timbonham.com

When my wife was offered a 3 month contract in Alice Springs and she asked if I could keep myself amused, I remember saying something like "I'm sure I'll find something interesting going on there". We certainly live in interesting times.

The four days we took to drive from Melbourne to Alice Springs gives you an idea of what a vast country Australia is, and being from Canada I'm not easily impressed. Vineyards on gently sloping hills and paddocks with grazing sheep slowly give way to seemingly endless plains of red sand and scrub. Some clever marketing person decided to rename the "Dead Heart" the "Red Centre" and advertisements now talk about "the Real Australia/Outback". As the city traffic dwindles and the Road Trains and "last petrol for 240 Kms" signs start to appear, you could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking this is the middle of nowhere.

At dusk on day two we arrived at Woomera, famous for being home to a recently closed detention centre for refugees/asylum seekers and also as a base for testing aerospace and weapons technology. It felt like we'd walked onto the set of Dr. Strangelove. During our stay we learnt about the above ground British nuclear weapons testing carried out in an area roughly the size of England, in the late 1950s. The local aboriginal people and military personnel were directly affected by the tests, many dying of cancer. They also produced enough radioactive fallout to dust almost the entire continent, the clean up of which continues to be a source of contention after a cost of more than 100 million dollars. You get the feeling it's a history everyone should know about and certain people would like you to forget.

Walking down the main open-air pedestrian mall in Alice Springs you can often hear as much German, French and Japanese being spoken as English. Aboriginal men and women have their paintings laid out on the grass for sale. They wait patiently or talk with the tourists about the nature of their work and the price. Starting at dusk, police drive their paddy wagons slowly down the now empty mall, making their presence felt and watching. Despite the relative calm it doesn't take long to figure out that Alice Springs is a town in turmoil. The top politician for the Territory was booed off the stage when she tried to address a crowd about the growing crime rate. Aboriginal councils and federal government officials accuse each other of blocking the way to improving aboriginal housing in the NT which can be best described as third world. The government wants the land, which was only given back in the 1970s, in exchange for the improvements. A few weeks before Oxfam co-releases a report which states Australia is in last place amongst "wealthy nations working to improve the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal peoples".

A local newspaper trumpets a proposal to make Alice a "Solar City" with massive investment in solar power systems while the decision about the placement of a nuclear waste dump looms off in the distance. In 2005 the Federal government of Australia passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Bill which essentially allows it to place a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory over any challenges or objections by it's government or people. The government came up with three possible sites but with the help of the National Land Council, whose mandate is to "consult with traditional landowners and other Aborigines with an interest in the land", a fourth site, Muckaty Station, has actually been nominated and is under review. Most people believe that the dump will be placed at Muckaty. With everyone I speak with not wanting the site I can't figure out why an aboriginal group would actually be asking for it on the their land. Government ministers are quoted as saying the sites are "some distance from any form of civilization" or they are "in the middle of nowhere" and yet a 30 minute drive from downtown Alice and I'm at a proposed site.

During the three months I spent in the Northern Territory, I talked to a lot of people and the question I heard the most was "If it's as safe as they say, why can't they keep it there"? The "it" was nuclear waste, some low level waste but also spent fuel rods and parts of a decommissioned reactor, and the "there" was Lucas Heights Nuclear Facility in Sydney. It's a question that no one I spoke with had received a good answer to. Some representatives who had been taken on a tour of Lucas Heights told me they had been assured the waste was perfectly safe,"we were told you could handle it with your bare hands". I'm not an expert in nuclear waste but handling spent fuel rods with bare hands sounds like a scene from the Simpsons. They were also told that if they didn't accept the dump children were going to die from lack of access to nuclear medicine. Others asked "If the decision is being strictly based on science then why is it only being considered in the NT and why only on [or near] aboriginal land"?

As my wife and I drove out of Alice we were listening to a lecture on the war on terror. The speaker argued that it was an elementary moral principle that "decent people apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others." I was reminded of another question I heard a lot in the NT, "Why doesn't that Johnny Howard bury it in his backyard"?