TOTEM AND ORE

TOTEM AND OREA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION by B. WONGAR

CONTENTS

TOTEM AND ORE Commentary 1

TOTEM AND ORE Photographic collection expedition one 1960s 19

TOTEM AND ORE Photographic collection expedition two 1970s 78

Contributors 111

Bibliography 113

For René Böll and Thomas Shapcott

1

TOTEM AND ORE Commentary

The photographs in this collection were taken in Northern and Central Australia in the late1960s and early 1970s. They portray tribal Aborigines who were badly affected by adual nuclear tragedy – the mining of uranium and subsequent British nuclear testing, bothof which took place on their tribal land. A smaller portion of the collection features theimpact of mining development that followed, with devastating consequences on tribalcommunities and their traditional culture.

The collection, at first titled Boomerang and Atom, was renamed Totem and Ore in orderto avoid the scrutiny of the Australian Atomic Energy Act and its draconian power. Itoriginally consisted of about 5,000 still negatives taken in the Australian outback underdifficult climatic conditions and a depressing social environment, undertaken with meagreindividual resources and without any funding or outside contribution. Much of thematerial, especially negatives from the first expedition of the 1960s, suffered from dustand extreme desert heat which damaged the films’ emulsion. Some 1,700 negativessurvived the harsh desert elements. From these, about 100 negatives were selected andprinted for the first exhibition of Totem and Ore held at the Adult Education Centre inMelbourne on 31 May 1974, organised and curated by Harold Baigent and openedby Gordon Bryant, the then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Australian government.The collection had several subsequent showings throughout Australia and internationally,including the ill-fated mounting at Parliament House, Canberra, where it was banned bygovernment authorities. Prior to that showing the collection was hosted by organisers forNational Aboriginal Day at the Australian National University in Canberra, during whichYami Lester from the Yankuntjara tribe of Central Australia gave an account of hisexperience with nuclear testing. Other guests at the gathering, including Roy Marika fromRiratjingu tribe of Yirrkala, spoke about the inroads made by mineral development ontribal land in Arnhem Land.

They are taking me to cave

Where my track ends

– my poor body, my broken soul

ABORIGINAL TRIBAL CHANT

Only the dead have seen the end of war

PLATO

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URANIUM MININGA considerable number of photographs in the Totem and Ore collection feature the impactof mining on tribal Aborigines during the first uranium boom of the 1950s. Little has beensaid in the Australian media or recorded in history about the lethal consequences ofprospecting and mining for uranium, in particular the horrific impact on tribal life in WestArnhem Land and adjacent areas. It was the period of the Cold War. Politicians at thattime were on rampages, making “patriotic” speeches about the “Yellow Peril” andpossible Chinese invasions from the North, urging all Australians to join the search foruranium to help produce the nuclear arsenal necessary to “defend our democracy”. Theyoung Queen was brought from England to tour Australia and foster moral support. In theprocess, scores of Aboriginal tribes were alienated and their culture destroyed – thelongest living culture on earth, which had sustainably existed in the area for more than50,000 years and had the most just and democratic social system in the world – a culturefar beyond the white man’s ability to fully comprehend.

The Aborigines’ encounter with uranium is sad and tragic and for the last fifty years hasbeen the direct cause of the destruction of tribal life in Central and Northern Australia.The story of uranium began in 1869 when the Surveyor-General of South Australia, G.W.Goyder, was dispatched to the northern shore of Australia with a party of 154 men tosurvey the unknown bush for prospective white settlements. He made his first camp at aplace which he named after the naturalist Charles Darwin and, moving further southinland, began to survey the virgin bush and divide it into 186 -square mile allotments.

Each land parcel was to be given to absent landlords in England as a freehold title forprospective development. It was thought that once the land was cleared, slave labourfrom Asia, Africa and elsewhere would be brought in to work the land for food and keep.At the time, the British considered the original landowners, the Aborigines, to be sub-human and not even capable of tilling the land. In one of his first dispatches Goyderspoke of finding an iridescent green ore that looked like copper, although he failed toidentify the mineral positively. The sample was found near a quartz reef on an earthquakefault at Giant Reef in the vicinity of Rum Jungle near Adelaide River. About one hundredyears later, when a sample from that very site was analysed, the mysterious iridescentmineral was found to be Torbernite – uranium ore.

In his field dispatch Goyder also reported that at Giant Reef his contact with localAborigines had been hostile and two men in his team subsequently died. However, hemade no mention that while at the reef his men had trampled on a tribal ceremonial site,forbidden even to tribal women and children, let alone intruding white strangers peggingthe ground. The Giant Reef incident marked the first nuclear conflict known to man.

During World War Two the area south of Darwin to Adelaide River and even furtheralong the Stuart Highway was dotted with airstrips and military camps. The large influxof young white men into the area weakened Aboriginal traditional life and oftendecimated tribal communities. The whites roamed through the bush in their jeeps seizingAboriginal women, many of whom never returned to their tribes. When the whites left atthe end of the war, the opportunity arrived to restore the traditional way of life.Unfortunately along came uranium fever which for the local Aborigines turned out to beeven more tragic than the war.

The uranium at Rum Jungle was rediscovered in 1954 by bushman John White at the siteof an old copper mine that had operated briefly during World War One. For hisrediscovery White collected £50,000 reward from the Australian government, whichwas a fortune at that time. The news immediately generated uranium fever – every secondman in the streets of Darwin had a Geiger counter and was heading for the bush tosearch for precious uranium ore. The fever even caught up with Ross Annabell, editor ofthe Darwin newspaper The News, who quit his post and headed for the bush. At thattime uranium was badly needed by the British for the development of their atomicprogramme. Even before John White’s rediscovery, a team of geological experts fromEngland was sent out to tour remote areas of the Australian bush in search of uranium.Simultaneously, the Australian government established the Bureau of Mineral Resources tostimulate prospecting and mining. The government took the Rum Jungle find from JohnWhite and later handed it over to Territory Enterprise, a subsidiary of the British miningcorporation Conzinc. A uranium prospecting plant was hastily erected at the Rum Junglesite from where drums of uranium oxide were transported to Darwin to be shippedoverseas. Thousands of men recruited from displaced camps in post-war Europe arrivedin Rum Jungle to build and operate the mine and processing plant. They little knew of howlethal the work would be both for the surrounding environment and their own health. Theyworked and lived at the site for several years under assignment, hardly communicatingwith the outside world. Rum Jungle operated under stringent rules laid down by the AtomicEnergy Act 1953, according to which anyone found guilty of obstructing the productionand processing of uranium could be sentenced to a minimum of twenty yearsimprisonment.

