1950s atom bomb tests deepen degradation of South Australia’s northwest Aboriginal desert peoples
Aboriginal people at Ooldea and all along the transcontinental railways lived in apartheid degradation, unwanted in their own land.
The seven 1950s atom bomb tests in northwest South Australia were at Emu Field and Maralinga – home to Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara-speaking Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years. But the degrading of these people started long before the bombs. White settlement has taken over their lands and disrupted their traditional economy.
These Aboriginal spinifex desert peoples had their trading and ceremonial traditions disrupted when Yuldi Kapi, original name for the permanent water soak at Ooldea, was pumped dry in just 20 years after the arrival in 1917 of the nearby transcontinental railway.
Aboriginal people living along the Trans-Australian line were reduced to living marginal lives, worsened by the South Australian government’s chronic underfunding of the Aborigines department. They were forced to barter or beg for food – annoying the Aborigines department and Commonwealth Railways. All along the Trans-Australian line, they were deliberately excluded from medical services with white patients refusing to share wards.
Aboriginal chief protector Milroy Trail McLean told a Port Augusta meeting in 1937 he favoured the extending this apartheid to all Aboriginal people along the Trans-Australian line: “The black, in their present condition, and the whites will not mix without damage to both.”
Renowned anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1942 found the Ooldean Aboriginals disillusioned and depressed, unwanted in their own country; a symptom of “second stage of culture contact”.
The effect of the British atomic tests sent them into a third stage. Not only were they forced south into the alien territory of the Yalata mission, the shifting of Ooldea Aboriginals in 1952 to the Gerard Mission at Loxton in the Riverland forced together with Indigenous people of different backgrounds and deepened the cultural disintegration and its problems.
Prime minister Robert Menzies told the Australian parliament in the 1950s that “no conceivable injury to life, men or property could emerge” from the British nuclear bomb tests in South Australia’s northwest.
But, after Totem 1, the first of the seven bomb tests, a black mist rolled across the landscape at Wallatina and Welbourn Hill stations in the Granite Downs 175 kilometres, bringing high radioactive contamination. About 45 Yankunytjatjarra people were reported to have been caught in the mist at Wallatina and fallen ill. But the 1985 McClelland federal royal commission said it didn’t “have sufficient evidence to say whether or not it caused other illnesses or injuries.”
