Irati Wanti – the poison leave it! This is the core message from the Kungka Tjuta. They know what they are speaking about as many of them as children lived through the atomic bomb tests on their ancestral homelands. Twenty atomic tests were carried out by the British Government over Australian territory between October 1952 and October 1957 at Monte Bello and Christmas Islands off the coast of Western Australia, and at Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia.

Another instance of terra nullius. The existence of the traditional owners wilfully, criminally ignored. 40,000 service personnel exposed as guinea pigs to the blasts. In 1955 a deal was sealed with a UK firm for the Lucas Heights reactor (just south of Sydney), a research reactor designed specifically for producing weapons-grade plutonium. In 1956 Australian uranium was set aside for British defence purposes. The collusion between a toadying Australian government and its colonial master. The characteristic apathy of the general populace. Mega blasts? She’ll be right, mate! Anything for that old warmongering whore and her bitch queen, Mother England.

11 October 1956. The giant cloud that hovered for days, blowing south on prevailing winds to Adelaide increasing the airborne radiation from 21 counts per second to 95,000 cps.

At Maralinga (field of thunder). Black rain, the burning eyes, the blindness, the weeping sores, the tangled entrails, the persistent coughs, the deaths, whole families devastated, and later, the infertility, the congenital birth defects, the atomic legacy carried down for 3 generations now, who knows how it will be for the daughters of the daughters of the daughters of the daughters. The relocation of the Indigenous peoples, their land poisoned, the animals – malu, perentie, dead.