Following the establishment of the nuclear processing plant at Rum Jungle, the Australiangovernment quadrupled the reward for new uranium finds and allowed the developmentof privately owned mines. This accelerated the uranium fever; new mines multiplied in thebush, stretching from about 400 kilometres inland as far south as Katherine. As they beattheir way through the unknown terrain, the prospectors used flame-throwers to set the forestablaze and thus clear away the growth. It was said that the burning of the bush would

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expose the rocks and make the area more accessible; however the main purpose was todrive the tribal Aborigines away from the area and prevent them from hiding under thegreen canopy. The Bureau of Mineral Resources, a government body which superviseduranium mining operations, provided the prospectors with gelignite, maps, supplies,transportation, food, information on how to treat snake bites and much else, but failed totell them that the tribal people who lived in the area were also human beings.

After covering the bush area south of Van Diemen’s Gulf in line from Darwin to Katherine,the prospectors advanced frontally eastward towards Arnhem Land high country. Movingthrough the unexplored vastness they checked every acre of the bush with Geigercounters; ahead flew aeroplanes carrying out geological surveys in order to determinethe possible presence of uranium. Horrified by the white man’s push, the Aborigines fleddeeper into Arnhem Land.

As the uranium fever peaked, a team of prospectors led by George Sleis who worked forthe Northern Australian Uranium Corporation, reached the upper Katherine River andadvanced upstream through the rugged terrain, scrutinising every rock in sight. The whitesheaded towards Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve. They had previously swooped throughthe Eva Valley area, a remote, almost inaccessible wilderness. Sleis had formerlyprospected for uranium around the Orr Mountains in Germany during World War Two,but the terrain of central Europe was totally different from the Australian bush; however,that made no impact on his drive to find the rock. It mattered little for which country oneworked – the Atomic Energy Act in Australia hardly differed from a piece of similarlegislation brought about by the Third Reich. The team was pushed to human limits to finduranium just as prospectors would have been in Germany during the war. The remote,rough bush country of the upper Katherine River was accessible mainly by foot. Suppliesand equipment had to be carried on packhorses through narrow gorges and over steepridges. The horses were handled by young Aborigines recruited as slave labour; theyreceived no wages and worked on meagre food rations – clad only in tattered shorts,they moved bare-footed through rocky bush. Some fled deep into the bush; others becameill and perished – some, like Bobbie Secretary of the Larakia tribe, survived to tell the storyof horror. He was a lad when taken by George Sleis. Apart from handling packhorses,Bobbie had to ‘test’ water and food before it was consumed by the prospectors whofeared they could be poisoned by local Aborigines.

The whites built an airstrip at Birdie Creek on the upper reaches of the Katherine River toferry supplies of food and equipment to the prospectors. The surrounding bush countryhad abundant supplies of bush food on which tribal people had lived for generations.However, prospectors feared that local food may have been poisoned.

At the time the prospectors reached the Arnhem Land plateau, local Aborigines wereliving their traditional way of life using stone tools and wooden implements; many of themhad had no previous contact with the whites. A group of prospectors came upon aceremonial ground while an initiation ceremony was taking place for tribal girls. The girlswere seized and taken to the prospectors’ camp where they were chained to a tree. Eachwas released for about an hour or so a day to sexually satisfy one prospector or another.The tribal men, also seized at the ceremonial ground, perished without trace.

Out in the remote wilderness of the upper reaches of the Katherine and Alligator rivers,the prospectors would often hold their Geiger counters against rock slabs covered withAboriginal paintings in caves and rock shelters. If a trace of radioactivity was registered,the prospectors searched for the Aborigines to whom the site belonged and forced themto lead the white men to the locality from where ochre, used in the paintings, had come.The paintings looked old, dating back thousands of years – some even as far back asthe Ice Age. The Aborigines were tortured and sometimes died, but without revealing thelocation of their ochre pits. The prospectors were often briefed by men from the Bureauof Mineral Resources on how to interrogate Aborigines and blow up caves containingprehistoric paintings. At the field camp men from the Bureau who worked on aradiometric survey of the new uranium field, kept a grim mascot on their mess table – agrinning Aboriginal skull removed from one of the burial caves. A generation of nationalfervour to find uranium was fostered – the key to “the preservation of Westerndemocracy”, as was so often said – at the same time inexorably bringing about thedestruction of Aboriginal man in his tribal state. George Sleis and his team located richuranium finds in the hills of the upper Alligator River. However, the price for uranium onthe world market unexpectedly slumped and none of the newly discovered finds reachedthe stage of commercial production. Uranium hunters who struck it rich retreated from theremote bush of West Arnhem Land, back to civilisation to lick their wounds.

The mining of uranium on tribal land was revamped again in 1974 during the world oilsupply crisis with the news that a nurse from Adelaide, holidaying on Oenpelli, hadstumbled on a uranium mine. It was heralded as “the largest uranium deposit in theworld”. The virgin bush of Arnhem Land was subsequently subdivided into a multitude ofprospecting leases which were grabbed by greedy multinational corporations. The localtribal Aborigines strongly opposed mining on their land and held on for years, but theirresistance came to an end when the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs summoned the triballeaders to a meeting at Bamyili – a bush settlement about 100 kilometres from Katherine.After their arrival, the police sealed off the only road connecting Bamyili with the rest ofthe world. The tribal men were held in the remote settlement for days without food and

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water until they signed a paper which allowed the mining of uranium on their sacredland. No journalist was allowed near the settlement to witness what the Minister called“an historic occasion”. However, two young people from Sydney who were making adocumentary on the missionary outpost in Arnhem Land made their way through the bushto film the “historic occasion”. Some years later when their documentary Dirt Cheap wasreleased, it showed the cruel duress used to force the Aborigines to sign the papers. Afterthe signing, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs shook hands with the distressed Aboriginesand presented each of them with a pen and writing pad as a gift – welcome tocivilisation!

