Jessica Urwin, "Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia" (U of Washington Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network — Jessica Urwin, "Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia"
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Jessica Urwin
Date: September 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Dr. Jessica Urwin’s new book, Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia. The discussion explores Australia’s complex nuclear history, focusing on how British nuclear testing and ongoing uranium mining have intersected with settler colonialism and disproportionately impacted Indigenous communities. Dr. Urwin and Dr. Melcher delve into the origins, public responses, resistance efforts, and ongoing debates about contamination and land rights, illuminating a history often hidden beneath headlines of scientific progress and national interest.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Personal Journey and Origins of the Book

• Dr. Urwin’s academic path: Began as an Australian historian, later specializing in environmental and nuclear history. Interest sparked by a professor’s mention of British nuclear tests in Australia.
  • “I had a really influential history professor say to me, did you know they tested nuclear weapons in Australia? … I was hooked.” (02:26)
• Aim of the book:
  • To interrogate the intimate ties between nuclear processes and settler colonialism in Australia.
  • Based on nearly a decade of research, including PhD work.

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Periodizing Nuclear Colonialism in Australia

• Beyond Hiroshima/Nagasaki:
  • While global narratives often begin nuclear history in 1945, Dr. Urwin argues for an earlier start: radium and uranium prospecting in the late 19th century, tied directly to settler colonial expansion.
• Resource rush:
  • Mining brought settlers into newly mapped regions, directly impacting Indigenous lands and communities.
  • “The optimism of these new scientific marvels, such as radium and uranium, led to considerable excitement in Australia…” (04:05)

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British Nuclear Testing: Whose Weapons, Where, and Why?

• Testing details:
  • British weapons tested—nine inland in central deserts and additional tests on the Montebello Islands.
  • British sought wide-open spaces, viewing Australia’s deserts as “empty” and suitable for experimentation.
• Environmental ‘wastelanding’:
  • Settler and colonial notions of “useless” land justified its use for dangerous experiments.
  • “Other scholars have referred to this as wastelanding or rendering these sites pollutable.” (07:14)
• ‘Minor’ tests were major:
  • Often, smaller plutonium dispersal tests resulted in greater contamination than the “major” detonations.

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Colonial Mechanisms Enabling Nuclear Testing

• Persistent colonial structures:
  • Testing occurred decades after Australian federation. However, settler authorities leveraged Protectionist measures (segregation, movement controls) to manipulate and displace Aboriginal communities.
• Instruments of control:
  • “Native patrol officers” tasked with rounding up Aboriginal people, pushing them away from test sites via force, misinformation, and the destruction of sacred totemic sites.
  • “Government officials…took young Aboriginal people out into the deserts and asked them to identify sacred sites… and they would dismantle them…” (13:25)
• Failure to protect:
  • Some Indigenous people returned regardless, motivated by cultural ties and necessity, rendering state measures both oppressive and ineffective.

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Public Knowledge and Opinion

• Secrecy and optimism:
  • 1950s public saw little transparency; what news existed was framed as progress and Commonwealth defense.
  • “Nuclear tests… were to a lot of Western nations… considered signs of scientific progress…” (16:21)
• Localized concern:
  • Some on-the-ground opposition (e.g., missionaries), but public dissent was limited until later decades.

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Shifting Public Attitudes and the Rise of Protest

• 1970s activism:
  • Anti-nuclear sentiment flourished as part of wider global protest movements. Ironically, Australians protested French tests in the Pacific soon after British tests ended at home.
  • Critique of French and American imperialism “very outward looking… but there was very little introspection about… Australia’s own indigenous communities.” (21:00)
• Turn inwards:
  • Aboriginal rights movement for land restitution intertwined with environmental and anti-nuclear activism.
• Question of ‘tainted’ land rights:
  • Politicians and scientists struggled with returning contaminated lands—technicians sometimes found plutonium decades after "cleanups."

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Uranium Mining and the ‘Separation’ of Nuclear Issues

• Continuing extraction:
  • Despite anti-nuclear protest, uranium mining persists for international markets (and supposed proliferation control).
  • “It’s been common for uranium mining to be separated from nuclear processes.” (24:20)
• National interest versus Indigenous rights:
  • Mining framed as economically vital and geopolitically strategic, often sidestepping land rights debates.

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The Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests

• What is it?
  • Australia’s highest public inquiry, but with merely suggestive (not binding) powers.
• Scope/procedural limitations:
  • Intended to probe contamination of humans—the government resisted broader investigations into colonial and social harm.
• Testimony as revelation:
  • Indigenous survivors’ stories publicly documented displacement, cultural destruction, health impacts, and loss of land far beyond what officials acknowledged.
  • “Once kind of the lid was off this Pandora's box, it was very hard to get everything back in.” (32:30)
• Outcome:
  • Recommendations for land cleanup; acknowledgment that the absence of mass deaths was “out of sheer luck, not because of the parameters…to protect people.” (29:05)

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Resistance, Land Return, and the Struggle for Cleanup

• Aboriginal mobilization:
  • Communities active in pushing for remediation and land restitution. The homeland movement sought to return to and restore “country.”
  • Collaboration with lawyers, anthropologists, and historians to fight for compensation and cleanup.
• Balancing environmental harm:
  • Cleanup proposals (e.g., removing soil) risked creating new harms. Communities wanted restoration but not “to replace one environmental crisis with another.” (Archer Barton, c. 37:00)
• Diplomatic pressure:
  • Aboriginal advocates traveled to the UK to secure cleanup funds, as the Australian government required British co-financing.
• Enduring loss:
  • Some lands remain permanently off-limits due to contamination.

