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
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