A part of West Arnhem Land that fell outside the uranium mining leases was subsequentlydesignated the Kakadu National Park because of its rich wildlife and the importance ofthe ancient Aboriginal cave painting sites. Soon after, Kakadu was listed by UNESCOas a world heritage area in order to guarantee the Park’s protection and preservation. In1999, however, after the successful deployment of missiles using uranium and plutoniumby USA and NATO forces against Yugoslavia in a “humanitarian war”, the mining ofuranium prevailed against the cultural heritage and UNESCO ambassadors werepersuaded by the military establishment to authorise the mining of uranium in KakaduNational Park. Subsequently a part of Kakadu was pegged and gazetted as “off limits”for tourists and local Aborigines. The local people of the Mirrar tribe, who wandered intothat area of their ancestral land, were seized by the police, prosecuted and gaoled. TheUN agencies, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other ‘humanitarian’organisations showed no interest in the fate of these Aborigines.

NUCLEAR TESTINGThe uranium oxide obtained from tribal land in the 1950s was shipped abroad and theby-product returned to Australia for British nuclear testing, thereby creating a secondnuclear tragedy to strike the Aborigines. The Australian government assigned largeportions of central Australia to the British government without much concern for theAborigines and their environment. The area contained scores of tribal territories where thepeople had lived for thousands of generations, since the Ice Age, and had developedtheir unique culture, social structure and beliefs in harmony with the desert environment –thus being able to sustain life even during severe climatic upheaval. According to theAborigines, the land was created by their tribal ancestors who made boulders, hills andranges from a featureless plain of sand. They made occasional waterholes and createdplants; before departing for the spirit world they instructed their tribal descendants on howto look after the land and sing to summon rain in times of drought. That same land wasgazetted by the Australian government and overnight declared a prohibited zone – to beaccessible only to personnel engaged in the British nuclear testing programme. Theprohibited area was larger in size than England.

Prior to nuclear testing, detailed surveys of scattered farming properties held by the whitesin the area were carried out. The surveys listed the numbers of cattle, horses, sheep, pigs,hens and other farm animals on the properties, but made no mention of the indigenouspeople living in the area or the waterholes essential for life.

Throughout the prohibited area and the desert beyond, the whites built an extensive gridof roads to get in and out of the desert so that they could monitor nuclear blasts and othertesting. They penetrated deep into the remote desert in order to round up tribalAborigines. Special teams were sent out to comb the area; even spotting planes wereengaged in the search for a human presence in the dry wilderness. Where that failed,the whites set up ambushes at waterholes, which would trap those Aborigines desperatefor water.

The rounded-up Aborigines were hustled into cattle trucks and transported to variouscamps, most of which were outside the perimeter of the prohibited zone. Hastily set-upcamps were described as “Food and Water Rationing Depots”, purportedly to “helpAborigines during drought”. The camps often consisted of a bare patch of desert with anartesian bore sunk into the ground and an improvised dwelling for the white administratorswho supervised the rationing of food and water and controlled the movement of theinmates. The Aborigines brought in were provided with a blanket and a spot on theground to dig a hole, where they huddled with their families in order to survive the colddesert winds at night. There was no wood to make a fire, no running water, no propertoilets or other amenities. Before retiring for a night’s rest in a sandpit, the Aborigineswould stick a spear into the ground next to the sandpit, so that if a windstorm occurredduring the night, it would be known where members of their family were buried. Duringthe rounding-up and transportation, tribal families were often broken up; children wereseparated from their parents, never to find each other again if they were sent to differentdestinations. Most of the children were placed in government and missionary institutionsin which abuses and rape were common practice.

The whites kept no proper records of who was sent where; the camp authorities did noteven know the names of the inmates and barely knew their estimated number. Oftenpeople brought into the camps were from different tribes, not sharing a commonlanguage or tribal beliefs. They shared only the same skin colour and fate. These peoplewere prohibited from leaving the camps and returning to their tribal country. Stranded, faraway from their hunting grounds, sacred tribal sites and waterholes, they were in despair– everything they had ever known in their entire lives and the lives of their ancestors hadsuddenly perished – bare existence was left. Some with will and courage fled the campsand headed back to the prohibited areas, but were never heard of again.

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Scattered bands of tribal people remained in the prohibited areas. They had managedto avoid being rounded up, or perhaps they were intentionally left behind by the whitesto be used as an example of how effective nuclear testing was on humans in the area.(A secret document prepared by the British Nuclear Testing Authorities was discovered in2001 in the Library of the University of Dundee, Scotland. It was a report on the rounding-up of desert Aborigines in Australia and states that about 40 per cent of the Aborigineswho might have avoided being caught, were left behind to the perils of nuclear testing.)

As nuclear testing proceeded, some Aborigines found in close proximity to the explosionsites were covered with dust from the blast. They were immediately taken away bynuclear testing authorities, never to be heard of again. A tribal family was found dead ina crater made by the nuclear blast – people who had wandered around and stopped tocamp in nuclear-made craters during the cold desert nights, huddled against rocks stillwarm from the explosion.

Fifty years after the event an Aboriginal survivor, Eileen Kampakuta Brown, wasinterviewed by Nancy Haxton on A.B.C. Radio National. She recalled the NuclearHorror. Members of her family, walking in their traditional homeland saw a strange colourin the sky and in the days that followed, suffered the effects of a radioactive mistspreading through the bush. Speaking through an interpreter, her grand-daughter KarinLester, Ms Brown states: “We had lots of eye sickness, like sore eyes, lots of phlegm,people were vomiting. There was diarrhoea happening and there was a lot of skin rashesas well …so, when that mushroom happened, people starting getting sickness.”

During one of the tests at Emu Field – Totem 1, Wing Commander E. W. Anderson, withtwo of his officers, was ordered to fly through the atomic cloud only a few minutes afterthe bomb bursts. They all died later from radiation after-effects. Before he died thecommander wrote a chilling account of the flight.

As the radiation from the testing ground in the desert spread, it affected the majorpopulated area far away in the eastern part of Australia. The Australian scientist HedleyMarston who was monitoring radioactive fallout received information that even in thecoastal areas of Queensland the Geiger counter was “running red hot”. This was abouta half continent away from the testing site at Maralinga. The radiation detected in animalsregistered 400 times higher than expected; major Australian cities – Adelaide,Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane – were effected. The people who reported red dustclouds engulfing their area were misled with assurances that the cloud had nothing to dowith the nuclear testing. “I go mad when I think of it”, Hedley Marston commented. Heurged the Nuclear Testing Authority to hold over any further blasts until the danger of

radiation might be properly assessed. He was concerned that a large area of thecontinent had been contaminated. As the nuclear testing proceeded, Marston was askedto prepare a report on the impact of radiation on the civilian population. He commentedof the nuclear testing authority: “Some of those boys qualify for a hangman’s noose.”

