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hey kids. i am currently preparing to go to the deswert in south australia to protest a few different things... i wrote an article about it which is being published in a few different places over here, and is on my blog if you're interested -- but i thought i'd post it here, also. i've heard that some people in the UK, 'London Calling', are doing solidarity actions. I'm also hoping people might think up a solidarity action in New York or elsewhere over the Easter weekend. The no borders movement has global relevance and if you don't already know about it, I reckon you should find out. Anyhow, here is the text of the London Calling affinity group blurb:
London Calling
Concerned teachers, parents and other members of the public in London and the UK are organising solidarity activities with the children at Woomera and other IDCs. They have initiated an email protest against Philip Ruddock and will be sending greetings and gifts to children in Woomera. Plans are also being made to set up a solidarity website and organise protests outside the Australian High Commission in central London. For more information please contact: bb@elcamino.demon.co.uk
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And here is the article itself, to give you an idea of why we're protesting:
'There's a thousand secrets
waiting here...'
-- South Australian Tourism Commission ad
Surely you've seen it. It's an ad for the secrets of South Australia: wineries, horse-riding, "gourmet food in the outback". The Flinder's Ranges. Great art. Good coffee. Now, I definitely agree that South Australia has some secrets. In fact, I'm journeying there over Easter in the hope of uncovering some of them. But discovering some nice winery in the Barossa Valley is not on my itinerary. Instead, I'm going to travel to Woomera as part of the Festival of Freedom being held there at Easter. It's an Autonomad: a journey of taking responsibility, learning about history and making our dissenting voices heard.
Woomera itself is not such a secret anymore. Partly, this is because Woomera is the location of one of five "detention centres" in Australia that imprison "illegal immigrants". Briefly, people who come to australia without the right paperwork -- in many cases fleeing war, torture, starvation and natural disaster -- are kept in "mandatory detention", a fancy DIMA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) phrase for concentrating a large number of people behind razor-wire. Detainees must undergo a lengthy, bureaucratic process by which their applications for refugee status are either approved, or they're deported back to their country of origin.
Mandatory detention is a flawed policy for more reasons that I can list here, ie: the bizarre rationale that it will send a message back to aspiring asylum-seekers that Australia will not welcome them; the inhumanity of captivity; the mercenary behaviour of a government that capitalises on detainees' plight in every way it can to win votes. But this is not just an article about refugees, and the detention centre is not the only site of injustices at, or near, Woomera. The desert of SA is a place of multiple dispossessions, from the removal of indigenous people from their land to the wholesale functioning of a military and domestic nuclear cycle and surveillance activity. What follows is only a portion of a history that the tourists who go and visit the Woomera missile park will never learn.
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Woomera township was first settled as a military base. The township is entirely owned by the Australian government -- no-one is unemployed and you have to have a job to actually live there. Most of the town's inhabitants now work for Australian Corrections Management, the private company who run the detention centre. Until 1991, the township survived on the income and flow-through created by a US spy base, Nurrungar, which was a main centre of communications, surveillance and encryption for the command of US troops during the Gulf War, as well as various military and defence force staff working on operations in the Woomera Prohibited Area.
The Woomera Prohibited Area is as shady as it sounds. Kind of like Australia's version of Roswell, a friend reckons. The actual area spans 127,000 square kilometres (12.7 million hectares) and is surrounded by a high fence; driving to Alice, you can see it from the Sturt Highway, mile upon mile of chicken-wire with signs telling people to keep out.
British nuclear testing began at Emu Field and Maralinga in 1953. The tests in South Australia not only gave defence force workers radiation sickness, but affected the large population of indigenous people who lived in the vicinity of the test site. Initially, the Australian government removed thousands of Maralinga, Pitjantjatjara and Kokatha people from their land to carry out the tests. But radioactive clouds spread north and east of the test sites, up towards Mabel Creek and Wallatinna, where many Kokatha and Pitjantjatjara people were living. Eileen Wingfield, a Kokatha elder, recalls:
"We were living in Mabel Creek working there in the Station. The day the bomb went off. I was working, the others went up on the hill... They said they saw a big cloud of smoke go up but I didn't. That night we went home and slept... When we got up in the morning we started the runs you know and nose and stomach trouble and everything... Our eyes were starting to getting sore and sore until it got really sore and that's why some of us went blind... Old people started passing away after that and everything was strange. Little lamb and everything we noticed it. Had three legs... no ears... and two head..."
Through several Royal Commissions into nuclear testing in South Australia, neither the British government or the Australian government has taken any responsibility for the damage done: not only to indigenous people, but to its own military workers, many of whom are also dead or dying from cancer and radiation-associated diseases.
