Kulini Kulini report : Melbourne Indymedia

My hugest thanks go out to the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, senior Aboriginal women of Coober Pedy, for their amazing generosity, spirit, strength and warmth in inviting us all here to their country and sharing their stories with us. My respect also to the Irati Wanti team and the Melbourne Kungkas for their incredible work on the campaign and for the camp.

From Sunday 28th September through Wednesday 2nd October people from around Australia and the world converged at 10 Mile Bush Camp at the invitation of the Kungka Tjuta. The Kulini Kulini ‘Are you listening?’ camp was called by the Kungka Tjuta after they attended the nuclear free gathering in Silverton earlier this year. After they have travelled far and wide in their campaign against the proposed nuclear waste dump it was the first time that they would play host to so many people on their country. The Kungkas extended the invitation for people to come Wangka irati, wangka Maralinga – talk about the poison, talk about Maralinga.

After an amazing week of setting up, collecting bbqs and chairs, tables and gas bottles from local businesses and setting up the infrastructure at 10 Mile Bush Camp people started to converge on Sunday. Amazing pit toilets (this is a mining town after all!) a huge Eco Warriors marquee, the incredible FoE kitchen, huge piles of fire wood, crate beds for the Kungkas, piles of borrowed swags and more combined to make 10 Mile one of the most decked out camps I have ever been to.

Over two hundred people made the journey to Coober Pedy to meet the Kungkas, listen to their stories and share their own. Families, friends, supporters, community groups, greenies, politicians and locals all gathered under a marquee amidst swirling dust, big winds and storms to listen to stories of the 1953 atomic bomb test and the devastating impact they had on people’s families, health and lives. Whilst these were stories of sadness and loss Kulini Kulini was also a celebration of strength and survival and of coming together and sharing.

The program was never officially organised or announced, and meeting times were completely on the Kungkas terms. I think initially people, myself included, were challenged by this fluidity and lack of (our familiar) structure, but the space that this gave the Kungkas and other Anangu people present to speak was what made Kulini Kulini so amazingly special.

Before the camp begun there was sad news of the death of a senior Coober Pedy Tjilpi and on the second day word came of a death in a Kungka’s family. This meant that camp was to coincide with sorry business. The news itself was testament to the constant presence of loss and death in these communities lives, but their choice to continue the meeting demonstrates their resilience, strength, generosity and commitment to spreading the word about the irati – the poison – and opposition to the proposed dump.

It was the first meeting that I have been lucky enough to attend that was not just a small number of articulate, accepted indigenous speakers on the mike, but an open forum, in Yankunytjatjara language with translation in to English. Some people who spoke had never publicly told people their experiences of the detonation of Totem 1 at Emu Fields 50 years ago (anniversary on 15th Oct). As well as local Anangu there were mob from Ceduna, Oak Valley, Adelaide and Darwin who were welcomed by the Kungka Tjuta to share their stories.

It was heart wrenching and devastating to hear their painful stories. but simultaneously inspirational and heartening to witness the strength, generosity and humor that people possess in spite of the loss, sickness and devastation that the poison and policy have exposed them to. Sitting down on the manta – earth – sharing stories, tea and wisdom was just beyond words.

I kept waiting to hear some hack or campaign head activisty type whine about getting around to planning the campaign, or organising an action and I was happily surprised that no-one challenged the pace and content of the meetings or the lack of traditional meeting forums.

The distribution of food, malu wipu – roo tail – and cups of tea to the Kungkas and Tjilpis was an integral part of the gathering. Initially only a small group of people were taking on looking after the elders, but after the three days more and more people overcame their shyness to spend more time with the older men and women in camp. The exchange and sharing of food in step with the sharing of stories and histories as well as visions and ideas for the future was a powerful element at Kulini Kulini. As with any meeting or conference the most powerful exchanges are often organic and occur in between any programmed sessions.

When the Kungkas went in to town for showers on Wednesday morning they suggested that we have ‘greenie time’ to talk about plans and how to support the campaign. After a bit of background from Irati Wanti and Melbourne Kungkas campaigners people broke in to groups, mainly geographically with particular emphasis on thinking of actions to do around the 50 year anniversary in two weeks. It looks like there will be a range of projects from 10,000 avant cards being launched, a public community art project in Melbourne, screenings and events in Alice Springs, Sydney and Adelaide and a big bbq in Coober Pedy! In addition there were loads of ideas thrown around with plans to work closely with the Peace Pilgrimage – a walk from Roxby Downs to Hiroshima leaving Melbourne in December - and potentially a bike ride from Lucas Heights along the proposed transport route to the proposed dump site!

Later in the afternoon the Kunkgas performed Inma - ceremony – for the whole camp. After the wati – men - had performed the Kungkas invited all the women in camp to come up to be taught one of the dances of the Seven Sisters creation story. Shyly and giggling hundreds of women of all ages danced in the dust with the Kungkas.