In his report Hedley Marston found that the presence of Strontium 90 from the nucleartesting is 5 times higher in the bones of children than in adults. This derived mainly bydrinking milk from cows fed on contaminated pasture and will likely cause leukaemia andcancer. “Whitehall and Canberra think that the people of Australia are expendable”:Marston published his findings in the CSIRO scientific Journal of December 1957 but nodaily paper deemed it proper to mention it. Marston was accused of subversive activitybut went on with his work, monitoring the effects of 6 of the total 12 British nuclear blastsin Australia. Two of those blasts went dreadfully wrong. Due to Marston’s efforts 21,000body samples were taken from people effected by the nuclear testing, mainly childrenand still-born babies. The samples are housed in a Melbourne laboratory and constitutethe largest collection of samples from victims of nuclear radiation in the world. Nosamples, however, were collected from Aboriginal victims from Central Australia. Beingin far closer proximity to the nuclear testing ground and living in contaminated semi-desert,their casualty rates were far higher but it seems that no authority was concerned with that.

No persons were officially held responsible for such human destruction or “qualified forthe hangman’s noose” as Marston suggested. Indeed, the man most responsible for it,Ernest Titterton, was knighted by the Queen for service to “science and peace”. He sawthe entire Australian continent as a testing range, ignorant of the fate of local Aboriginesand the fragile environment. Titterton had a history of incompetence some years earlierwhen in charge of nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert (USA), resulting in more humanand environmental destruction. Marston was right – a noose may have been moreappropriate than a medal from the Queen.

At the time of the British nuclear testing about 15,000 Australians were enlisted into theAustralian army to take part in the project. According to some of those servicemen, afterthe nuclear blast, codenamed “Totem”, had caused the death of a considerable numberof tribal Aborigines, the army engineering units refused to bury the victims because of thehigh level of radioactive contamination. The range commander of nuclear testing wassubsequently relieved of his duties and there was a likelihood that the world might hearof the Aboriginal casualties and contamination of such a large area of the Australianoutback. The Nuclear Testing Authorities hired a certain Joseph “Rocky” Maine – a civilianbulldozer operator working for the 17th Construction Squadron in Kingsford, NSW – aman from uncertain background and without next of kin or relatives. In the middle of

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1955 he was flown several thousand kilometres from the east coast to Central Australiato dig mass graves and bury the Aborigines at the Quandong Tree site, about 30 milesnorth of Maralinga. In the years that followed Joseph Maine visited the nuclear testingarea on several more occasions to dig more mass graves for Aborigines. His visitsstretched into the 1960s. One of those mass graves was located at the edge of the localairstrip, Hendon, about 43 miles north of Maralinga. In the semi-desert area of CentralAustralia, local Aborigines traditionally move around in small family groups due to scarcityof bush food and water. They would normally have kept away from the testing areaoverrun with white people. The dead Aborigines buried in mass graves may have beenheld as detainees and placed in the proximity of the nuclear blast to test the effectivenessof the nuclear weapon. Joseph Maine used to boast to his drinking mates at the canteenthat by digging the mass graves he had “buried the evidence” and saved the NuclearTesting Authorities from embarrassment and worldwide condemnation. After the nucleartesting ceased Joseph Maine was given free lodging at the army barracks at the Schoolof Military Engineering for the rest of his life. When he died in 1995 the bulldozer driverwas taken to his grave followed by a military cortege, with the pomp and honour usuallyreserved for a great soldier.

The camps in which the Aborigines were held were never visited by the Red Cross, theUnited Nations, or any other human rights organisation – the Atomic Energy Act hadprohibited any knowledge about the camps and the Aboriginal inhabitants confined inthem from being made public. At Ernabella, a mission settlement adjacent to the nucleartesting area, Aborigines were dying en masse due to the radiation. The settlementprovided a “perfect opportunity” for the Nuclear Testing Authority to monitor the lethaleffects of radiation on humans, but no help was provided to the victims to alleviate theirsuffering.

Separated from their land, children and traditional way of life, the Aborigines lostcontinuity with their culture. The will of a people who had stewarded the land for morethan 50,000 years with enormous skill and determination to survive in the dry and aridAustralian interior, was crushed under the white man’s ignorance and brutality. The losseswere immense, not only for the Aborigines, but for the entire world which lost theopportunity to learn from a unique culture and its beliefs, as well as from the people whohad lived through the calamities of the Ice Age and subsequent climatic upheavals.Neither the British nor the Australian governments accepted responsibility for the senselessdestruction of this great cultural heritage, nor did the UN agency show any concern.Those Aborigines who miraculously survived the nuclear tragedy never received rightfulcompensation, except for a few token handouts.

Yami Lester, blinded by nuclear testing, later travelled to England to see the Queen andplead for justice. The Queen declined her responsibility towards the victims of nucleartesting even though the Royal family was used to promote uranium mining and nucleartesting in Australia. In the 1980s, after fragments of plutonium and other radioactivedebris were found at an Aboriginal camping site, the Australian government eventuallyset up a Royal Commission to enquire into the British nuclear testing and its impact onlocal Aborigines. The British government refused to cooperate with the Royal Commissionand withheld information about the testing despite the evidence that Aborigines in CentralAustralia were dying as a result of the nuclear tragedy brought about by the British. Alsodying was a generation of Australian ex-servicemen who were enlisted to assist with thetesting.

Whether they were removed from their land by uranium mining or by nuclear testing, theloss to the Aboriginal people was catastrophic. They have suffered more than any otherpeople in human history. While on their own land they had a self-sufficient lifestyle andwere free to choose their destiny; they enjoyed economic and cultural independence.With their land taken away from them in the white man’s quest for nuclear power and itselusive benefits, all that perished.

