Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  By the middle of the twentieth century, the nomadic life had all but vanished. Aboriginal numbers were less than a tenth of the half million or so who were alive before the British settlers landed. Most were living on the fringes of society, suffering the same alienated fates as the American Indians of their day—alcoholism, disease, and nihilism. The uranium bonanza had pushed them further to the margins, especially in the Top End, where many lived on cattle stations or at missionary-run charities. Some took to vagrancy, begging for change. They were finally granted the right to vote in 1963, but they were not allowed in many swimming pools or hotels until much later. The compromise over Ranger was viewed as a kind of payback for all the abuse. The Aboriginals now—suddenly—had an exceptionally strong hand in deciding how uranium was to be developed, if at all.

  This puzzled Joe Fisher, who had employed dozens of Aboriginals in mines and mills, and felt they should not have received any superior status in regards to the land. “One cannot dispute that their lifestyle is different from that of the white man, that their customs are different and their culture is different,” he wrote. “Yet, essentially they remain human beings just like you and me; and they should be treated just like you and me as human beings, not differently.”

  He was quick to profess respect for their ways. During one jeep trip near Port Keats, he had watched as an Aboriginal companion caught a goanna lizard that he wanted to take back to his family for dinner. He could not kill it on the spot—its corpse would grow rotten in the heat—so he snapped the four legs and threw it alive in the back of the truck. The reptile “remained fresh until the feast,” noted Fisher, admiringly.

  He added: “Provided you worked with them, they were generally good hands.”

  The company agreed to pay the local clan of Aboriginals, known as the Mirrar, a royalty on gross sales, plus an annual rental fee. It also agreed to move its southern boundary even farther away from the sacred Mount Brockman. An artificial town named Jabiru was platted and constructed in the middle of the tropical forest. It had a school, a supermarket, a gas station, a cul-de-sac neighborhood of ranch houses, a Holiday Inn in the shape of a crocodile, a camping spot for wandering Aboriginals, a mimeographed local newspaper called the Rag, and wide bitumen streets that shimmered in the afternoon heat and seemed to fade into the trees. Democracy was another mirage: a Ranger executive was a permanent member of the city council. Unless you worked at the uranium mine, you could not stay there. On the streets at shift change, miners in orange jumpsuits, helmets, and work boots could be seen walking from the shuttle bus stop to their homes. The nearest shopping for anything but groceries and postage stamps was in Darwin, 140 miles away. Jobless Aboriginals lingered outside the concrete-block supermarket, occasionally cadging for pocket change. The highway to the mine had a panoramic view of Mount Brockman, where nobody was allowed to tread.

  The town was a mirror of the tortured national attitude toward uranium. Few people wanted to stay there when their time at the mine was finished. The Kakadu park itself was rarely visited by tourists and was viewed as an unattractive compromise. An environmental group called it “a controlled disaster zone rather than a national park.” The historian David Lawrence settled on this verdict: “a mélange of uranium mining, environmental conservation, tourism, and Aboriginal land rights.”

  For atomic proponents, it was regarded as an acceptable—if ungainly—outcome. Though he hated the vast size of the park, Joe Fisher defended the decision to carve out the Ranger lode.

  “Some conservationists have claimed that to allow any mining whatsoever in an attractive place like Kakadu is like cutting a small hole in a Van Gogh painting,” he said. “This is a totally misleading analogy. One looks at a painting as a whole; no human can take in an area as large as Kakadu.” In the Dreamtime country, the uranium existed only for those who wanted to see it.

  Mount Brockman was not the only patch of uranium in the strange new park. An even richer deposit called Jabiluka had been discovered in 1970 by a geological team sent on a joint venture of Pancontinental and Getty Oil. When the drill samples showed the presence of uranium oxide, the chief geologist sent a one-word telegram to his bosses: CHAMPAGNE ! As mining permits were being finalized in 1983, the political climate shifted once more, and Labour was voted back into power with a much less murky philosophy toward uranium. A grandfather clause, otherwise known as the Three Mines policy, froze the business in place. The operations then in existence—Ranger, Mary Kathleen, and Olympic Dam—could continue. But no further export licenses would be approved. This looked like Jabiluka’s obituary.

  But in 1991, the lease was sold to ERA, the next-door operators of Ranger, who restarted the approval process for Jabiluka and had better luck with the politicians in Canberra. Further test drilling indicated that the lode was much bigger than previously thought. Once milled, it would yield nearly 120,000 tons of yellowcake. However, protesting the “rape of Jabiluka” quickly became a fashionable cause among young Australian progressives, even among those who had never visited the Top End and had no intention of ever going. In Sydney, five thousand people gathered to picket in the streets; three thousand were in Melbourne the same day. A Catholic advocacy group labeled the uranium project “morally unacceptable.”