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Nuclear Waste: A Continuing Saga

• Public fear and NIMBYism:
  • National debate over where to store nuclear waste—often proposed for already-contaminated Indigenous lands.
  • Transport mishaps reignited fears and highlighted dangers.
  • “People were really, really fearful of what nuclear waste is, what we don't, you know, what it's constituted of.” (39:17)
• Legal challenges:
  • Several proposed waste repositories in South Australia defeated due to protest, court rulings, and government procedural failures.

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

The Human Side

• Protectionism, segregation, and manipulation:
  • “Government officials attempted to manipulate Aboriginal people's movements…by suggesting the testing areas were only for white men.” (11:45)
• Colonial violence at the individual level:
  • “There were stories of people having their dogs shot in front of them. There were people waking up in craters. There were people who couldn't… forage from the land.” (31:30)
• Environmental justice:
  • “We don’t want to replace one environmental crisis with another.” — Archer Barton, Aboriginal spokesman (37:00)

Resistance and Solidarity

• Grassroots activism:
  • The Coober Pedy Kungkas, an Aboriginal women’s group, effectively protested against proposed nuclear waste dumps, even catching the attention of actor Val Kilmer.
  • “They were devastated…they thought they were way too cool to be hanging around with their elders. And so they weren’t there. And they are devastated they missed Val Kilmer that day.” (48:45)

Unexpected Discoveries

• Hidden histories:
  • Douglas Mawson, famous Antarctic explorer, was also a major player in Australian uranium exploration, collaborating with an Aboriginal prospector, Clay Pan George—a story unearthed from neglected archives. (45:10)
  • “This was just a phenomenal discovery, partly because of the silences in the archives that surround Indigenous people…The prospector directly referenced George.” (46:09)

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Notable Sections & Timestamps

• Guest Introduction and Origins of Research: [02:26]
• Periodizing Nuclear Colonialism in Australia: [04:05]
• British Nuclear Testing and ‘Minor’ Tests: [07:14]
• Colonial Infrastructure and Movement Restrictions: [10:08]
• Public Knowledge and Mid-century Attitudes: [16:21]
• 1970s Protest Movements: [18:17]
• Shifting Attention to Australia’s Own Record: [21:15]
• Uranium Mining and Continued Extraction: [24:20]
• The Royal Commission and Its Impact: [29:05]
• Land Return, Cleanup, and Ongoing Struggles: [34:38]
• Nuclear Waste Debates and Indigenous Activism: [39:17]
• Archive Surprises and Personal Anecdotes: [45:10]
• Closing and Future Projects: [49:46]

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Tone and Language

Throughout, both speakers maintain an accessible, deeply engaged, and empathetic tone. Dr. Urwin weaves personal anecdotes with historical rigor, while Dr. Melcher’s probing questions encourage nuance and reflection. The conversation is scholarly yet direct, attentive to both structural analysis and the voices/experiences of First Nations communities.

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Conclusion

Dr. Urwin’s Contaminated Country offers a vital reframing of Australia’s nuclear past and present, foregrounding Aboriginal resistance and the persistently colonial logic behind environmental and political decisions. The impacts of radiation, mining, and “wastelanding” endure, but so does the activism and resilience of those most affected. Listeners are encouraged to read the full book for a richer, deeper engagement with this critical history and its ongoing implications.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jessica Irwin about her book titled Contaminated Country, Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025 and forthcoming in 2026 from Melbourne University Press for our Australian listeners. This book talks about Australia's nuclear history and present in some interesting ways because technically Australia is not a nuclear state. We're going to talk about why that's really not even close to the whole story. Nuclear testing, energy has been actually quite involved in Australia with all sorts of impact for the environment, for the people that live there. And that's not new. That's not a secret. There's been a whole bunch of organizing as we're going to talk about to protest this, to try and change that history. So we've got a lot to discuss here. Jess, thank you so much for joining me.

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Of course. So I'm an environmental historian, though I didn't necessarily start out that way. I was an Australian and still am an Australian historian. And really this book was a culmination of nearly a decade of research which began really from an interest in nuclear politics. In particular, I was a student taking Australian history and international relations and I was incredibly interested in thinking about postcolonialism and gender in relation to the politics of nuclear weapons. And when it came to doing postgraduate study, I had a really influential history professor say to me, did you know they tested nuclear weapons in Australia? And she handed me a book, and I guess the rest was history. So they say. I was hooked. And I became really interested in looking at Australia's incredibly intimate nuclear history, especially considering Australia has never had nuclear weapons, still doesn't have nuclear energy, and there are significant intersections in Australia between nuclear processes and settler colonialism. And really, the book is a product of all of that interest and my PhD research over the years.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I love it when there's such a clear kind of moment of. I mean, really is sort of a light bulb going off of like, hang on a second. I'm so intrigued. I must investigate. So thank you for giving us that kind of backstory to the origin of the project. Speaking then, of origins, can we talk about how some of these strands started to come together? If we're looking at nuclear colonialism in Australia, we.

