Pauline Clague, originally from the Clarence Valley and with family still living there, is featuring on ABC Message Stick this month.Pauline is now an accomplished writer and film maker - I'm sure that the documentary will be both interesting and informative as this press release suggests:
Maralinga-The Anangu Story
Producer: Pauline Clague
TX Date: Sunday 18th October, 1:30pm, ABC 1
Monday 19th October, 5:00pm, ABC 2
Friday 23rd October, 6:00pm, ABC 1
50 years ago British atomic tests were carried out on Australian soil at a place called “Maralinga” in north-western, South Australia.
Yvonne Edwards talks about her feeling on the bomb tests: “When the bomb went off. Like the spirit of the people that were buried there, went up in the bomb, and this man looked down and he is crying and all the kangaroos and emus are just skeletons around the place were the bomb went off”
Originally a Reserve for the Anangu, their mission at Ooldea was shut down, but they were not told why. They were mostly moved to new country, Yalata on the coast near the start of the nullabor plains.
Some of the Anangu people had effects from the radiation poisoning, others were workers in the seventies and eighties at Maralinga Village. Many have passed away, but some are still enduring the effects of the exposure to the poison today.
Many are still grieving the loss of their people and land from that time, Yvonne Edwards ”sometimes I cry at night. My aunties, uncles, they was young, they all died. Just like us here now, in our fifties, we got nobody over sixties and seventies in our community. Even people died when they was young. I lost a sister, when she was in her twenties, from cancer. I lost an uncle, forties, from cancer. My aunty died, from cancer”
Earlier this year a book of Anangu stories and paintings about their lives and the effects the bomb had on the Anangu people of that region was published. Christobel Mattingley the co-author, who worked alongside the Oak Valley and Yalata communities, states how she feels about the project “ The story of the injustices to the Aboriginal people, the Anangu people, through the Maralinga atomic testing are not widely known or remembered now. It’s a chapter that people have forgotten and it’s a tragic chapter and it’s an –extremely important chapter of Australian history.”
Despite the history of this area and the hardships incurred by the bombing, the Anangu are hoping that the final restricted zone, of which Maralinga Village is a part, will be returned to them in December this year. The soil may be contaminated, but it is still their home. They know they may not be able to camp in some of the areas, but like their stories they are trying to pass on to the future generation the stories and the land of their peoples.
Photograph from Australia Council for the Arts
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