By Greg Adamson
Opposition to uranium mining in Australia emerged as a mass movement in the 1970s. However, opposition to environmental destruction had already existed for more than a century. Campaigners for national parks, against the destruction of native flora and fauna, against urban pollution and for safe working environments were all fighting around what would today be called green issues.
In every case, unrestricted market forces of capitalism were destroying some aspect of the environment necessary for the survival of the human species. Many battles were required to achieve often limited results.
The Australian icon Blinky Bill began his adventures in 1933 after the shooting of his father for sport. Dorothy Wall begins her book with a moving description of a koala killing. The Macquarie Encyclopedia of Australian Events estimates that just six years earlier an open season on koalas in Queensland resulted in the shooting of at least 600,000 of them. The November 5, 1927, Brisbane Courier-Mail described a single shipment of more than 100,000 koala skins.
Damming of unique lakes, sand-mining of beaches and felling of irreplaceable forests have disturbed many people. Concerns for preserving wilderness, flora and fauna have battled with the capitalist philosophy of development, the view that extraction of some commodity is the only legitimate land use.
Uranium-bearing ores were found in Australia more than a century ago. In 1869 traces of an unidentifiable green ore were reported from the Rum Jungle region in the Northern Territory.
Prior to World War I, mining of the radioactive element radium occurred at two sites in South Australia, but it was only during World War II that the modern demand for uranium emerged. Under Britain's direction, the Australian government began encouraging the hunt for uranium. Australian uranium supplied the British nuclear weapons program during the 1950s.
Journalist and uranium prospector Ross Annabell in his book Uranium Hunters describes the mood in Darwin in the early 1950s. The town was so sleepy that buildings bombed in World War II remained unrepaired. Then, in scenes reminiscent of a gold rush, fossickers began fanning out across the Territory, Geiger counters replacing gold pans. Tense excitement gripped every new announcement, the government promising a £25,000 reward for major discoveries. The Bureau of Mineral Resources provided aerial surveys showing likely places to prospect.
Annabell describes some of these government staff: Men of the Bureau of Mineral Resources working on a radio-metric survey of the new field had a grim mascot on their mess table â a grinning Aboriginal skull removed from a burial cave.
Four decades later, the government's Bureau of Resource Sciences was showing the same insensitivity to Aboriginal people, proposing to dump radioactive waste near the region of South Australia which had suffered bomb tests in the 1950s.
Working at Rum Jungle
The first of the new discoveries to be mined was at Rum Jungle. Annabell visited the site in the mid-1950s and found that eighty tent dwellers lived two to a primitive shack with wooden sides and a canvas roof stretched over tarpaper ceilings. The canvas was rotten and leaking, the tarpaper tattered and torn. Security at the mine was poor, and there was little indication that the largely migrant work force had any education regarding the danger of uranium mining.Some people were very aware of the dangers, however. A 1975 Australian Atomic Energy Commission paper, Radiation Hazards in Uranium Mining and Milling, describes the deaths of large numbers of European miners exposed to uranium in the 15th century. By 1913 the cause had been identified as lung cancer, and by the early 1920s radon gas was suspected as the cause.
Similar ignorance was found at the first Australian mainland nuclear bomb testing site, at Emu in South Australia, in October 1953. Fifteen years later site surveyor Len Beadell published a happy, chatty description of the explosion, Blast the Bush. His preparations for the atomic tests largely consisted of what he called bush bashing, driving through hundreds of kilometres of wilderness laying down a path for roads to follow.
During all his travels he fails to mention finding a single inhabitant. Any evidence of human occupation is attributed to long-dead tribes.
His awareness of radioactive fallout was limited to a concern that the site was far enough from Woomera to ensure that radiation would not interfere with the future missile range work. Rather, it should be carried away harmlessly into the desert.
The test was a complete success, enthused Beadell. After the explosion, British bomb developer William (later Lord) Penney flew over the bomb site with Beadell, who writes: I saw him rubbing his hands and heard him murmur one word, 'Whacko!' He should have been an Australian.
