Chain Reactions: Nuclear Colonialism in South Australia

Abstract

During South Australia's short settler history, it has hosted almost every aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle. The state's nuclear past is an internationally pertinent and illustrative example of how the nuclear order has been historically entwined with colonialism. Nevertheless, historians have been slow to take up and adequately investigate 'nuclear colonialism' in an Australian context. In applying international scholarship on nuclear colonialism to Australia for the first time, this thesis explores the relationships inherent to nuclear colonialism in South Australia by focusing on the interactions between nuclear processes - radium and uranium extraction, nuclear weapons testing and radioactive waste disposal - and South Australia's Aboriginal peoples. It addresses the question: in what ways has the nuclear order interacted with, co-opted, or facilitated colonialism in South Australia?

In answering this question, this thesis uses a wide range of state and national government archival material, manuscript collections, printed sources, and oral history interviews with both Aboriginal nuclear survivors and non-Indigenous people to argue that Australia's nuclear order has been historically influenced by the pursuit of national development and geopolitical power. These are pursuits fundamentally underpinned by the imperial and colonial ambitions of both Australia and Britain, and which have been facilitated through a variety of colonial mechanisms. Demonstrating the varied manifestations and developments of nuclear colonialism across the twentieth century, the chapters within this thesis present seven unique but entwined case studies. The thesis begins by placing early radioactive mineral exploration in the Flinders Ranges in its colonial and geopolitical contexts before examining the paternalistic Aboriginal welfare policies that enabled Britain's in-land nuclear tests in the 1950s. It then investigates Australia's anti-imperial responses to France's first Pacific nuclear tests, the intersection between uranium mining at Olympic Dam and the burgeoning land rights movement, and the multi-faceted politics of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia (1984-85). Finally, the thesis considers the relationships forged among Indigenous nuclear survivors in Australia and beyond during the 1980s and 90s, and Aboriginal resistance to a proposed nuclear waste dump near Coober Pedy from 1998. The case studies examined in this thesis demonstrate that nuclear colonialism has developed in response to various historical influences and challenges, from Cold War nuclear ambitions to the development of the land rights movement. So too do they highlight the centrality of Aboriginal political mobilisation to the history of nuclear colonialism in South Australia, a history that necessarily flows between local, state, national and international scales.

By charting a history of nuclear colonialism in South Australia through the course of the twentieth century, this thesis takes up one of environmental humanities scholarship's contemporary challenges: considering and accounting for the interactions between the nuclear order and those upon whom it impacts, namely Indigenous peoples. Addressing this challenge offers insight into the historical persistence of colonial structures and ambitions, places Australia firmly into international conversations about the disproportionate - and decidedly colonial - nature of the nuclear order and demonstrates how nuclear colonialism is not just imposed, but also experienced and resisted. Show more