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

When?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Where? Why are we starting?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

It's a really interesting point, thinking about the periodization of nuclear colonialism, and it's a bit of a tricky one. And depending which historian you ask, which scholar you ask, there are different starting points. Most people kind of consider the beginning of nuclear colonialism globally, with the explosive beginnings of nuclear colonialism being with the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but in contaminated country. I wanted to think about it with a little more nuance and think about less tangible nuclear links. So I account for early interactions between what we would now consider nuclear processes, but which wouldn't necessarily have been historically considered so, such as radium mining and thinking about. About the ways that intersected with settler colonialism in Australia. And really here in Australia, the earliest explorations for radium, I think, can be where we start to think about nuclear colonialism. And in Australia, this comes around the same time that the Curies are making their discoveries in the late 19th century. And the settler colonial optimism of these new scientific marvels, such as radium and uranium, led to considerable excitement in Australia and the possibility of finding radioactive minerals across the country. And as I describe in the book, and as many would be familiar from settler colonial states, prospecting and mining in colonial periods often assisted in bringing settlers into close contact with Indigenous communities. As settlers, you know, encroached on indigenous lands and started to peg out prospects in areas which wouldn't have necessarily been particularly amenable to pastoralism or other settler pursuits. And therefore prospectors themselves were really intrepid explorers. The boundaries of the maps in Australia really were complete, but there was still an imperative to fill in the map and find out what kinds of resources and minerals could be found to line the pockets of settlers as well as governments. So really, I see this as being the beginning of what we might understand as nuclear colonialism today, which is really the process of settlers pegging out prospects and mining in a period where. Where radium really was just a scientific marvel. But of course, that would then lead into the wartime exploitation of uranium and radium, and then the second half of the 20th century where we have a lot more involvement with more acute nuclear processes.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

See, already we're getting into some interesting questions here, right, because as you said, there is often a sort of. Well, obviously it starts at this moment. It's like, well, hang on a second, how did we even get to that moment? Maybe, maybe we need to go back further then. But that I think sets us up well for understanding kind of some of the intertwined processes we're going to keep talking about. Definitely settler colonialism being one, land being a huge part of that as well. Let's bring in some other aspects then of what you discuss in the book. If Australia doesn't have nuclear weapons and doesn't have nuclear energy, whose weapons we're actually talking about here?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

So the weapons that were tested in Australia were those of the British. So for context, there were nine inland tests in the central deserts of Australia, as well as several tests on an island called the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia. And these were British tests. And part of this was a big geopolitical issue around collaborating with the United states during the 1940s and 50s and in a ability to find somewhere suitable to test nuclear weapons. Of course, the United Kingdom is not very big. There was a concern that the geographical limitations of the UK would mean that there wouldn't be somewhere suitable to test a nuclear weapon. And of course, in the eyes of British officials as well as Australian government officials, Australia had empty, and I put that in scare quotes, a wide open spaces that would be perfect for. For nuclear testing. And this is something that quite a few environmental historians and other scholars have looked at in terms of desert environments all over the world and the way that these desert environments that weren't necessarily considered particularly useful to settler colonial pursuits because they didn't necessarily do great for pastoralism, there wasn't much that you could grow there during the atomic age or the nuclear Age, they seemed to gain new purchase in that they could become really, really important nuclear testing sites. And other scholars have referred to this as wastelanding or rendering these sites pollutable. So Australia had a lot of desert in the center of Australia. And here's where the British tested a number of nuclear weapons over a very extensive period, about a decade or more, as well as a bunch of minor tests. And these were called minor tests, but they were perhaps the ones that created, we think, from evidence that they created the most contamination. And these were tests that included, you know, dropping plutonium from a plane or setting plutonium on fire, basically to see what would happen if there was an accident with a nuclear weapon, what would happen if we set one on fire, what would happen if a plane crashed with one on board? And so these minor tests significantly contaminated this area, adding to those much larger scale major tests that were taking place in the desert as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's very helpful to understand the range of tests here and kind of what the goals were from the States, the British and the Australian states in doing them. If we're talking, though, about the sort of 1950s and 60s, that sort of period by then, obviously Australia and Britain are officially completely separate countries. That, I think is probably an overgeneralisation to say that therefore it has nothing to do with colonialism. What, in fact, are the ways in which we can understand Britain's tests in Australia as still being colonial?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