After completing their atmospheric nuclear testing in Central Australia and after signingthe Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty in the 1960s, the British (jointly with the USA)secretly carried out a series of nuclear “trials” to perfect weapons that would have lessvisible impact, but even more lethal consequences. The Australian military authoritieswho assisted them published Nuclear Handbook: Part 1 in 1960, a manual for theirofficers in the field on how to handle testing of “dirty bombs”. A cocktail of uranium,plutonium and other radioactive elements was packed into a projectile or missile andfired from the Woomera testing range at a target many kilometres away in the Australianwilderness. A grid of newly built tracks stretched across several tribal countries – fromWoomera to the Macdonnell Ranges – so that “military experts” and “scientists” couldfollow their nuclear toys throughout the Australian vastness and monitor their lethalpotential. Numbers of artesian wells were drilled in the semi-desert and depots set up forthe distribution of food and water to Aborigines, in order to keep the tribal people outof their usual hunting grounds and traditional waterholes. There was also a medical teamon hand to “help” the humble natives, but its main purpose was to test the effect of thenew weapons on humans. The testing fell within the Finke River catchment area and theriver’s tributaries which had sustained so much life in the arid Australian interior. Somenuclear testing sites were located only a few kilometres away from the river, in closeproximity to sacred Aboriginal sites and ochre pits from which colours were obtained forritual body decoration and traditional paintings.

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(In 1995, during the filming of A Double Life, John Mandelberg and his crew cameacross one such site at Osmond Gorge, hidden for years in the ranges. Part of a hill hadbeen blown out by an immense explosion that had melted the rocks. Devoid of any signof life, the radioactive site was not signposted and during the years Aborigines from theneighbouring settlements of Papunya and Hermannsburg must have, undoubtedly,stumbled upon it. The site appears symbolically in paintings by Aboriginal artists KaapaTjampatjimpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjari, Dinny Nolan and Michael Nelson Jagamarra.)

The nuclear missiles were meant for the Vietnam War, but that war ended before thetesting was completed. The actual deployment of the missiles had to wait for decades –for the Gulf War and the bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Perfected after initialtesting in Australia, the new weaponry later became known as “depleted uranium” (DU),also known as “dirty bombs”, chiefly made up of Uranium 235 – a waste product ofUranium 238 used for nuclear reactors and for the production of nuclear bombs. Denseand more penetrating than lead, DU has immense destructive power; it burns on impact,thus dispersing radioactive particles into the air and soil that will destroy life for millennia.

After being rounded into government settlements, many Aborigines died prematurely of a“mysterious sickness”. Others suffered from an illness which some years later becameknown as “Gulf Syndrome”. The legendary Aboriginal artists of Papunya, KaapaTjampatjimpa and Tim Leura Tjapaltjari, died prematurely, most likely from nuclearradiation. The Totem and Ore photographs tell of their fate and the fate of an entiregeneration caught in the nuclear tragedy and forgotten by the rest of the world.

The first showing of the Totem and Ore photographs took place at the Adult EducationGallery in Melbourne in 1974. Later on that same year the collection was exhibited atthe Australian National University in Canberra during Aboriginal National Daycelebrations. Yami Lester spoke at the opening. He described how some years earlier hehad seen a large cloud engulfing his tribal country. The cloud brought a dusty mist thatstayed on for days, settling on plants and waterholes. His eyes became inflamed andirritated, as did the eyes of his pet dingo. The animal often shook its body trying todispose of the dust caught in its fur. Some months later the dingo’s eyes began to shineduring the best daylight time of the day. Yami noticed that he too was losing his sight –the country around him grew dimmer every day until it sunk into darkness forever. Manyother Aborigines suffered similar symptoms; they called it “sandy blight” as no one knewat the time that the illness had been caused by the nuclear cloud.

FALLOUTDuring the British nuclear testing, the only man allowed to keep a photographic camerain the Central Australia testing area was Clive Campbell, who was in charge of security.Clive Campbell was directly responsible to M.R. Thwaites, whom the British brought toAustralia to be in charge of overall security of uranium processing and nuclear testing.Clive Campbell photographed installations, equipment, British scientists and militaryofficers who were conducting the tests. He took photographs of the nuclear bombexplosions in Central Australia as well as of the devastation left behind. Alsophotographed were Australian soldiers conscripted in thousands to build and maintain thetesting sites. Many of them were used as “indoctrinees” – a word which some 45 yearslater was revealed to mean “guinea-pigs”. The soldiers were positioned in close proximityto the nuclear explosion to record its impact on humans. When he retired, Clive Campbellleft most of his photographs to the Atomic Ex-servicemen’s Association, formed bydemobilised soldiers who survived the nuclear testing. Many of his photographs werelater published in Atomic Fallout, the quarterly journal of the Atomic Ex-servicemen’sAssociation – its pages of obituaries list the names of the many men who died frommalignant radiation diseases and their children who inherited the illnesses.

Campbell’s former boss, M.R. Thwaites, stayed in Australia after the nuclear testing wascompleted. He was given the job of Chief Librarian at the Parliament House Library,Canberra, in the early 1970s. In 1974 Wongar received a letter from the ParliamentHouse Library signed by a Mr D. Dun, informing him that he had seen the Totem and Orecollection exhibited earlier at the Australian National University. Dan asked if the Librarycould have the collection on loan, to be mounted for two weeks in connection with theparliamentary debate on the first Aboriginal Land Rights Report compiled byCommissioner A.E. Woodward. The letter explained that there was not enoughdocumentary material available on the impact of industrial development on Aboriginalpeople and that the Totem and Ore collection should provide politicians with valuableinformation and stimulate parliamentary debate about the forthcoming Aboriginal LandRights legislation.

A few hours after Totem and Ore was mounted in Parliament House, the exhibition waspulled down. Mr R. Thwaites then issued a press release denigrating the collection.(“Shame of Aboriginal Squalor Comes Down”, The Age, 2 October 1974).

On news of the banning of Totem and Ore, the Geelong Advertiser published aninterview with Mr R. Wood, head of the Geelong Regional Library, who had earlierhosted exhibitions of the collection; he stated: “The collection provided valuableinformation on a little known area” (Geelong Advertiser, 4 October 1974). The

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newspaper wondered why the politicians in Canberra were barred from seeing Totemand Ore. The same question was asked by the Melbourne Sunday Press, which publisheda number of the photographs under the heading “The Pictures MPs Couldn’t See” (SundayPress, 17 November 1974).

A special showing of Totem and Ore was subsequently organised by the AboriginalAdvancement League (Victoria) at the Aboriginal Centre in Melbourne (November 1974).The exhibition was opened by Aboriginal elder, Sir Douglas Nicholls, who, in hisopening speech voiced his disappointment at the “blindness and ignorance of Canberrabureaucrats towards the plight of Aboriginal people”. The Institute of Australian Studies inCanberra later hosted the collection for private viewings. This was followed by a newshowing in Melbourne at the Australian Conservation Foundation (July 1975) jointlyorganised with the National Council of Aboriginal and Island Women.

