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Maralinga nuclear bomb site returns to aborigines

Traditional indigenous owners to reclaim Maralinga bomb site THE AUSTRALIAN  David Nason  November 10, 2009 MORE than 50 years after their ancestral lands were devastated by nuclear testing, the Tjarutja people of western South Australia will next month be handed back the infamous expanse of remote desert the British named Maralinga.

After years of legal jousting, plans are being finalised for a formal handover of the land on December 18, the 25th anniversary of the government decision to give back to the Tjarutja what had always been theirs…………

The proposed handover will help bring to a close one of the most damning chapters of modern Australian history, one that saw 20,000 British, Australian and New Zealand servicemen and the local Aboriginal population become virtual guinea pigs for the nuclear ambitions of the British war machine.

Maralinga, a 3000sq km range about 1300km northwest of Adelaide, began operating in 1956 and over the next seven years, the British tested atomic bombs ranging in force up to 27 kilotons of TNT……………

those who served later suffered high rates of cancer and other diseases. Most at risk were the local Aborigines, who were oblivious to the dangers, regarded as inconsequential by the British authorities, and who returned to the irradiated land once the British had left.

In one particularly disgraceful episode, 200 servicemen were threatened with court martial after taking photographs of an Aboriginal family they spotted camping in a radioactive crater.

When the British finally departed in 1963, they left behind a site contaminated with radioactive materials that took eight

Owners to reclaim Maralinga bomb site | The Australian

November 10, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, indigenous issues | antinuclear, AUSTRALIA, nuclear, nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, radioactive, uranium, wastes