That's a really interesting one. And people have different views on it. There are several scholars in Australia who consider the tests colonial because they were undertaken by the British, or they might refer to them as nuclear imperialism. I try. I tried in the book, and I think I've achieved in the book to think about the links between nuclear colonialism and the nuclear tests in a slightly different way, in that a lot of the assumption around the nuclear tests is the reason they were undertaken where they were was because there were no populations, or the government didn't know they were there or didn't really care that they were there. But I think what we see from archival material and that is discussed in contaminated country is that fact that actually the Australian government, as much as the British government, relied on existing existent colonial mechanisms in order to manipulate the mobility of Aboriginal communities. So what I mean by that is in the central deserts in the 1950s, there were already lots of mechanisms in place that the colonial government or the Australian government had put on Aboriginal people in order to prevent their movement into certain places, to prevent them mixing with the settler population. They called this Protectionism, but we might understand as segregation. So there was the creation of big reserves in the central deserts where Aboriginal people were essentially kept or encouraged to stay and settlers were discouraged from entering these areas. But during the nuclear tests, there's a need to try and control movement even more because there was the knowledge and the desire to not have people entering the nuclear testing region. So what ends up happening is that the Australian government, utilising things such as. Well, they refer to them as Native patrol officers. So individuals whose job it was was to essentially round up people, discourage them to moving through their country, and when I say country, I mean Aboriginal land, and to essentially manipulate their movement, to encourage station holders and other landowners to employ Aboriginal people to keep them off of their lands, to encourage missions to control their movement. So there was a very intricate network of control around Aboriginal people's lives that existed before the nuclear testing happened. But in order to enable the nuclear testing to take place and to reduce the number of Aboriginal people that might end up in the testing area, there was an attempt to use these mechanisms in. In the advantage of the nuclear testing in the central deserts. So officials were well aware of Indigenous people living in these areas using the land, though it should be said that they were obviously ignorant to the extent of the importance of the land to people and also ignorant to the extent that they felt like they had the mechanisms to keep people off their country. So some examples of how government officials attempted to manipulate Aboriginal people's movements was, for example, by suggesting that the testing areas were areas that were only. They were only for white men, and that this kind of led to a lot of fear among Aboriginal communities that they were entering places they shouldn't go, especially because in culmination, with the exploding of weapons, a huge amount of military personnel flying planes, jeeps, all sorts of things that people may have been exposed to for the first time. There was a lot of fear involved. There was also the notion of mamu, which is a word for poison. So this idea that the poison in the desert was the nuclear testing, but at the same time, there are significant measles outbreaks in the central desert. So it means that people are seeing their loved ones dying from measles, and there's an association with this poison that government officials are talking about. And another really quite devastating example of how these colonial mechanisms were used to manipulate movement was through the removal of totemic sites. So government officials would take young Aboriginal people out into the deserts and ask them to identify sacred sites or totemic sites, and they would dismantle them in order to, in what the government viewed as essentially remove any reason for people to go into the deserts. But as we know, indigenous people have a very, very close relationship with this country. And these kinds of mechanisms were not successful in stopping people from accessing their country.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Every home, despite some really quite significant barriers that you've just described, was this something that obviously the people impacted by in their country, as you've been talking about, knew that this was happening, even if they obviously weren't privy to all the details. Often I imagined having those details withheld from them. They knew what was going on. What about the wider public, the people who weren't in these particular places? What was the kind of general opinion of these tests and did it have any influence on government policy?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

