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Aborigines finally get back radiation tainted land

The worst contamination came not from the bombs blasted, but from the so-called “minor trials” of weapons components that took place for another six years.………….Australia did not recognise the aborigines’ claims to the land

Atomic amends Jan 15th 2010 | MARALINGA The Economist
A blighted site is handed back to the people displaced by British bombs FROM the air, Maralinga looks much like the rest of Australia’s outback: vast, red and empty. Up close, there are differences. Its long, quiet airstrip recalls a time when this was an unlikely epicentre of the cold war. Parrots and wedge-tailed eagles cruise above a desert still littered with radioactive plutonium and other fragments of atomic weapons that Britain exploded more than 50 years ago.After Australia agreed to its request for a test site, Britain exploded its first atomic device off north-west Australia in 1952.

Maralinga (an aboriginal word meaning “place of thunder”), near the transcontinental railway in the state of South Australia, was chosen later as a better site. Altogether, Britain conducted 12 atmospheric atomic tests in Australia, including seven at Maralinga, up to 1957. The worst contamination came not from the bombs blasted, but from the so-called “minor trials” of weapons components that took place for another six years. Tests at a site called Taranaki left plutonium, uranium and beryllium dispersed across the range.

Australia did not recognise the aborigines’ claims to the land. Their ancient songlines, or “dreaming tracks”, had extended through Maralinga. Authorities relocated many of its natives south to Yalata, a dire highway town, where alcohol and welfare payments ruined them. Britain relied on Australia to ensure that no others strayed into the vast test zone. Inevitably, some did:………………

Scientists have left just one small part, at Taranaki, restricted: the new owners can hunt through it, but they may not live there. Peter Johnston, a scientist involved in the latest clean-up, and a former consultant to the Maralinga people, reckons this is the first case of a former nuclear test site being handed back safely to an indigenous group. “Is there some residual radioactivity there? Yes,” he says

January 17, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | antinuclear, AUSTRALIA, indigenous, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, radiation, radioactive