Australia Day
Ten years ago, I met a boy in a remote Indigenous community called Yalata, on the edge of the Nullabor in South Australia. He asked me to take his photo, and then, simply held up a five dollar note bearing the Queen of England, blocking out his own face. Nothing else needed saying.
The Indigenous people of north-western South Australia call themselves ‘Anangu’, which simply means ‘people’. European settlers called them the Pitjantjatjara, which is the name of the language they speak.
Most of this boys tribe don’t speak English. His family have lived in Australia for 60,000 years, and their language is one of the oldest on earth. But now, their tribe lives behind bars, under curfew, and a complex web of family trauma, violence, imprisonment, death and poverty have taken hold. Why?
Two hundred and fiftyish years ago on this day, January 26th, the oldest culture on earth was invaded by the British Empire. It was a messy invasion. Genocide. And if that wasn’t enough, sixty years ago, the Australian government then packed up what remained of this boys tribe from Maralinga, moved them 2,000 kilometres west to Yalata, built the largest fence on earth, and then positioned military and police to stop the Maralinga people returning home. The reason?
Their land was needed, for a British war.
It is perhaps not well known, that South Australia is the site of the world’s largest multi-government nuclear weapons site, positioned in Woomera, which originally included Maralinga, and was set up after the Second World War. It is an area half the size of France. How did this happen? Well, 20 years before trucks dumped this boys family in the desert, a British physicist from Adelaide called Marcus Oliphant, went to the U.S, to convince American researchers to collaborate with Cambridge physicists, and build an atomic bomb. Marcus was successful, the MAUD committee was formed, the atomic bomb was built using the combined power of British and U.S science, and after approximately 200,000 people were killed in the atomic bombing of Japan, Oliphant returned to Australia to form the Anglo-Australia Joint Project of 1946. The AAP was created for a very important reason. To claim land in Australia needed for global nuclear weapons testing. Huge tracts of land that could only be found by claiming native land. And so they did. Oliphant was then knighted, and made Governor of South Australia.
Thirty years after their land was taken, the people of Maralinga finally received damages from the Australian government. Many returned to their homes, but many were also unable to. Some people were very sick, and there were long term health fallouts from the nuclear testing that took place on the land.
The weapons site at Woomera is still the biggest nuclear weapons site in the world.
The first people of Australia still live with many of the fallouts of colonial invasion.
Today, on invasion day, we remember them. And I’m breaking 1 month of silence to write this. Because Truth is power. It overrides all.
Aboriginal land.
Always was.
Always will be.
Please share.
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Photography by H.A.Gold
www.500px.com/hagold