So in the 1950s in particular, there was very little public discussion of the tests, given the secrecy surrounding them. But I think what's really important context for this story and a lot of nuclear stories really in the 1950s was that nuclear tests and successful nuclear tests were to a lot of Western nations in particular, considered signs of scientific progress, development. And in Australia in particular, this was Seen as a really exciting opportunity to be involved in Commonwealth defence. And Australia was really keen to be involved. So if you have a look at a lot of the newspaper articles around this time, you'll see that it's an exciting development that Australia becomes an integral player in the British nuclear tests in order to not only demonstrate our worth to the Commonwealth, but to potentially gain our own technology and scientific expertise in a period in which it appears that nuclear physics and nuclear science is going to be the next big thing in science and help with national development. So in terms of public opinion, there were obviously some grumblings. People were concerned. There were during the nuclear test, incidences of people as far away as Queensland finding signatures on Geiger counters that indicated that tests were going on. And people were concerned about that. But that was incredibly minimal compared to what, more generally was an optimism around what being involved in these tests would mean. Though on the ground, people in the central deserts, including missionaries and others, were quite vocal about their concern over what actually increased settler presence in the deserts would do to indigenous communities.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Got it. Okay. That's definitely helpful to understand to some degree as a baseline when this starts. What sorts of changes do we see in public opinion by sort of the 1970s and what causes this change?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Well, this is particularly telling is that essentially, well, worldwide we know that there is kind of a global movement, big student movements. This is, you know, the 1968 kind of era of a lot of student activism, a big shift to the left and a big kind of global push for change, especially against conservative governments. And this was exactly the same in Australia. So Australia had had a conservative government for a long time. And there was this burgeoning student movement, environmental movement, moratorium movement and other social movements that really culminated in trying to agitate the government to make positive change. And one of the things they were really preoccupied with in Australia, rather ironically, was French nuclear testing in the Pacific. So in 1966, the French proposed testing in the Pacific and a lot of Australians were outraged that there were going to be any tests so close to Australia's sovereign territory. Ironically, the British had only stopped doing their minor tests in the central deserts a couple of years prior to this. But there was considerable concern that French tests in the Pacific would elevate the amount of radioactivity coming into Australian waters, into onto Australian soil, would impact already very heavily drought stricken water sources as well as livestock and other things. And so there became a really, really vocal anti nuclear movement in Australia in the 1970s that really coincided with the student movement and other Social movements. Interestingly, this also tapped into conversations about colonialism. The Communist party as well as communist newspapers, student newspapers and others were incredibly vocal about French nuclear testing in the Sahara as a type of imperialism. They saw what the French were doing in the Sahara and Algeria as imperialism, and they were calling for the independence of Algeria and other African nations. And in this context, there is a big movement, especially among environmentalists and others, to stop nuclear testing from going ahead in the Pacific. This is when things start to change. In terms of public opinion, though, the argument that I've really tried to make is that this was a very outward looking movement. This was very much a criticism of French imperialism, of American imperialism in the Pacific as well, and fears over what might happen in Vietnam if the use of nuclear weapons was considered. But there was very little introspection in Australia about perhaps how Australia had been involved in. In similar processes with their own indigenous communities.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's definitely a distinction worth making very clear. Did that change at any point? Did it start to look inwards and think about what had happened in Australia and what to some extent was still happening?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yeah, it definitely turned inward. It still took a little bit of time. What was happening in the 1970s with the student movement and concurrent with this was a really, really prominent and very important Aboriginal rights movement in Australia. So at the same time that students were calling for this, the stopping of French nuclear testing and other such things, prominent Aboriginal activists in Australia were calling for Aboriginal rights. They were calling for land rights. So the giving back of Aboriginal lands and for acknowledgement of a lot of the wrongs that had been done to Aboriginal people. At the same time, a Labor prime minister, a more Liberal. Well, in Australia, the Liberal Party with a capital L is the Conservative Party. So when I say Liberal here, I'm talking little L, Liberal, Gough Whitlam, he ran for election, committing to stop the French nuclear testing, comes into power, and he takes the French to the International Court of Justice over the nuclear testing. And this really culminates in a sense that nuclear testing is incredibly consequential to the environment, to people and to others. And there was a big push in particular to thinking about how this impacted on communities who were, Whose lands were targeted for the testing. Now, in the 1980s, this ends up looking a bit more inward when individual state governments, in particular the South Australian government where the nuclear testing took place, started to lobby their own federal government to look more deeply into the impacts of nuclear testing on Aboriginal lands. And this comes around the same time that there are lots of discussions in Australia around the provision of land rights and the returning of aboriginal land to communities. But there was a big question around how do we return land that we don't know how contaminated it is? And there were several incidences of scientists going out into the central deserts to check on contamination levels and finding, for example, at one, in one instance, 20 kilos of discarded plutonium which was repatriated to the United Kingdom. But other incidents such as that, which made it really clear that perhaps the cleanup efforts hadn't been adequate and that Australians needed to take this more seriously. So that's when we start seeing a bit more introspection about what the impacts of the nuclear testing were from an environmental standpoint and how that might be remediated.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's definitely helpful to see how these things are coming together. It isn't, however, if I understand correctly, the case that kind of from that point on, everyone was united that this must be cleaned up and sorted out and nothing else in this sort of vein should be done. Again, you talk in the book about the uranium mining that's still, I believe, going on at this point in the 1980s, is that right?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yeah, we still have uranium mines today.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So how did that work in terms of public discourse? How did, for example, proponents of uranium mining work against these calls for presumably not doing that and cleaning it up?