility,
the full implications of what that might mean.
And I think that's what communities are demanding.
We understand that this thing, you're saying
100 years. We know it's not 100 years. We know
it's 250 ,000 or whatever it might be, depending
on the level of waste that might be stored there.
And there's a need for people to think in timescales.
We really, really struggle to conceptualise,
but a lot of Indigenous communities, as we know
from thinking about Indigenous approaches to
history, there's a very different... approach
to linear time and the way that current things
impact future generations, especially considering,
I think this goes back to the issue of trust
and people being unsure. It's hard to put people
at ease when we can't point to really successful
examples of say, a permanent waste store. We
know that it's been very difficult all over the
world to find a solution to these issues. So
when people are suggesting that we have this
solution, but they know that they're kind of
being spun a bit of a story because no one's
been able to do it. And if, you know, these...
I think it's like Finland. Yeah, Finland. And
they're kind of in this stage of being like,
we think we might have, we might have figured
it out. And these are countries that have nuclear
power. So have a lot more need to find... solutions
to high level waste. And we are here struggling
to find a solution to low level waste that we
use for life -saving medicines that we need.
And so you can see how some communities then
are concerned about the narratives they're being
told because they look at the situation and they
think, well, We haven't been able to do this
in the past. We haven't seemingly been able to
come up with a solution that we know will work,
but also no one has because we actually haven't
lived with this technology for long enough to
know that, you know, in 100 years will this concrete
mausoleum work or in 200 years will this kind
of buried sin rock still be. contained in the
ground. And so I think there is just that concern
and it comes back to timelines and the seeming
unwieldiness of nuclear materials and how long
they last. With that, do you want to tell people
about your book that's coming out? Sure. So my
book is called Contaminated Country, Nuclear
Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia.
And it's coming out with Washington University
Press in June. So very soon, which is great.
Or in the past, depending on when this comes
out or you're listening to it. It will be available
as an e -book as well as a hard copy. The hard
copy will be accessible, but I know that U .S.
presses aren't the easiest to get hold of. So
there'll be an e -book and really it is this
history of nuclear colonialism. And really what
I wanted to do with it, especially with a U .S.
audience in mind, given it's a U .S. press, is
to expand the North American geography beyond
North America. I had multiple people in the US
tell me, oh, I've never even thought about Australia,
let alone the fact that Australia has a super
unique history. We are one of, I say one of because
I'm trying to be very careful with my language,
but one of the only countries in the world that
has willingly given up their sovereign territory
to test someone else's nuclear weapons. Like
you think about the gravity of that, right? It's
not that... You know, Britain said, we are testing
nuclear weapons here in Eurodominion, therefore
it happens. But the Australian government was
actively involved in this process. And part of
what I've tried to do is think through shifting
the narrative a little bit away from assuming
that Australia was this naive country that just
went along with a lot of... what other people
wanted, but actually at the same time had their
own ambitions, wanted to develop their own scientific
capability, their own military capability, and
cut their teeth in the Pacific in particular.
And that there's this really interesting history
to be told that is intimately entwined with the
US's history of nuclear development, as well
as the UK's. As an Australian historian, I think
Australia is very relevant, but I think it's
a really interesting case study to put into the
global history of nuclear development because
we don't have power. We've never had weapons
yet. We have an incredibly, incredibly rich nuclear
history and we're entangled in everyone else's
nuclear history. We export. Huge amount of uranium.
And we're heavily involved in the fueling of
other people's reactors, other people's weapons.
We know that Australian mines were set up specifically
to fuel US weapons and UK weapons programs in
the 1950s. And I think there can be more done.
there. And as we know, the conversation about
nuclear doesn't seem to be going away. No, no,
we're in the middle of another one, right? Exactly.
So it's a good time to be, you know, releasing
the book so we can learn this history and understand
that and kind of take it into these conversations
that we are having about nuclear technologies
now. 100%, because I think what is important
about history really is thinking through these
histories is integral for thinking about how
we go forward. And we think about nuclear future
because inevitably Australia will have a nuclear
future we will continue to use medicines we even
if we don't realize that we have nuclear technologies
every day and therefore we have to dispose of
waste we have to think about the implications
of a lot of this so even though we don't have
nuclear power Even though we don't have nuclear
weapons, we have a nuclear footprint that we
need to think about moving into the future, especially
if that's going to be expanded or we want to
think about the way that we're involved in the
programs of other countries or with AUKUS or
with all sorts of different things. We are in
a position where we need to think about the past
in order to think about how we might move forward
into the nuclear future. Nuclear Matters is a
production of the Australian National University
College of Systems and Society. We acknowledge
the traditional owners of the lands on which
this podcast is being recorded on or listened
to and pay our respects to their elders and all
First Nations people. If you liked what you heard
today, please share this episode with friends,
family and colleagues. If you want to send us
some feedback on an episode, please email us
at nuclearmatterspodcast at anu.edu.au. Keep
in mind that this podcast is intended for information
and education only. The views and opinions expressed
in each episode are those of the individual speakers
and do not represent the official policy or position
of the Australian National University College
of Systems and Society or the university as a
whole.