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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lRunning costs dispute stalls Maralinga returnBy Penelope Debelle
22 March 2003 - Three years after the Federal Government spent $108 million cleaning up the contaminated British atomic test site at Maralinga in South Australia, negotiations to hand the land back to its traditional owners have stalled. The Maralinga Tjarutja say they cannot afford to maintain the Maralinga village. It includes historic and newer buildings, generators that cost $600 a day to run and an uninsurable Defence Department airstrip suitable for landing a jumbo jet. A report by the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee to be handed to Federal Parliament next week will declare the site clean but for one zone in which camping remains prohibited. But the administrator of the Maralinga Tjarutja, Archie Barton, said the community did not have to take back all of the village, particularly the huts used during the five-year rehabilitation of the site. Dr Barton said equipment left at the site may have to be moved before the land could be returned. "It doesn't fit the kind of accommodation and we have no attachment to those homes in the first place," he said. He said the return of the 3200 square kilometre zone was "the last frontier" for his people, who were herded off it 50 years ago. The Government would have to provide a permanent indemnity against future contamination problems and a package to maintain the village after it was returned to Aboriginal care, he said. "If we take the village over, it's going to cost us money to run it." Maralinga site manager Steve Sheppard said An impasse had been reached because the Federal Government wanted the village put to productive use. While Dr Barton said part of the village may be used as a resource centre or a small hospital, Mr Sheppard said he believed the village would deteriorate in Aboriginal hands. "However unfortunate it might sound, letting the Tjarutja run it themselves it will ... go downhill," Mr Sheppard said. "It's a harsh judgment to make but ... I think it's an honest judgment." This story was found at: The Sydney Morning Herald The land that nobody wants
More than three years after the Federal Government spent $108 million clearing up the radioactive mess left by a British "clean-up" in the 1960s, the Maralinga Tjarutja people are in no hurry to get it back. Despite investing heavily to rescue this contaminated area for its displaced Aboriginal owners, the Government will have to remain liable for its future health. It may find the traditional owners do not want it at all if they must maintain the historic Maralinga village. The problems at Maralinga are partly rooted in history. Old people who in the 1950s lived on a mission in the test area remember being herded into trains and trucks by armed soldiers. But not all left. One woman, Edie Milpuddie, camped in an atomic bomb crater where the rabbits, blinded by the blast, were easy to catch. Milpuddie, now elderly and ill, gave birth at the time to a stillborn baby. The other women made her bury her child a long way off for fear it was infectious. "She had to leave," recalls Alice Cox, another elderly woman who, like Milpuddie, lives in the Oak Valley community about 120 kilometres north-west of the test site. "They were saying the baby had poison and it might [affect] everyone else." Before the nuclear trials, Cox and her tribe would roam the land, hunting kangaroos and small animals. Though this is desert country, bordering the treeless expanse of the Nullarbor Plain, the bush tucker was plentiful. Today, Oak Valley elder Hughie Windlass, who remembers a mushroom cloud covering half the sky, says the land was poisoned and his people would not hunt there, no matter what assurances were given. "We don't go Maralinga way," he says. "That land over there ... we don't interfere with that ..." Three generations after being herded off the land, dispossession is complete. In 1984, the elders of the Maralinga Tjarutja drifted to the Oak Valley area, which is as close as they want to be. Over time, an organised, tightly run community of about 100 people has solidified. Some choose to live in swags under humpies but most, including Windlass, live in small wooden houses with large outdoor areas for communal cooking. This semi-tribal life suits them well. There is a store, a nurse, a vet who visits every few months to cull the rampant camp dogs, and a new school with four teachers to 10 pupils. And the community is dry. "There is no drink, none of that," says Windlass. "This is a remote community. It is quiet and we enjoy the life." Reclaiming land they will never hunt on and which could become a financial liability is not a priority. "Don't rush those things, just wait patiently," says Windlass. "We don't hunt there. It's only for the future." The immediate issue is what the Aboriginal people would do with the test site village, an incongruous museum piece and a reminder of the extraordinary events that went on here. Five of the original British buildings, sent out in kit form, still stand and the Maralinga caretaker, Steve Sheppard, lives with his family in the former hospital. Sheppard, who has worked at the site for 20 years and run it for two, is passionate about the village and fears it will be broken up or fall into ruin. The camp is divided into the old and the new. The accommodation units used during the clean-up, the large mess hall and ablution block, are already falling into disrepair. "You try to keep the weather out of them but they have not been used since the end of 1999, when the official clean-up terminated," Sheppard says. Sheppard is frustrated by the lack of progress in negotiations with the Maralinga Tjarutja. The land management agreement setting the terms of the handover is in its sixth or seventh draft. "It changes like the wind," he says. "Tomorrow you might hear they want to pull the buildings down and stick them somewhere else. My own personal view is the accommodation units should be sold off, give the Tjarutja the funds from it but don't let it deteriorate." The Tjarutja talk of turning some of the buildings into a resource centre for young Aborigines and using