No go zone

by Eleonora Gasparotto (Italy)

Making a local connection Australia

A thud and I fall. Nothing serious just scrapes. I get up and shake off the red earth. The bike is completely bust. On the horizon between the shrubs and spinnifex, a group of kangaroos are hopping off. One of them was the cause of my accident. There isn’t any signal on my phone. I sit on the side of the asphalt road waiting for a car. The sun is strong, it’s hot, at least 35 degrees. The outback is an arid and sparsely populated area, this is the only road that connects Norseman (Western Australia) to Ceduna (South Australia). 1200 km of desert that I wanted to cycle. I'm not crazy, there is a logical reason why I'm doing it. I don’t have a driving license and there is no public transport down this road, so the final decision was to buy a bike and pedal. I wanted to cross this immense piece of land because the story of Yalata deserves to be told and that the Australians don’t know it. Great Victoria Desert, 1950s. The Christian mission of Ooldea has just been closed and the Aboriginal people who lived there during the “Stolen Generation period” are transferred to the distant communities of Tarcoola, Coober Pedy, Kooniba, Yalata and Cundeelee. The trauma of a diaspora. The Anangu never forgot the sadness and confusion of that day when they had to leave their home and land without explanation. Torment, anxiety and bewilderment flows assail them. Some people cry, while others try to escape on foot, but are recaptured and brought back. Yalata is a refugee camp: people are camped everywhere, the physical and psychological stress affects the natives, the rations are poor and there is no health care, some manage to survive the diseases transmitted by the whitefellas, but many of them die. The coastal reality is different from the desert environment to which they are accustomed and the Aborigines are unable to find the food and plants necessary for their diet. Many of them vomit, have stomach pains, coughs, diarrhea, headaches, suffocation, rashes, flaky skin, sore eyes and tears, bleeding from the nose and mouth. In the “Pana Tjilpi” (gray land) as the Anangu call it, a few days earlier some black fumes and a gray fog were seen on the horizon and a metallic smell was perceived. A loud thunder noise was heard. A roar of uncertain origin that they cannot recognize: it’s a nuclear explosion. In 1946 the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia decided to set up the Woomera area, ignoring the danger and the consequent environmental and human destruction that would have occurred. The statements of the time reported that no one would have been influenced by the tests. In June 1952 the Prime Minister's Memorandum written by scientist Leslie Martin and Professor Ernest Titterton said: "We are able to assure you that no habitations or living beings will suffer injury to health from the effects of the atomic explosions proposed for the trials." When politicians and scientists arrived in these places in the mid-1940s, they only saw a desert, a large uninhabited space and didn’t understand the importance that the Anangu have given to this land for 40,000 years. The tests were a concrete example of the concept of Terra nullis. The lack of respect supported by the colonialist ideology of believing that Aborigines simply didn’t exist. Due to plutonium and its 24,000 years of risk, some areas today remain "no go zone". Despite the bans, many Aborigines have wanted to return to their old lands stripped of their soul, where contaminated water and animals cause cancer and skin and respiratory diseases, a set of emotional, physical and social complications. Finally, after few hours a car stops. The man at the wheel is very kind: he loads the bike on the 4x4 and we go to Nullarbor, the village before Yalata.