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yeah, so it's an, it's an interesting one. I think that it's been common for uranium mining to be separated from nuclear processes. And Gabrielle Hecht, a phenomenal historian of science, talks about this a lot in her work about nuclearity and at what point something becomes nuclear. And so a really interesting thing around uranium, and especially in conversations with proponents of uranium, is this intent to separate uranium out from the end product of what it might turn into. And uranium mining had been going on in Australia since the Second World War. I mean, radium and uranium mining was going on sporadically before that. But the British government and the American government during the Second World War were very, very keen to get as their hands on as much uranium as they could. And so there were contracts throughout the Second World War and afterward for larger uranium mines to produce uranium for what is referred to as the Combined Development Agency, which was the British and the Americans collaboration for building nuclear weapons, and hopefully eventually civilian nuclear energy, too. But by the 1970s, uranium mining in Australia had, until this point, started to take a back seat because of the economic situation around uranium. It wasn't making as much money as it was taking to extract. It was polluting and mining was not as prominent as it is now in Australia. But in the 1960s and 70s there was the discovery of huge uranium deposits in Australia. Very, very significant uranium deposits. And this coincides really interestingly with discussions around the nuclear testing, but also discussions around land rights. So at the same time as land rights is being debated in Australia, huge uranium deposits on aboriginal land is, are being discovered. And so really, proponents of uranium mining have had a couple of ways that they attempted to chip away at anti uranium protesting in particular the government who was quite supportive of uranium mining at the time, Malcolm Fraser's conservative government. There was a sense that uranium mining and the provision of uranium to the world market would actually allow Australia to be involved as a middle power in the policing of proliferation. And that sounds kind of mad. I think it is a bit mad. But basically Fraser's belief was that if, if Australia was providing uranium to the market, then we could control who received it and therefore we had some kind of role in proliferation. I think it was a bit of a long bow, but it was part of this sense of trying to encourage uranium mining at a time where it was considered part of the national interest. And there are so many important historical contexts to bring in here, including the fact that this is a period in which, I mean, we've already talked about environmentalists, but environmentalists are calling for the divestment from coal and gas and oil and the move towards renewable energy in this period. Obviously then an interest in nuclear energy from proponents of uranium mining. And it was considered that uranium and nuclear power might, as it sometimes is considered today, be a replacement for what were considered dwindling or polluting coal, oil and gas produced energy. But on top of this, you have the 1973 oil crisis, where the provision of oil to Western countries such as the United States and Australia reinforced the fragility of some countries relying on foreign oil sources. And the US recommitted to nuclear power in light of this. And so Australia really saw an opportunity to contribute to this. So despite the fact that was significant, growing anti nuclear sentiment in Australia, especially considering uranium's role in the nuclear fuel cycle, which could lead to power or peaceful uses, but also could lead to weapons, the government considered it in the national interest and ultimately mining interests won out over those arguments around land rights around anti nuclear sentiment and anti uranium sentiment as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Really interesting to understand kind of what the different arguments were and how they played out. And especially given this, I was particularly intrigued to, I mean, essentially literally turn the page when reading the book and read then about the Royal Commission into British nuclear tests. Because that sounds very official. So was it, was this significant? What was it, what was it trying to do and did it make any sort of impact?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yes. So Royal commissions, for those outside of Australia, a Royal commission is, is basically the highest investigation that can be undertaken in Australia. The royal part comes from the fact that we are a constitutional monarchy, still are. And these are basically large investigations that the government elicits. What's important to remember with these though is that the Royal commissioners can make suggestions, but there's no necessity for the government to act on those suggestions. So often these are big investigations which expose issues, but they don't necessarily in themselves have mechanisms built in to solve those issues. They're more a fact finding and large kind of exposure of issues. So in the 1980s, there was a push, as I mentioned earlier, from state governments in particular to, to look more closely at the impacts of the nuclear testing, especially on Aboriginal people. And the Premier of South Australia at the time, John Bannon, he actually contacted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and asked for Britain to give over all of the documents they had around the nuclear testing. And this at the time definitely humiliated the Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawk. But it really kick started what was an investigation into, okay, should we be considering what happened in the nuclear tests? And ultimately Bob Hawke, the Prime Minister decided on a Royal Commission rather than a specific inquiry. And the Royal Commission into British Nuclear test was really designed to consider the potential contamination of servicemen as well as Aboriginal people and others. So it really wanted to look at very, it had very specific principles, parameters. Partly that was to try and avoid the question of impacts from the nuclear test beyond contamination. So a big thing that people in particular land rights groups and others who were interested in advancing Aboriginal rights were interested in looking at were actually the way that the nuclear test impacted upon Aboriginal communities beyond contamination, because contamination is quite hard to prove, given a lot of doctors and others are unwilling to categorically say that a particular illness was because of exposure to radioactivity. So community groups were saying, well, you know, we should be looking at the impact of colonization. Really, you know, these nuclear tests, they displaced people, they may have irradiated people, they stopped people from going back to their lands, they distressed people significantly, they forced people onto missions where they were exposed to really, really horrific experiences and living conditions. And so there was a desire to really, really open up the parameters of this investigation. But Bob Hawke's Royal Commission really said, no, we're just going to look at radiation effects now. Despite this, the Royal Commission went Out. The investigators went out into the central deserts to speak directly with nuclear survivors. They went out and sat on the sand with people and heard testimonies about what people had experienced. And regardless of the fact that what the Royal Commission was not looking for were demonstrations of colonialism at work, really, or the impacts of colonialism, what the testimony showed was that the stories of people who'd been blocked from country, who had been exposed to the manipulation of their mobility, to those who had been either put on reserves or stopped from going onto reserves, those in missions, actually provided an invaluable record of quite devastating experiences of colonialism. And really, once kind of the lid was off this Pandora's box, it was very hard to get everything back in. So while the Royal Commission didn't necessarily have any conclusions or recommendations that discussed what might be done about remediating some of these colonial harms, newspapers, community groups and others reported on this Indigenous testimony quite extensively because of how heartbreaking some of these stories were. And so that really let people into what had been experienced beyond just irradiation. So, you know, regardless of whether community members were irradiated, their country was definitely irradiated. There were stories of miscarriage. There were stories of people having their dogs shot in front of them. There were people waking up in craters. There were people who couldn't. Could no longer forage from the land. There were so many really devastating stories that these really took off in the media. And so while the Royal Commission was designed to look at irradiation, and it did that, and there were no ne, There weren't anything. There wasn't anything legal that it ties the government into, there were recommendations that the lands needed to be cleaned up, and that essentially, if Aboriginal people were not irradiated during the nuclear tests or did not find themselves in the testing area, that was out of sheer luck, not because of the parameters that were put in place to protect people.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely a pretty strong conclusion to come to. What were some of the reactions then to this kind of publicization of the idea that clean cleanup was necessary? Maybe you can tell us particularly about Aboriginal communities organizing to make this happen.