At the other end of the nuclear cycle, the desert in SA is peppered with uranium mines or proposed nuclear waste sites. Roxby Downs uranium mine opened in 1998 and produces enough fuel to make 1400 nuclear weapons per year -- from the by-products alone. Recently 60,000 litres of contaminated liquid spilt into the water table from Roxby. This is just one in a litany of smaller, so-called 'minor' leaks and spills; the same kinds of mistakes have already happened at nearby Beverley Uranium Mine, which began business in 2000. While state and federal governments argue over a proposed underground radioactive waste dump at Evetts Field West, nuclear waste is already being stored in 'temporary storage facilities' above ground near Woomera itself. Green activist rumour has it that the containers are just sitting there, uncovered, without security or any kind of warning signage.
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As exemplified in the story of Burke and Wills, Australian national myth sees the outback as an adversary, something to be overcome; or maybe it's a fear of the expanse that has to be overcome. Either way, the desert invokes incredible responses from white, citified folk like me. We spend long hours on buses looking out the window at land we expect to be completely flat and dull; spend exorbitant amounts of money flying over Lake Eyre or riding camels through the Simpson Desert, hoping to 'find ourselves' or hijack some of the Aboriginal dreaming to take back to the city with us.
Ideas that shape personal responses often have just as much effect on government policy and the constitution of what Australia is, its sovereignty. One of these ideas is <i>terra nullius</i>, a phrase that allowed British colonists to settle here without engaging in any treaty process, or even acknowledging that any humans lived here before white people came. Similarly, an astoundingly widespread myth about the desert in Australia is that 'nothing lives there'. Particularly in desert that has few suitably spectacular landmarks to offer tourists and an abundance of uranium in the ground, it seems.
And where nothing is, no-one goes; which is precisely the logic that the Australian government has used to attempt to hide an embarrassing slight on our 'perfect' human rights record. Woomera is the perfect place for a prison camp; even if its captives escape, they wonÕt be able to get far.
But the desert is not nothing, not at all. In a letter to the Woomera2002 network, Eileen Wingfield says, "When you mob come up to Woomera please think about how we been fighting for a long time." Apart from an incredibly complex and diverse ecosystem, the South Australian desert is home to many groups of indigenous people whose custodianship of their land is constantly threatened by the various military and nuclear activities in the desert. Resisting that means fighting against the land being taken away for spurious military purposes; against the amnesia both Australian and British governments have towards evidence of radiation poisoning from Maralinga; against waste being dumped and against water being taken to feed the Olympic Dam at Roxby Downs. The South Australian desert is home to an immense history of resistance. Some of those resistances are happening now: the Kupa Piti Kunkga Tjuta, women elders from the Antikarinya, Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha mobs, are waging a fierce campaign against the waste dump with their demand, "Irati Wanti -- the poison, leave it!". Numerous protests have taken place at Roxby Downs, Beverly and Lake Eyre itself, initiated by Arabunna elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott and other indigenous and environmental activists. The acts of resistance initiated by detainees at Woomera are the newest addition to this history.
What is continuing to happen at Woomera also brings up larger political questions: the way the global armament and information industry funds regional conflicts, which in turn result in flows of refugees from places like Afghanistan, or American trade sanctions on Iraq, which have also resulted in huge refugee flows from that country. Or the way in which the mobility of people is clamped down upon even as capital flows more and more wherever it will multiply fastest; or the ways that indigenous dispossession and environmental destruction are everywhere, every place you look, and that almost no government is interested in engaging in repair or treaty or respect. The Call to Action for Woomera2002 sums up these issues eloquently: "We are making the journey to refuse the death, pain and confinements that are manufactured in the name of The Economy. We refuse the caging behind razor wire and the new world borders fashioned so that capital, by reserving for itself the 'right' to move around the world, can better enforce austerity, misery, the earth's destruction and the 'race-to-the-bottom.'"
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So what can you expect, if you decide to make the journey? Woomera2002 will be a do-it-yourself festival; it is not the action of any one group or organisation, and as you might expect, the motivations for people to come are diverse. Direct actions, workshops, music, kite-flying, independent media coverage and talk-fests are all possibilities; the point is that you bring yourself to Woomera and figure out the best way for you to express your dissent. Decision-making is being made by a range of autonomous groups without leaders or party lines, and with space for everyone who comes to make their own decisions about what they want to do. Networks in Perth, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide are already meeting; itÕs not too late to start a network or put out a call for action in your own town or city.
It's up to us to take responsibility for speaking out. In the maze of intersecting political threads, sometimes even speaking out is difficult. It's harder to know to act appropriately; how to go about protesting in 'the right way'. But this is also about learning. It's the multitude of connections, and the possibility of making a personal connection to this amazing land we live in, that motivates me to make the journey. It's how Woomera tells a story about state-sanctioned wrongheadedness, but also about resistance. I'm going to Woomera to honour that resistance and see if I can't help a bit with some resistance of my own. Maybe I'll see you there.
Check out the Woomera2002 website for information on what you need to bring, how to get there, the pre-Woomera convergence being held in Adelaide, and various other useful stuff. Solidarity actions are also being planned in London and other places, and a virtual borderhack will take place during the festival. Keep your eye on the website for updates. |
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