In the dirt out there at Ten Mile Bush Camp a remarkable coming together occurred between people of different races, languages, ages and backgrounds. We were talking about the bombs, the history and devastation, acknowledging and grieving the history and the pain, but with hope and vision to prevent the same Irati – poison – from disrupting the future.

The ripples and learning, stories, pace and respect learnt, the ideas challenged, the knowledge and feelings in my head and heart – and everyone else’s – are going to fuel so much more from here. I feel so so so lucky to have been involved in helping with this camp, I feel so privileged to have had so much shared with me.

...am looking for evidence that an english Dr out here testing nerve gas used to work at Porton Down where at least one fatal test was done.

Also evidence of highly radio-active waste from original tests that could be sprinkled over a standard ANFO and details of how many indigenous people died during or soon after the original tests

Finally evidence that the defence establishment of this nation has a fucking clue what they are dealing with.

Couple of articles...

Subject: Incomin'

New York: Security at nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States is so lax that they have repeatedly failed drills in which mock terrorists captured radioactive material and escaped, an article in the magazine Vanity Fair says.

"Some of the facilities would fail year after year," said Rich Levernier, a federal employee who ran simulated "war games" to test security at the nuclear weapons facilities until he lost his security clearance in 2001.

The article, written by a veteran nuclear industry reporter, Mark Hertsgaard, quotes Mr Levernier as saying teams of mock terrorists ran attack drills on the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and other premises.

"In more than 50 per cent of our tests at the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn't fire a shot, because we didn't encounter any guards," he said in the article.

These failures occurred despite the security forces at the laboratories knowing the dates of the drills months in advance.

The report says Mr Levernier, a 22-year veteran of the US Department of Energy, was stripped of his security clearance after he faxed an unclassified document to The Washington Post.

He has filed a Whistleblower Protection Act lawsuit against the department, arguing he was illegally removed from his duties.

Anson Franklin, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told the magazine the lawsuit prevented him from commenting, but he denied that nuclear-weapons facilities are vulnerable to attack.

"The impression has been given that these tests are staged like football games, with winners and losers," he said. "But the whole idea of these exercises is to test for weaknesses. We want to find them before any adversaries could, and then make adjustments."

A statement from the NNSA said the incidents cited by Mr Levernier occurred from 1996 to 1999 and noted that the Bush Administration and Energy Department had increased security funding by more than 50 per cent "to ensure that our nuclear weapons materials are not vulnerable to terrorist attack".

The report said a second whistleblower, Chris Steele, formerly the DOE's senior safety official at Los Alamos, sounded an alarm after he received a safety report last October for the Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility at Los Alamos.

Lab officials had analysed various scenarios, including an aircraft crashing into the radioactive waste, and concluded that although such a crash would cause hundreds of thousands of litres of nuclear waste to catch fire, the fire would be put out by the facility's roof-sprinklers.

"That must be a magical sprinkler system," Mr Steele said, "since it's apparently able to rise up from the rubble, turn itself on, and put out the flames. We should buy one of those for every nuclear plant in the country."

The Los Alamos laboratory, which was where the first atomic bomb was developed, has faced a series of security lapses in recent years, including a lost hard drive in 2000 that contained classified information. The drive was later found behind a photocopier.

http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/07/1065292588799.html

AND...

Subject: Dangerous journey

Dangerous journey
By Miriam Cosic
October 04, 2003
Dancing with Strangers
By Inga Clendinnen, Text, 310pp, $45

Inga Clendinnen is quoting Yeats. "Tread softly," she says, "because you tread upon my dreams." The line haunted her when she worked on her last book, Reading the Holocaust, an outsider's review of the literature surrounding the 20th century's seminal horror. Clendinnen challenged the unimpeachable privilege of survivor testimony and of Jewish scholarship, bringing her idiosyncratic mix of compassion, tough-mindedness, intellectual curiosity and rigorous historical methodology to bear on an area fraught with moral and political sensitivities.

"An immense number of people of goodwill said 'you must not publish that book you're an outsider, it's so politicised'," she recalls. "There was an absolutely neurotic sense of the risk of misuse because it wasn't clearly partisan and it wasn't within the usual academic parameters."

And yet her book was well received. Reviewing it for The New Yorker, Daphne Merkin praised its "modesty of tone". It signalled, she wrote, a "radical departure point, clearing a space out of a cluttered and 'jealously guarded' rhetorical arena for the discussion to be freshly and impassionedly taken up".

Clendinnen is incredibly brave or incredibly reckless, depending on your take. At an age and in a fragile state of health when anyone else would seek the calm of a well-earned retirement, she has left the arcane and sheltered byways of an esteemed professional life to embark on dangerous journeys.