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yeah, so a cleanup was. Was definitely something that community was incredibly interested in. So another piece of important context for this period is this is primed for Australia's homeland movement. And what this homeland movement really was, was part of the Aboriginal land rights movement, where communities who had been moved off their lands or all across Australia, were really committed to getting back onto their lands and living on country again. But communities who testified to the Royal Commission were also exposed to the reality of what had happened to them. So while there was a lot of secrecy surrounding the nuclear test and a lot of people didn't understand what had happened because they hadn't been given the information as to what had happened by the 1980s and the Royal Commission, that there were real revelations about the contamination of country, the way that communities had been treated. And so therefore a lot more information with which communities could work, as well as connections with lawyers, anthropologists, historians and others with whom I spoke for this book who were able to assist in jostling for some kind of compensation over this. Now, what the communities predominantly wanted in terms of compensation was the return of their lands, but this required those lands to be cleaned up. So there were lots of scientific investigations undertaken by what were called the TAG teams. So technical assessment group studies, and the job of these scientists and anthropologists and others was to go into the Maralinga lands, this is where the nuclear test took place, and to look at how community members were using that country, how they foraged for food and how they lived, and determine the threat level in terms of radiation. And what was quite clear was that the inhalation of radioactive dust and other physical exposures to the land were. Were quite consequential. And so there were lots of conversations being had with the community about what would need to be done. But at the same time, the community was already incredibly concerned over the amount of environmental damage that had been done to the nuclear testing, to the sites due to the nuclear testing. And so there was a desire to balance decontaminating the land, but also not creating what the community said. In the community spokesman Archer Barton said something along the lines of, we don't want to create, we don't want to replace one environmental crisis with another. So we don't want to take the nuclear testing sites and turn them into some other kind of environmental disaster through the tilling of soil or the removal of topsoil. So the kinds of ideas that were brought up were things such as the complete removal of several feet of topsoil and then the burial of a lot of contaminated materials into the ground. And lots of. There were lots of options which ranged from not so expensive to incredibly expensive. And because of the financial commitment that this cleanup was going to take, we're talking over a hundred thousand square kilometers was the prohibited, prohibited zone that was used for these testing. The Australian government was not willing to foot the entire bill. So the Australian government turned around to the communities and said, you know, we're willing to work with you on this rehabilitation and can and compensation if we get buy in from the British government as well. So that really required the community to go directly to the British government in search of compensation. Acknowledgement that cleanup had not been adequate because as far as the British were concerned, they did a cleanup operation in 1967 and they'd wiped their hands of it and they had revoked any kind of obligation to do anything further. But the Australian government was unwilling to do this alone. And so communities, the community brought together a group who they, they sent to London on multiple occasions to speak directly with the British government in order to try and get the money required to both rehabilitate the land and also compensate the community for a portion of land which would never be able to be habit inhabited ever again. So, so basically for the loss of enjoyment of their lads is what they were looking for.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's definitely a very key demand given everything you've described to us so far. What about nuclear waste? How is that part of these discussions?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yeah, nuclear waste has always been a very fraught topic in most countries and it still is. I think nuclear waste, it comes with connotations of mushroom clouds and contamination. And people are really fearful of nuclear waste. And in Australia that's very much the case. And there are a lot of urban areas have a very NIMBYist approach to this. So NIMBY standing for not in my backyard. And so this idea that the places that produce this waste, hospitals, research facilities, there's a desire to keep that waste away from urban centers. And this is a problem in a lot of places. And it's a continual problem for countries that, that have nuclear power and have much higher level waste than Australia does. But the waste that was produced for the nuclear testing was, was buried in pits. But then beyond that, beyond nuclear testing, beyond uranium mining and the, and the kind of waste that is held in tailing dams and other such areas around mines. We still need nuclear medicine for treating cancers and other ailments. And therefore there's a lot of low level nuclear waste that is produced in Australia. And around the same, towards the end of discussions over the nuclear testing and the cleaning up of the land. The cleanup culminated in the 1990s, though it has still been ongoing in terms of the return of land. So it's a really, really recent history. There were issues around nuclear waste because there were several federal attempts to try and find somewhere to store Australia's national waste. But again, there was this sense that okay, well where do we put this? And perhaps the desert is the best place now because of the nuclear testing and the military facilities that remain out in the central deserts. This is federal land. So in Australia we have states and, and a federal government. And even though this particular site is in the, is in South Australia, it is federally administered. So then the federal government thought, what a great place to put a national repository. We'll just already put it out there. There's already nuclear waste out there from the nuclear test. That's where we can put it. But of course, those people who had fought so hard for the cleanup of their lands over such a long period of time and who had decades and decades, nearly a century worth of experience of having these nuclear impositions on their land and there being a lack of, of transparency and lots of issues around environmental contamination, were obviously outraged and very upset that this was yet again going to be a site of nuclear waste in Australia. And so there was a lot of protest around this nuclear waste site, aided by the fact that when nuclear waste that was taken from Sydney, in Sydney we have a reactor that is used for, is used for research purposes. And there were, there were some contaminated soil that was taken from Sydney out into the central deserts, but on transit some soil leaked. And there were, there was, you know, during a routine inspection of a truck, it was shown that there had been a radioactive leak as part of, of this transportation. And it became a bit of a scandal. And so there was this sense that people were really, really fearful of what nuclear waste is, what we don't, you know, what it's constituted of. Radioactivity is source of significant anxiety for members of the public. And, and the government recognized that. So by trying to put waste back out in the desert, it reignited these issues around contamination, around attempting to use desert spaces to essentially kind of put the problems of urban centers in Australia in particular. And so it really, really kickstarted yet another issue around desert versus urban communities and also the imposition again of nuclear contamination on indigenous communities, because predominantly those who would have been impacted by this would have been indigenous people whose land was being earmarked for nuclear waste yet again.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And these, if I understand correctly, are still to some extent ongoing debates and contestations, Is that right?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Yeah, absolutely. Only a few years ago, our latest national waste repository campaign was shut down. And often these, I think it's the maybe third in the last couple of decades, and most of them have been proposed for South Australia. And often what ends up torpedoing these particular endeavors is not necessarily significant protest. So that is, has been very important and the role of indigenous nuclear survivors and other indigenous organizations has been imperative for this, but also because on multiple occasions these cases have gone to the High Court or other courts and it's been found that decision making hasn't been adequate or, you know, decisions have been made before adequate testing or environmental considerations can be made. So in almost every situation, when it comes to the sighting of nuclear waste in a national repository in Australia or storage facility, it has come down to government officials and others cutting corners and unfortunately not kind of following legislation to the letter.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, we shall have to see how this develops in future. But looking then at the book, the project overall, was there anything as you were doing all this research and figuring all this out that particularly surprised you when you came across it?