  At the rallies rock bands performed songs about, in the words of one musician, “the death and destruction that is inherent to uranium mining.” Peter Garrett, the lead singer of the rock band Midnight Oil, was the headline act at several rallies. He later used his role in the protests as a springboard for a successful campaign for a seat in the national Senate. Outside the locked gates of the Jabiluka site, he told a teeming crowd: “Any fair-minded Australian who had thought the issue of having twenty million tons of radioactive tailings in a World Heritage listed site, in the middle of the most significant national park we have, on land that belongs to somebody else, will say that this mine is wrong.”

  A Midnight Oil song called “The Dead Heart” later received worldwide radio airplay and denounced uranium companies. The chorus appropriated the supposed voice of the Aboriginal:

  We carry in our hearts the true country

  And that cannot be stolen

  We follow in the steps of our ancestry

  And that cannot be broken

  A tent city sprang up at the gates. Local police requested a $1 million increase in their budget just to keep order. Sleeping on the roadside there became a mark of prestige. Animal blood was splashed on bulldozers, and holes were cut in the fence at night. A van crashed through the entrance to the mine site; the driver was arrested. In apparent retaliation, the driver of a twenty-four-wheeled truck from the mine came roaring through the protesters’ campsite, knocking over several tents. He claimed to have “gotten lost.” Molotov cocktails were hurled through the windows of ERA’s offices in Melbourne, causing fire damage but no injuries.

  For many Australians, the uranium hubbub cut to a core question, one of national identity: What does it mean to be an Australian? Do we stand for globalization or isolation? What responsibility do we have to the rest of the world?

  In December 1998, two protesters in Melbourne were arrested for spray painting antiuranium slogans on a statue of Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills, heroes of the previous century who scoured Aboriginal land for gold. These men were a Down Under version of Lewis and Clark, opening up territory for progress and civilization. Uranium was squarely within that heritage of Australian discovery. But it was a different kind of treasure from gold—more mysterious and sinister, coming to the forefront of the national agenda in a more prosperous era in which the majority of citizens lived in air-conditioned houses, drove cars, ate well, watched television, and therefore had the luxury of refusing to develop a natural resource that represented fabulous profits. This wasn’t Niger or the Congo or even East Germany in the 1950s, where uranium was all that separated rural people from abject poverty. Australia could say no because it could afford that luxury. “Most Australians don’t
want it, the traditional owners don’t want it, the world doesn’t need it,” said David Sweeney of the Australian Conservation Foundation. “It’s unsafe, it’s unclean, it’s unnecessary.”

  The protesters received a boost in November 1998 when the United Nations sent a seven-member team of experts to the area and reported that the mining would pose an imminent threat because of the radioactive tailings. Two years later, a majority stake in ERA was purchased by the British mining giant Rio Tinto (that stalwart of the old Uranium Club), which announced the site would not be developed, given the fierce political opposition.

  I visited the second-story offices of the Environment Center of the Northern Territory on a morning in January when the air was warm and smelling of wet steel, a sign of an imminent monsoon. The air conditioner was broken, and everyone inside was sweating. A framed newspaper on the wall, from a decade earlier, carried the headline GREENIES WARNED: BEHAVE OR ELSE.

  A staff member named Emma King made us hot coffee in a press jar. She told me she feared the energy had gone out of the antinuclear movement and that Australia was fated to become a bigger uranium producer because the opposition had become lazy.

  “People are less willing to engage anymore,” she said. “It’s too overwhelming for them.”

  King is a suntanned woman of forty with a tattoo on her forearm in the shape of a dog’s paw print, a memorial to her lost blue heeler, Molly, who had run away the previous year. King had moved up to Darwin to be a reporter and wound up as the head uranium campaigner for the Environment Center. She had come to believe it was immoral to dig radioactive material out of the ground, even for a purpose as benign as generating electric power. After citing a list of objections for me—hazardous waste, scars on the land, theft of Aboriginal land—she brought up a more personal critique.

  “It’s really hard to put this idea forth without being viewed as a conspiracy theorist or a Marxist,” she said. “But I really don’t understand why our money isn’t being spent on developing renewable sources of energy like wind or solar power. We will eventually have to go to renewables. Why don’t we do it now? My idea is that this would go against interests of multinational companies because they cannot control the source of energy. Nobody owns the wind or the sky. But with nuclear energy, you can control the uranium. That means you can set whatever price you want. Nuclear seems to be the easy answer to climate change, right? It’s going to solve all our problems and people won’t have to take personal responsibility. But I think it’s a way for corporations and governments to retain control over our energy supply.”

  What about the uranium itself, I wanted to know. Could it ever be used for a good purpose?

  “This isn’t necessarily my theory, but I’ve heard people speculate that maybe it’s a part of the evolutionary process,” she said.

  I asked her to elaborate.

  “Radioactivity leads to mutations. Evolution needs mutations.” Man’s tinkering with uranium, she went on, could lead to unexpected genetic changes in the species itself. The mineral had lain undisturbed and unnoticed in the Congo, in Utah, in Australia, and in eastern Germany until civilization reached a certain point in the first half of the twentieth century. Uranium was then “discovered” by the physicists, and all of its latent power became known. Hiroshima happened and rearranged the globe. And through either a catastrophic atomic war or just the incremental effect of mutant-making waste piling upward, uranium would give birth to a new version of man—just as surely as a scarcity of food on the Galápagos Islands had forced Charles Darwin’s mockingbirds to adapt and evolve.