In the early 1980s a European exhibition of Totem and Ore was planned for France andGermany with the help of Simone de Beauvoir and Frederick Rose, however, this projecthad to be abandoned because of political obstruction from Australia. An earlier versionof the Totem and Ore text was translated by Eberhard Brüning and published in Germany(Bumerang und Bodenenschatze) as originally planned. The text inspired Annemarie Bölland her husband, Heinrich Böll, to translate B. Wongar’s Nuclear Trilogy into German.

Many requests have been made seeking information about who gave the order to banTotem and Ore but with no positive result. The last request, under the Freedom ofInformation Act 1982, was made in 1983 through the office of Clyde Holding MP,Member for Melbourne Ports and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs at the time. In reply tothat request the Department of the Parliamentary Library advised that the matter “…isspecifically excluded from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act…” anddeclined to provide the information.

The Aboriginal images from Totem and Ore helped Wongar in the following years towrite his Nuclear Quartet (the novels: Walg, Karan, Gabo Djara and Raki). Thephotographs also provided him with the inspiration for the collection of short stories TheTrack to Bralgu, Babaru, Marngit and The Last Pack of Dingoes. The Totem and Orephotographs provided material for John Mandelberg’s film A Double Life – the life andtimes of B. Wongar. The film won a finalist award at the New York Festival 1995. A newfilm by the same director is in progress using many photographs from the Totem and Orecollection.

MALIGNANT SYNDROMESAlthough a global nuclear conflict has been avoided so far, the world has been plungedinto an equally destructive environment known as “Gulf Syndrome”. The lethal weaponscontaining depleted uranium and plutonium, originally tested in central Australian desertsin the 1960s, have long since been perfected and deployed globally. Designed todestroy the enemy, DU is also killing the soldiers who deploy it as well as innocentcivilians and their descendants – it leaves behind a legacy of death to linger for manygenerations.

Much of the lethal data on DU remains “classified” by the USA and British governmentsand nothing is done to alleviate the suffering of victims, just as nothing was done inAustralia to help the earlier victims of nuclear testing.

The nuclear testing site at Maralinga has long been reclaimed by the desert but at nearbyWoomera a cemetery of still-born babies remains, heralding many such cemeteriesspringing up around the globe after deployment of DU weapons. During the 1991 GulfWar, the USA and Britain fired about 944,000 thousand DU rounds from ground andair – about 2,700 metric tonnes of depleted uranium. Many Iraqi civilians, includingchildren, who survived that military onslaught, have contracted leukaemia and cancer; ahost of malignant syndromes have been passed on to their descendants of which 67 percent have been born with some kind of deformity. After the 1991 Gulf War many Iraqibabies were born without eyes or without the crown of their skull – deformities linked tothe deployment of DU in the war. A report by the British Atomic Authorities predicted thatin years to come about one half a million Iraqi citizens would die due to the radioactivedebris from the war. This finding was prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq during which aneven larger quantity of DU was deployed against that country and its people, alreadyexhausted by years of UN sanctions and international neglect. In 2004 alone the US hadfired 127 tons of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, the radioactive equivalent of10,000 Nagasaki bombs.

Depleted uranium was also dropped twice on Serbian people under similar circumstancesand prolonged UN sanctions during the Balkan conflict – in Bosnia (1995) andYugoslavia (1999).

The bombing in Bosnia marked the first use of nuclear weapons on European soil andagainst Europeans. It was brought about through clandestine involvement of the USA inBosnia. The Americans were allied to extremist Muslims trying to drive away localSerbians from their land on which they had lived since time immemorial. They helped setup Al-Qa’eda camps to train mujahedin warriors in bomb-making and sabotage. The UN

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representative in Bosnia, Kofi Annan, sided with the USA, helping to smuggle mujahedinfighters and ammunition into Bosnia, thus aggravating the conflict; he urged the USA tobomb the Serbs and prevent them from overrunning Al-Qa’eda camps. The bombinglasted 7 days during which 5,800 DU projectiles where dropped on local Serbs. Thebombing was not authorised by the United Nations and it was illegal to use depleteduranium. Kofi Annan was subsequently promoted to General Secretary of the UN, andvoiced no objection to the illegal bombing of Yugoslavia (a founding UN member) by theUS-led NATO force in the spring of 1999. The bombing was carried out withoutauthorisation of the Security Council of the UN and lasted 78 days, deploying depleteduranium weaponry chiefly on civilians: schools, hospitals, homes, apartment buildings,libraries, bridges, water treatment plants, electricity supplies, factories and other civilianinfrastructure.

The Yugoslav TV station in Belgrade was hit, killing presenters, journalists, technicians andother support staff; even taking the life of a young makeup artist. DU bombs weredropped on columns of refugees near Prizren killing 75 civilians. At Grdelica Gorge acommuter train crossing a bridge was hit with DU missiles; the carriages fell into theMorava River leaving no survivors. A maternity ward in a Belgrade hospital wasobliterated by NATO bombs.

The Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hit by DU missiles, killing many people inside.NATO had planned even to bomb the Serbian nuclear reactor at Vinca on the outskirtsof Belgrade for so-called “humanitarian objectives”. The West watched the air raids dailyon their TVs as a spectacle, without concern for the fate of the victims of such horrificbombing. Prior to NATO’s attack, the Serbs were demonised by Western politicians andthe media as being subhuman, just as the Aborigines were perceived during the nucleartesting in Australia.

After the bombing the Yugoslav authorities began publishing data on birth abnormalitiesand the effect of radiation on humans and the environment, but that ceased after the USAinstigated “regime change” in Belgrade. In a letter sent to UN Secretary Kofi Annandated 7 February 2002, NATO finally admitted that about 31,000 tonnes of depleteduranium missiles and other projectiles were used to bomb Yugoslavia.

That real figure is about 100,000 tonnes according to Yugoslav sources, perhaps evenhigher. During the closing days of the bombing, the US military admitted that its stockpileof DU ammunition was severely depleted. Ironically, Kofi Annan initially called for the“humanitarian” bombing of Yugoslavia, even though such action contravenedinternational law and the UN charter. The bombing of the Serbian people brought about

ecological disaster well planned and executed by the USA/NATO. It is developing intothe largest tragedy in European history – for thousands of generations to come the peoplein the Balkans will be dying from radioactivity. The estimated damage bill from depleteduranium bombing of Yugoslavia is 300 billion dollars which the USA/NATO declines topay.