During these decades, there was no public protest surrounding the Australian uranium industry, which employed few workers at small mines in remote regions. In the political climate of the times, supplying the British war machine was accepted as necessary by most people. The dangers of uranium mining were not widely understood, and official assurances of adequate safeguards were readily accepted.
British testing continued for several years. Here there was some concern expressed by a range of organisations. By the end of this period, a campaign had developed in opposition to nuclear testing which reflected the British anti-nuclear weapons testing campaign.
Preparing for nuclear war
The official government position was that nuclear war had to be prepared for, through both bomb testing and home preparation. In 1964 the Commonwealth Directorate of Civil Defence published a pamphlet entitled Survival From Nuclear Attack: Protective Measures Against Radiation from Fallout. This states: People within or near the target area where radiation dose rates of 1,000 roentgens per hour or more are possible, may need to remain in shelter for most of the next two weeks. An accompanying picture shows mum, dad and a small child happily playing inside their underground fallout shelter.Luckily, it would not take long for a family to prepare fallout shelter for themselves ... Windows are the weak point and would need to be blocked up with earth filled containers or bricks or even by furniture reinforced by earth, books or other heavy material.
In the 1960s the Australian government was among the most enthusiastic followers of the US nuclear plans. Regarding the late 1960s, Ian Bellany writes in his 1972 book Australia in the Nuclear Age, Official Australian interest in Plowshare has tended to concentrate on harbor-making applications and on underground storage reservoirs for water, gas or oil, in precisely the two areas of Plowshare activity, unfortunately, where American testing experience, and hence knowledge, is least.
Plowshare was a project of the US Atomic Energy Commission. With startling honesty, chairperson Lewis Strauss told an AEC meeting in 1958 that its purpose was to highlight the peaceful application of nuclear explosive devices and thereby create a climate of world opinion that is more favourable to weapons development and tests.
In his 1994 book The Firecracker Boys, Dan O'Neill tells the dismal history of the AEC's plans to blow up a chunk of Alaska as a test for building a new Panama canal.
Anti-Vietnam War experiences
During the 1960s a passive attitude to environmental problems and science in general began to break down, under the impact of the US-organised war against Vietnam. For year after year, Australians saw images of bombing and napalming in the name of democracy. Establishment assurances lost their value. A generation became educated about the nature of imperialism, and also learned the value of protest.Large demonstrations against participation in the Vietnam War began in 1967 and continued through to the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972. The last major protests occurred after Richard Nixon's infamous Christmas bombing of Hanoi at the end of 1972.
By then, hundreds of thousands of people had demonstrated, something virtually unknown to the generation which grew up in the 1950s. A mass movement with extensive social links and sophisticated understanding of strategy had been educated in this process. Some of the results which movement participants had discovered were:
- the effectiveness of mass action;
- the value of demands which win support from a broad range of people regardless of their views on other issues, and the value of tactics which draw in the maximum number of people, and provide them with increased confidence in their own power to press their demands;
- the need for democratic decision making in order to build an effective movement.
The modern feminist, gay rights and environmental movements were all facilitated by the climate of scepticism and self-organisation encouraged by this anti-war movement.
Among other things, the anti-war movement responded to the racism of the US invasion. Because of this, the anti-war movement helped create a broad anti-racist consciousness throughout Australia. The Aboriginal land rights movement in the late 1960s was able to win a receptive audience among activists in Australian cities. The establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra in 1972 struck a chord among many people who had been fighting for the national rights of the Vietnamese.
The anti-war movement also gave impetus to what later became the green movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a blossoming environmental movement campaigned around protection of the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling, the Tasmanian wilderness from hydro-electric dams, the Sydney Rocks district from razing for high rise development and many other causes. The movement also gained impetus from the many demonstrations during the early 1970s to oppose French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
One environmental disaster in the making was the uranium mining industry.
