Diet and dust in the desert: Life in the early years of Oak Valley community, Maralinga Lands, South Australia

Diet and dust in the desert: Life in the early years of Oak Valley community, Maralinga Lands, South Australia

  • Author(s): Palmer, Kingsley, Brady, Maggie
  • Published: 2021
  • Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Press
  • Edition: 2nd

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Abstract: Between 1953 and 1963 the British, in collaboration with the Australian Government, conducted atmospheric atomic tests and malfunction trials of uranium and plutonium based devices at two locations, Emu and Maralinga, in the Great Victoria Desert of South Australia. As a result of the tests quantities of radioactive debris, including americium and plutonium isotopes which are still present, were scattered over an area of several thousand square kilometres in the vicinity of the test sites. Some of the worst contamination occurred at a site named Taranaki situated at Maralinga, but other test sites in the region are also badly contaminated with radioactive debris, as well as being the location for cemeteries of low level waste and contaminated machinery and materials used in the tests and trials. Plutonium was buried at Maralinga, and some of this was repatriated to England in 1979, amid great secrecy. However, the bulk of the plutonium imported into Maralinga remains there, either dispersed by the tests or buried in pits close to the test sites. As a result many of the test sites are not safe for casual visitation and some pose a serious health threat to anyone not properly equipped to enter the area. The effects on the vegetation, food chain, ground water and the degree of contamination in airborne dust was unknown and little studied. The Maralinga test sites remained within a Commonwealth Prohibited Area, and permission to enter the area had to be sought from the relevant authorities. These lands were Aboriginal lands and had once been home to a group who are now generally identified as Pitjantjatjara. Years before the testing most of these people, or their immediate forebears, had moved into missions at Cundeelee in Western Australia or Ooldea in South Australia, a siding on the Trans-Australian Railway line (Gara et al. 1988). Others had travelled further afield: north to places like Ernabella; west to towns like Kalgoorlie; and south-east to Ceduna. Those Aboriginal people who stayed on settlements close to the railway line retained intimate knowledge and attachment to their lands. We know from the work of both Ronald and Catherine Berndt as well as that of Daisy Bates (all of whom worked at Ooldea) that Aboriginal people made visits back into their desert homelands up until the 1940s (RM Berndt 1941; Berndt and Berndt 1942–45; Bates 1938). The oral accounts we have collected from the people confirm this view.

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