According to an August 2002 report by a UN sub-commission, the use of depleteduranium weapons breaches the following laws and conventions: the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the GenocideConvention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva conventions of 1949; theConventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1889 and1907. All these laws are designed to protect innocent civilians from suffering in armedconflicts. Since that UN sub-commission report, depleted uranium was deployed againstAfghanistan and the illegal invasion of Iraq.

No person or country has been charged for breaching so many international conventionsand causing destruction to generations of victims.

As for remote Australian Aborigines, those who miraculously survived uranium mining andnuclear testing, they are to be engulfed by yet another nuclear tragedy – the Australiangovernment has recently authorised the building of a large depository site for nuclearwaste near Woomera, it is strongly opposed by local people. The Woomera area hasbeen leased to the Americans for testing the new generation of nuclear weapons.

LYNDA BILCIC and B. WONGARPapunya, 2003

TOTEM AND ORE Photographic collection

Expedition one — 1960s

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Jetty at Arnhem Land

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Ghost town at Mary Kathleen Mine Nuclear contaminated land

“The white man has strangled the country

by stealing the magic that made rain”.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

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Survivor of the blast … (left)

… with her family on contaminated desert

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Of man and flies (left)

The white man has taken everything except poverty

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Blinded – no longer able to see his tribal country

Nothing left to live for

“What they did to my dear people!”

SIR DOUG NICHOLLS

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Habitats 1, 2 and 3

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The tribe has vanished.

Why?

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Home!

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Evicted from a nuclear testing area The art of survival

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Relatives Toddler plays in old fridge

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Billycan man Miner’s mistress

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Working for the white bossCondemned

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Why do so many of us die?

Mother’s hand (right)

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Toddler and flies (previous)

Someone else’s finery

Separated from her parents

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Sweets in exchange for his country

Shanty Princess

“Human victims of dual tragedy –

uranium mining and nuclear testing”.

FREDERICK ROSE

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Under the tent and radioactive dust (left)

Growing up

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Young Australian… …and his brother

“Displaced and forgotten”

GERALDINE BRIGGS

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Wary Growing discontent

Landless generation (over)

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Feeding time

Washing off radioactive dust (opposite)

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Close to mother (opposite)

Timeless grace

While the billy boils (over)

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Tribal matriarch under scarf Bobby Secretary

Lament for a time bygone (over)

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Man in his dugout Behind their corrugated hut

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Barefooted youth (opposite)

Lookout

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Barefooted generation The outcasts

“Absent from national statistics and conscience”.

“Deprived of their country”.

GORDON BRYANT

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Migrant mine-builders in Arnhem Land

TOTEM AND ORE Photographic collection

Expedition two — 1970s

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‘The white man took everything but anguish’

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Confined 1

Confined 2

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Man in charity coat Woman with bony hands

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Living block 1

Living blocks 2 and 3

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‘No politician has ever been charged

for destruction of our people!’

STEVEN MURRY

Songman and didjeridoo player

Pierced-nose man (right)

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Between a rock and a hard place (previous)

At a rock-shelter

Water-bearer

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At sunset Sunset forever

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Dinny Nolan, Tim Leura Tjapaltjari and Kaapa Tjampatjimpa

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At wind-shelter (previous)

Home 1 and 2

Home 3 (right)

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Waiting for Godot

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Barefooted trio (left)

Tim Leura Tjapaltjari’s kid

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‘silent anguish in vast outback’

ROGER KISSING

Friends (left)

“…anyone home?”

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Waiting for Godot 2

Godot never comes (over)

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CONTRIBUTORS

BAIGENT, HAROLD. As head of the Arts and DramaDepartment at the Council of the Adult Education, heorganised the first exhibition of Totem and Orephotographs in Melbourne, 1974.

de BEAUVOIR, SIMONE. French writer; was the first topublish B.Wongar’s work in Les Temps Modernes, themagazine she co-edited with Jean-Paul Sartre, 1977.She wrote a foreword to the Wongar Nuclear Trilogy.

BILCIC, LYNDA. Editor, writer. Edited some of B. Wongar’s books including Totem and Ore. Sheworked for a while for the government laboratory inMelbourne which housed samples of ash from humanvictims of nuclear testing. She also took part in a 2003expedition to the Macdonnell Ranges and Papunya togather additional field information and catalogue thephotographs. She worked closely with Aborigines DinnyNolan, Janie Kaapa, Daisy Leura Nakamarra, ChristineKaapa, and Michael Nelson Jagamarra. She visited thenuclear testing area at the Macdonnell Ranges; on herreturn to Melbourne she became ill and died fromcancer (2004).

BÖLL, RENÉ. German publisher and artist, he promotedTotem and Ore in Europe. He published B. Wongar’sNuclear Trilogy, translated into German from the originalmanuscript by his parents Annemarie and Heinrich Böll.(Lamuv Verlag 1983)

BRIGGS, GERALDINE, with her daughter Lois, helpedorganise the second showing of Totem and Orephotographs in association with the AustralianConservation Foundation, Melbourne, 1975. Geraldinejoined B. Wongar on an expedition to Central Australia(1977) where at Papunya they met with Aboriginalartists Kaapa Tjampatjimpa and Tim Leura Tjapaltjariwho both pioneered the Desert school of art. Briggs andWongar continued to West Arnhem Land, visiting tribalcommunities affected by uranium mining.

BRÜNING, EBERHARD. German academic; translatedinto German some of B. Wongar’s work including theearlier version of Totem and Ore.

BRYANT, GORDON. Minister of Aboriginal Affairs in theWhitlam government 1974; a member of the AboriginalAdvancement League and editor of their magazineSmoke Signals. This was the first journal to publish somephotographs from the Totem and Ore collection. Bryanttried to improve the living conditions of the Aboriginesand was subjected to an unfair campaign for “over-spending” on Aborigines. He set up the LandCommission Right.

DOBREZ, LIVIO. Wrote a number of essays onB.Wongar’s work including Totem and Ore.

FESL, EVE. Mumewa. While director at the AboriginalResearch Centre at Monash University in 1988 sheorganised a writer-in-residence programme for B. Wongar at the Centre to promote Totem and Ore.She also hosted the launching of his Nuclear Trilogy.