Serious illness and a liver transplant left her, more than a decade ago, unable to pursue her life's work of teaching and researching Mayan and Aztec cultures. Her doctors forbade her to undertake a planned field trip to Guatemala that would have concluded her work on a

third book exploring first contact with the Spanish conquistadors. In fact, she will never see Latin America again the epidemiological rigours of the land are beyond her debilitated immune system.

Recuperating from the transplant, Clendinnen wrote Tiger's Eye, part fiction, part memoir, a harrowing personal journey drawn from the inexplicable hallucinations and recovered memories of the twilight zone from which she had just emerged.

She then turned her historian's eye to the nightmares that had hovered on the edge of her consciousness from childhood. Reading the Holocaust is popular history but the note she strikes of personal and tentative inquiry is deceptive: she brought all her academic rigour to bear and, as Merkin pointed out, all the important scholars and memoirists are represented in her text.

Now Clendinnen is stepping into another battle zone. Her new book, Dancing with Strangers, is an investigation of the thoughts and motives of the people who encountered each other when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788. Her timing could not have been better or worse.

With the "history wars" in full cry, she is raising a calmer voice. Will it be read in the same disinterested spirit in which it was written? One side may claim she is fuelling the "black armband" view of history; the other that she is appropriating an experience she has no claim to. She is sanguine: "I am too old and too wicked to care what other people think."

In 1999, she was invited to deliver the Boyer lectures. Australian history was unfamiliar territory but in her newly liberated state she grasped the opportunity and turned her attention homeward. "What I discovered was the history of the Aborigine in this country not just first contact, but the generation-by-generation humiliations, sometimes deliberate, sometimes inadvertent, a consequence of policies devised for other reasons with eyes elsewhere," she says. "And I discovered that no place had ever been made for them in the early colonial society and then that any place they had painfully carved out for themselves was simply obliterated when they came into conflict with white interests."

That became the theme of her lectures but her interest was quickened by the particularities of first contact in this country. In Dancing with Strangers she re-examines the published journals of the British officials Arthur Phillip, John Hunter, John White, David Collins, Watkin Tench who arrived here. She is alert to the nuances, the smallest gestures, the most glossed assumptions, noting not only the behaviour of the British but of the individual men and women Baneelon (Bennelong), Arabanoo, Barangaroo, Boladeree, Bungaree, Colebee who stood out, in those early days, from what would come, tragically, to be seen as an undifferentiated, because unknowable, group.

In naming her protagonists, she has nailed her colours to the mast, as she puts it. The British are called British. The Aboriginal people they met, she calls Australians. It is more than a device to make us rethink our assumptions. "I'm saying we cannot think of this as an encounter between brutal imperialists all cut from the same cloth and poor, helpless, victimised savages. Instead, you have two separate distinctive people, both moved by their own notions of what honour and proper conduct are, encountering each other in surprisingly neutral circumstances initially."

The insights she offers are conjecture she prefers the term interpretation because the Australians left no written record. She dismisses cultural squeamishness. "It's difficult and it's what you call ethno-history," she says, quoting the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle: "We know when someone is winking at us or when it is only a twitch. We know when a gesture is meaningful."

The result of her work is a densely woven tapestry of personal interactions a dance, as the title suggests, between people who could barely decipher each other, a fugue of warmth and misunderstanding, of curiosity and fear, of strange interspersings of humanity and brutality. We realise, what's more, that the minds of the British are as foreign to us today almost as those of the Australians.

"History for me is a giant reservoir of human experience and it's most valuable when that human experience comes in cultural forms unfamiliar to us, because one of the most difficult things to do in the world is to get a grip on our own pre-conceptions, assumptions, unexamined convictions," she says. "We also have to control our emotions."

The historical record, she points out, is by its nature defective. "So poor old Keith Windschuttle thinks that if it's an official record, you believe it. For God's sake, the world is not shaped like that. People project an artificial simplicity on to the world of the past and call it 'respect for the record'."

She is equally tough on the other side of the present debate. It is crucial, she says, to differentiate between myth-building and historical inquiry. "One is a quest for identity, a proud identity, after the savaging we've given the people who identify themselves as of Aboriginal descent. For that social and spiritual activity, people must build sustaining myths. It doesn't matter if they're empirically true in every detail what matters is that it helps them comprehend the world they're in and take strength to endure it and to cope with it. That is magnificent and I accept it with gratitude in art or literature."

History, by contrast, has pretensions to a scientific method. "It cannot be an insider's history, it can't be tribal history it can't meet the psychic needs of the group. It's a different human activity and has to be taken seriously."

The alternative people yelling their competing tribal histories at each other dismays her. "The historian's obligation is to humankind, not to a particular group. And therefore, arrogant as it must seem and painful as it is, we have to make the effort to cross cultural boundaries in our investigations."

1300 655 191, Australian Books Direct, $40.50

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,7419753%255E16951,00.html

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