"Global nuclear histories often ignore Australia because it has never developed or possessed nuclear weapons. However, Australia has been deeply involved in British and US nuclear imperialism throughout the twentieth century: Australia hosted weapons tests in its central deserts, provided scientific and military aid in building nuclear weapons, mined and exported thousands of tons of uranium, and disposed of radiated waste in the supposedly empty lands of Indigenous peoples. Exploring the ways in which nuclear processes have interacted with, co-opted, and facilitated the long history of colonialism in Australia, Contaminated Country explicates how nuclear development related to other practices of violence, dispossession, segregation, and assimilation. These colonial mechanisms were designed to undermine Aboriginal ways of knowing, being, and relating to Country, and importantly, Aboriginal people have vitally resisted and survived these efforts since the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on state and national government archival material, manuscript collections, printed media, and oral history interviews with both Aboriginal nuclear survivors and non-Indigenous people, Urwin unearths the entwined histories nuclear processes, imperialism, and Aboriginal activism"-- Provided by publisher.
The destruction and defiance that swirled around Australia's embrace of the world's nuclear order
Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth century. From uranium extraction to nuclear testing, Australia’s lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development. The continent was subject to rampant nuclear colonialism. However, this history is not just one of imposition. Aboriginal communities, bearing the brunt of these processes, have persistently resisted, reclaiming their rights to Country and demanding reparations.
As Jessica Urwin shows, extraction, weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal have caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and cultural harm to Aboriginal communities and lands. Yet Indigenous peoples all over the world have not only survived nuclear colonialism but challenged it time and time again. Tracking the colonial mechanisms Australia used to pursue a nuclear industry, Urwin simultaneously highlights how Aboriginal peoples refused and reshaped those same mechanisms over time. A groundbreaking book, Contaminated Country reveals how Australia’s deep nuclear past has been entangled with colonialism locally, nationally, and internationally.
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