the old village to attract tourists. But distance is a problem - to get there requires a 200-kilometre drive west from Ceduna on the edge of the Great Australian Bight, then north for three hours along a sometimes hazardous bush track. The cost of maintaining the village is also prohibitive. The lawyer for the Maralinga Tjarutja, Andrew Collett, says they want the land back but may not be able to afford it. The accommodation units were built for single white men and are inappropriate for Aboriginal use, he explains, while the cost of maintaining the could be huge. The same applies to the airstrip. "If they were in a position to afford it, of course they would take them all," he says. "They are looking at a series of options ..." These range from "bulldozing the lot" to keeping everything on site, which could cost $500,000 a year to maintain, according to Collett. The Maralinga Tjarutja's administrator, Archie Barton, prides himself on having kept intact the $13.5 million compensation money paid to the community by the British Government in 1995 for the loss of their land. The community spends the interest, but the capital has been left for the next generation. "This is the last frontier," says Barton, who in 1992 travelled to London with Windlass to present the British Parliament with a piece of contaminated Maralinga land. "If we take the village over, it is going to cost us money to run it." At the very least, he says, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, ARPANSA, would have to be on permanent call to protect them from future problems. "If you see any problem, you call them in and they can check it again. That's a must," he says. "But keep in mind, we don't have to take back the village." In the village, the remnants of a large, beautifully tiled swimming pool are still visible, as are signs of the pukka atmosphere that once prevailed. A jaunty sign above a hook in the accommodation section say "boots 'n' bits" and in the hospital a large, coloured mural caricatures the officers of the day. But this memorabilia has no meaning for the Maralinga Tjarutja and only an optimist would see the location as viable for tourists. Without further federal intervention, the village's future is seriously in doubt. Sheppard believes there are white people with unfinished business at Maralinga who should be brought back by the Australian and British governments to reconnect with their history before it is too late. Maralinga, an Aboriginal word selected by the British at the time because it meant "fields of thunder", is still a symbol of bitterness for many of the Australian and British personnel who worked at the site and who believe their health was compromised and their efforts unrecognised. "There are demons for the white guys as well," says Sheppard. "I think it is important for a lot of these men to close business and for their families to appreciate where they were and what they did. These things have gone unspoken. They played a major role in the Cold War era when Britain was desperate to get hold of nuclear weapons, and it would be an opportunity to put to rest the demons that haunt these people." Source: The Sydney Morning Herald Maralinga waste 'must be dug up' By Rebecca DiGirolamo March 10, 2003 RADIOACITVE waste buried during the clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear test site in South Australia must be dug up and remelted into plutonium-trapping rock, experts say, adding $30 million to the clean-up costs. "The best thing they can do is exhume this debris and melt it by in-situ vitrification," nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson said. The waste was not safe in its present condition, buried 2.7m deep in two unlined trenches, he said. "Plutonium is dangerous in any form," he said. "If you inhale 1mg of plutonium it will kill you." Mr Parkinson was a senior federal government representative from 1993-98 on the clean-up at Maralinga, where the British government ran nuclear trials in the 1950s and 60s. A long-awaited report on the outcome of the Maralinga clean-up project prepared by the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee is due to be tabled in federal parliament this month. Mr Parkinson has criticised the draft of the final report, and in particular MARTAC's treatment of debris contaminated from the Vixen B trials between 1960 and 1963. The waste, which included hundreds of tonnes of plutonium- contaminated steel, was exhumed from 21 pits and reburied in two trenches after MARTAC decided to abandon ISV waste treatment. The ISV process involved melting the contaminated pit debris and soil into a glass-like block to encase plutonium for thousands of years. MARTAC abandoned ISV after a pit exploded in 1999. The pit debris already treated by ISV was exhumed, cooled with water, broken up and reburied in the trenches with untreated debris. "They now have the plutonium encased in nothing," Mr Parkinson said. "It is totally illogical." A draft of the final MARTAC report obtained by The Australian estimates 650g of plutonium remains in the debris trenches and will not pose an exposure risk to humans if left undisturbed. US geochemist Dale M. Timmons, who conducted the chemical design for the ISV treatment of the Vixen B debris, said that while the waste was safer now than in its original form, the best way to prevent plutonium leaching was to exhume the waste and retreat it with ISV. "It results in the most chemically durable product that will certainly outlast the decay of the radioactive materials immobilised," he said. Australian Democrats senator Lyn Allison said the waste "has to be dug up and sorted so that we can identify where the most heavily contaminated waste is". Souce:The Australian related links :
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22 March 2003 - The traditional owners of the Maralinga lands in South Australia's far west say they are home to bad spirits, or mumoo. Despite a fortune spent rehabilitating this remote desert - appropriated by the British in the 1950s for atomic tests - the bad spirits still haunt both white and black. Those tests remains unfinished business because of the way they displaced Aboriginal people invisible to the decision-makers of half a century ago.