HOLDING, CLIVE. Former Federal MP and Minister forAboriginal Affairs; tried to help B. Wongar obtaininformation under the Freedom of Information Act aboutthe banning of the Totem and Ore collection, but it wasfound that the affairs of Parliament are exempt from theFreedom of Information law.

KISSING, ROGER. American anthropologist; took part inthe Totem and Ore exhibition at the School of PacificStudies. He selected some photographs from thecollection to illustrate his book Cultural Anthropology,which is used as a textbook in the USA.

JAGAMARRA, MICHAEL NELSON. Elder of theAnmatjira tribe from Central Australia; artist; helped withfield research on Totem and Ore. He made a number ofpaintings on the theme of nuclear testing in Australia.

LESTER, YAMI. Aboriginal elder of the Pitjantjara tribe,author and activist. He was blinded by the nucleartesting carried out in his tribal country.

MANDELBERG, JOHN. Filmmaker; found nuclear testingsite in the Macdonnell Ranges during the filming of ADouble Life (1995). His film shows a large number ofphotographs from the Totem and Ore collection.

MARSTON, HEDLEY. Australian scientist opposed to theBritish nuclear testing in Australia. He was reprimandedfor warning of human and environmental destruction.

MURRY, STEVEN. Aboriginal elder from Victoria. Ashead of the Aboriginal Advancement League 1974, heorganised an exhibition of Totem and Ore soon after thework was banned in Canberra and invited the VictorianAboriginal community to the opening.

NICHOLLS, SIR DOUGLAS. An Aboriginal activist andelder; co-editor of Smoke Signal. He opened the Totemand Ore exhibition at the Aboriginal AdvancementLeague Centre in Melbourne (1974) and spoke of thetragic impact of the nuclear testing on the tribal people.

ROSE, FREDERICK. Anthropologist who pioneeredresearch among Aborigines in the 1930s and the1940s. He was expelled from Australia because of hisopposition to nuclear testing. He settled in Germany andlectured at Berlin’s Humboldt University. In 1974 he wasinvited back to Australia as a visiting Professor at theAustralian National University where he saw andcommented on Totem and Ore.

ROSS, ROBERT. American academic associated with theEdward A. Clark Center for Australian Studies at theUniversity of Texas at Austin; and one of the founders ofthe journal Antipodes, which published some of thephotographs from the Totem and Ore collection. Hewrote an essay on Wongar’s Nuclear Trilogy for WorldLiterature Today.

SHAPCOTT, THOMAS. Australian author; encouraged B. Wongar to persist with the writing of the NuclearTrilogy. He contributed to promoting Totem and Ore.

Lynda Bilcic at Papunya, September 2003

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Age, “Shame of Aboriginal Squalor Comes Down”, 2 October 1974.Aboriginal Land Rights Commission Report, Australian Government Publishing Service,

Canberra, 1974.Atomic Energy Act, Commonwealth of Australia, 1953.Bruce, Ian: “Unknown Illness Sweeps US Troops”, The Herald, Glasgow, 2 October 2003.Butt, Peter: Silent storm, documentary, Film Australia, 2003.“The Consequences of Depleted Uranium Bombing of Yugoslavia 1999”, Glass Javnosti,

29 October 2005, Belgrade.de Beauvoir, Simone: Foreword to Walg, Dodd Mead & Co, New York, 1983.Department of Aboriginal Affairs (letter to S. Bozic dated 14 November 1983).Department of the Parliamentary Library (letter to S. Bozic dated 29 November 1983).Dimic, Momo: Pod bombama (Under the Bombs), Prosveta, Yugoslavia, 1993.Fesl, Prof. Eve Mumewa D.: Conned, University of Queensland Press, 1993.Holding, Clyde MP: (letter to S. Bozic dated 28 September 1983).“The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium”, Chugoko Shimbun, Hiroshima, 2002.Lester, Yami. Yami, Institute for Aboriginal Development Alice Springs, 1993.Lester, Yami: History and the Land, Institute for Aboriginal Development, Alice Springs, 1992.Lewis, John: “The Pictures that MPs Couldn’t See”, Sunday Press, 17 November 1994.Indoctrination Exercise – Operation ”Lighthouse”, Atomic Weapons Tests, Paper, 1958, Atomic

Fallout Vol. 3, No. 4, 2001. Mackay, Neil: “US forces use of depleted uranium weapons is ‘illegal’”, The Sun Herald,

Scotland, 30 March 2003.Mereweather, Charles: “Government Squalor”, Farrago, October 1974.O’Neill, Brendan: “Don’t Blame the Neocons – Al-Qa’eda in Bosnia”, The Spectator, 27 August

2005, UK.Pilger, John: A Secret Country, Vintage, London, 1990.Rose, Frederick G.G.: Correspondence with B. Wongar (unpublished).Ross, Dr Robert L.: “The Track to Armageddon in B. Wongar’s Nuclear Trilogy”, World Literature

Today, Vol. 64, Winter, 1990. USA.Ross, Annabell: The Uranium Hunters, Rigby Ltd, Australia, 1971.Weinberger, Eliot: “What I Heard about Iraq”, London Review of Books, 3 February 2005. Wongar, B.: “Bumerang und Bodenschatze”, in Der Pfad nach Bralgu, Verlag Philipp Reclam,

jun., Leipzig, 1981.Wongar, B.: “Le chemin de Bralgu”, in Les Temps Modernes, No. 369, Paris, 1977.Wonger, B.: Nuclear Trilogy: Walg, Karan and Gabo Djara, George Braziller, New York,

1990.Wongar, B.: Dingoes Den, ETT Imprint, 1999. Wongar, B.: The Last Pack of Dingoes, Harper Collins, 1993.

“A person shall not tamper with prescribed uranium substance.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 20 years”.

“... shall not tamper with atomic research or development.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 20 years”.

“…shall not publish, communicate or disclose photograph articles, notes or any information.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 20 years.”

“… shall not prejudice defence of Australia.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 20 years”.

ATOMIC ENERGY ACT 1953

© Text and photographs B. Wongar

ISBN 0 9775078 0 7Totem and Ore

Wongar, B.First published 2006 by Dingo Books

PO Box 147Carnegie, Victoria, Australia 3163

All rights reserved

Cover photo: DisplacedPhoto page vi: The Aboriginal mass-grave at the

Quandong Tree site, 30 miles north of Maralinga. Thesign above the skull was placed by soldiers to ridiculetheir sergeant. (Atomic Fallout Vol. 3. No. 6 2002)

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