  In this theory, uranium plays a role like the black monolith in the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which lay buried on the moon like a time capsule until man was knowledgeable enough to travel to the Tycho Crater and detect the enormous radio waves coming from the object. When the monolith was exposed to the light of the sun for the first time, a new era of evolution and a new chapter of mankind could begin.

  But uranium might also be seen as a serpent out of John Milton or a rough beast out of Yeats, a sentinel of dystopia, the apple of knowledge force-fed to the unready, who are exiled into a world they never asked for and do not want. A Jabiluka protester told me he had joked with his friends while looking at the night sky: “Each one of those blazing stars up there was once a planet where the monkeys started fooling around with uranium.”

  If the idea were true, I asked King, and if uranium really was supposed to be a catalyst for man’s evolution, then why fight the inevitable?

  “Western culture has this idea that development has to keep moving forward,” she said. “I think we have to back away from that idea. Why is there this imperative to keep progressing? The hallmark of Western culture is to keep going and going and going. This is a compulsion, and an irrational compulsion.”

  She concluded, “I think we ought to leave it in the ground. We don’t need it.”

  The friendship between the environmentalists and the Aboriginals was always shaky. Both sides accused the other of cynicism and of using the other to promote their own agendas.

  Environmentalists grew frustrated with the slow decisions and arcane family feuds of the Aboriginals, who, in turn, sometimes felt like pawns in a media war. An Aboriginal woman named Jacqui Katone resigned from the Australian Conservation Foundation, saying she had been treated like “window dressing.” And during the height of the Jabiluka protests, two young white men performed a ceremonial dance that they said was designed to raise the Rainbow Serpent in order to help the antiuranium cause. This was offensive to some of the Mirrar clan, who marched into the camp brandishing sticks and telling the protesters to quit their dancing and go the hell back to Sydney.

  One thing these factions shared, however, was the Götterdämmerung view of uranium. Tony Gray knew this well, even though he was an ardent defender of extraction. “Its apocalyptic power, its lethal and invisible radioactivity, and its secrecy made it easy to demonize,” he wrote. The Aboriginal vision of the serpent Dadbe, roused from his sleep and ready to destroy the world, had become a uniquely Australian metaphor for what uranium might accomplish once it was lodged in the warhead of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

  The Aboriginals who signed the leases had made it known that their serpent’s home on Mount Brockman was not to be touched under any circumstances. Today, there is a four-and-a-half-foot wooden fence that separates the mesa from the two large uranium pits. Any employee of the Ranger Mine found to have crossed the boundary without permission is subject to being fired on the spot. Sensors have been laid near the base of the mountain to record the seismic effects of the ammonium nitrate explosives in the pits, which are set off every other afternoon to jar loose the overburden.

  I asked Joe Fisher about the holy places in the uranium country, and he screwed up his face.

  “Most of the sacred sites are something they [the Aboriginals] made up as they went along,” he told me. “The activists were just using the Aboriginals, trying to stop development, but it didn’t work out that way.”

  He has a story about a company that started combing the Coronation Hill district in the early 1980s when gold prices were on the rise. Some Aboriginals were upset at the news. The gold target happened to lie under a place they said was an abandoned ceremonial site in a place known to them as Sickness Country, the home of a god called Nargorkun, who, like his relatives Dadbe and the Rainbow Serpent, could bring about the end of the world if he was provoked. Nargorkun grew sick, and so his two wives hunted food for him while he rested. If you happened to wander into the country without proper religious precautions, you could come down with the same wasting disease that had enfeebled the polygamist god. There were some etchings of him and his wives near a place called the Sickness Waterhole.

  Years ago, while out prospecting, Fisher had discovered several examples of the Sickness art carved on rocks and had urged their protection from blasting. But he was convinced that none of those holy places was anywhere
near Coronation Hill and made his views known to a Senate standing committee. An anthropologist was hired to investigate the matter and found that the Aboriginals who filed the complaint had only been shown photographs of Coronation Hill and had not made a visit themselves. The ceremonial site was eventually located at a spot thirty-one miles south, and the complainants admitted they had “made a big mistake.”

  “It makes me wonder,” concluded Fisher, “how many other sacred sites have been proclaimed when they do not exist.”

  The incident underlined a touchy subject in the Australian uranium business. The gods leave no oracular evidence of their Dreamtime activities, and so “proving” the holiness of a piece of land is a highly subjective act. Mining companies have suspected overreaching, or even outright fraud, on the part of the Aboriginals. But Aboriginals have compared their earthen landmarks to cathedrals and wondered why these places historically were treated with such indifference by their white neighbors.

  The British writer Bruce Chatwin spent several months in Australia in the early 1980s trying to learn a few Dreamtime stories. He remarked on the cleft between the European view of geography and that of the indigene, particularly in the face of bulldozers. “It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo,” wrote Chatwin. “It was something else to convince him that featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven’s Opus 111.”