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Definitely, I think, you know, this is probably an exciting discovery or surprise for Australian listeners in particular. But when I first started looking into radium and early radium and uranium mining in Australia, I was fascinated to find out that one of the most prominent people involved in this was actually Sir Douglas Mawson, who, for Australians, is our most prominent Antarctic explorer. So he's incredibly well known in Australia and revered as an Antarctic explorer. He was on Ernest Shackleton's first expedition to Antarctica and then led his own Australian expedition. And I'm here in Hobart and, you know, there are statues of him. His huts are here. Douglas Mawson is an incredibly important explorer of the ice, but he was also an incredibly important explorer of the inland. So he was a geologist at the University of Adelaide and he'd done some early work looking for radioactive minerals in Australia. And he credits himself at least with discovering radium in Australia. And I mean, this was exciting in itself. But then I think the most exciting or surprising thing I came across was going through some archives in South Australia from his company. He established a small company in order to try and sell radium overseas were letters between his prospector who he'd hired and the general manager of his company that explicitly referenced his employment of an Aboriginal man who he referred to as Clay Pan George. And this was just a phenomenal discovery, partly because of the silences in the archives that surround indigenous people, especially in this period. You know, settlers wrote indigenous people out of history. They took credit for their work, they took credit for their discoveries. But the prospector, Greenwood directly referenced George. And then I was able to cross reference that with newsletters, newspapers and all sorts which, which demonstrate that George himself was an incredibly well regarded and well known prospector, guide and, and worker in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. And that, you know, was. Was really, really exciting, especially given its link to Douglas Mawson, who is seldom remembered for anything other really, than his exploits in Antarctica. And perhaps beyond that, my favorite part of the story was in the final chapter and there's a great picture in the book and I'm so lucky to be able to include it. But the Coober Pedy Kungajucha, who I'd like to mention, they were a really wonderful women's group, the Coober Pedy Senior Women. They were an activist group who protested the nuclear waste dump that was proposed by the. By John Howard's government in 1998. And Val Kilmer actually was in the desert filming a movie and he heard about the Coober Pedy Kungas fight and he asked to see the women and so he asked if he could meet with the women at their campsite. And of course, the young. The young women were incredibly excited and said, of course we need to meet Val Kilmer. You know, he was Batman. That's so exciting. And when I spoke to family members of the Coober Pedy Kungas, it was really funny because I was speaking to a couple of the women who are now probably in their 50s and 60s, and they were devastated because they were, you know, late teens, early 20s at the time and thought they were way too cool to be hanging around with their. With their elders. And so they weren't there. And they are devastated that they missed Val Kilmer that day. And there's this phenomenal photograph of Val Kilmer with the Coober Pedikungers, which is, you know, very well loved by the families. And it's a shame it's in black and white in the. In the book, because he was wearing this incredibly bright orange tracksuit in the. In the photograph. And. And that was a really lovely part of the story as well. And it kind of brought the glitz and glam of Hollywood into the central deserts.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's such a great anecdote. Thank you so much for sharing. That's exactly why I ask this kind of question, because one comes across all sorts of fun things when doing research. So I think that's a love. Lovely place to conclude our discussion about the book, leaving me to ask just what might you be working on now or next? Anything you want to preview or highlight, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's on this topic.

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

So this book that I've written, Contaminated country, has really made me realise and made me really interested in thinking about Australian mining history. And so My next project is a history of the politics of uranium. Uranium is such a political topic. It, you know, as we've discussed today and as, as is showcased in the book, it really incites quite visceral reactions both for and against uranium mining. But it's also had a really important role in Australia in particular in, you know, the, the rise and fall of particular political parties and who's backing what at Web. So I'm really interested in pursuing a history of the politics of uranium in Australia and also considering mining histories in settler colonial context, which I think is really important work that really interesting environmental historians and others are working on at the moment. And I think uranium in particular has quite a fraught engagement in that history between settler colonialism and mining, especially given its political clout and the visceral reactions many have to it and its continued role in discussions over nuclear energy, the green transition in many countries. So watch this space. We'll see how it develops. But right now, working a lot on uranium mining.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Very intriguing. Best of luck with those explorations.

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Thank you. And thank you so much for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, listeners who have enjoyed our conversation and want to learn more can of course read the book we've been talking about titled Contaminated Country, Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025 and will be coming out in 2026 with Melbourne University Press. Jess, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Jessica Irwin]

Thank you.