Uranium mining's second wave
The second wave of exploration, which led to the discovery of Australia's huge uranium reserves, began in 1967, in anticipation of intense demand for uranium as governments and power corporations around the world sought a cheap answer to their energy needs.The vast bulk of the country's uranium reserves are located east of Darwin in the Northern Territory, in an area centred on the Alligator Rivers. With an official estimated 228,000 tonnes of uranium oxide, the Jabiluka deposit is among the largest in the world. The Ranger ore body, though less than half the size of Jabiluka, is also huge by world standards.
With ore grades averaging 21 kilos per tonne, the smaller Nabarlek is more than 20 times as rich as ore bodies that were mined in the US during the 1950s.
The small uranium deposit at Rum Jungle was mined until the early 1960s, stockpiled ore being processed until 1971. For more than a decade, official complaints were made about pollution at Rum Jungle.
According to a report by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, the Rum Jungle project discharged some 2300 tonnes of manganese, 1300 tonnes of copper, 200 tonnes of zinc and at least 380 grams of radium into the environment. At least a quarter of the discharged radium, an amount sufficient to cause 90 million cases of bone cancer, is estimated to have found its way into the Finniss River.
Public pressure has ensured that the uranium mining companies are forced to spend far more than their earlier counterparts on protecting the environment. But federal governments remain ready to help the companies cut corners at the expense of the land and its wildlife.
This was established early on by the fate of the Kakadu National Park, first projected for the Alligator Rivers area in 1965. As uranium finds were announced, the borders recommended for the park by the Northern Territory Reserves Board steadily contracted. By 1971, pressure from mining and pastoral interests had cut the proposed park to less than half its original area. It then become clear that the government had every intention of allowing mining to go ahead within the park boundaries, even in vulnerable wetland areas.
Labor's export suspension
Another consequence of the radicalisation associated with the Vietnam War had been the election in December 1972 of a Labor government headed by Gough Whitlam. Under the previous Coalition government, contracts had been approved for the export of 9000 tonnes of uranium oxide, most of it destined for Japanese reactors.The new government was reluctant to allow immediate export. In its 1972 election platform, the Australian Labor Party had made clear that any uranium mining would be delayed until Aboriginal claims to the affected land had been investigated.
There were also economic factors militating against an early start to mining. Influential forces in the ALP, led by minerals and energy minister Rex Connor, wanted to wait until uranium prices increased. In the meantime, Australia could investigate the building of an enrichment plant. These considerations continued to dominate government policy through 1973 and 1974.
By 1975, a growing number of ALP branch members and parliamentarians, led by environment minister Moss Cass, had begun to express outright opposition to uranium mining. In May of that year, federal cabinet ordered that the mining proposals of Ranger Uranium Mines Pty Ltd be the subject of a public environmental inquiry, headed by Justice R.W. Fox.
The inquiry had begun hearing evidence when, on November 11, 1975, the government was sacked by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. The federal election in December was won by the Liberal-National Country Party Coalition under Malcolm Fraser.
One company, Mary Kathleen Uranium, which had already established mining facilities in north-west Queensland and was not subject to the environmental legislation, had felt confident enough to resume mining and stockpiling uranium even before the change of government. But the company's hopes for an early resumption of exports met with a serious obstacle â the trade union movement.
Increasingly aware of the dangers posed by the nuclear industry, the Australian Council of Trade Unions had voted at its 1975 congress to ban all uranium mining except for biomedical use. Acting on this decision, the Australian Railways Union (ARU) placed bans on the transport of uranium ore. The government was forced to agree that no exports would take place until Justice Fox brought down his report.
First union bans
In May 1976, the resolve of the unions was tested. A railway-yard supervisor in Townsville was suspended for refusing to move sulphur bound for the Mary Kathleen mine. On May 24 the ARU called a national 24-hour rail stoppage in protest at the suspension. Soon after, the supervisor was reinstated.Pressure was mounting on the leaders of the union movement to force an end to all mining operations at Mary Kathleen. But in June, at the urging of Queensland Trades and Labor Council President Jack Egerton, himself a director of Mary Kathleen Uranium, a meeting of national unions adopted a compromise proposal which allowed mining to continue. This decision was endorsed by the ACTU executive soon after.
While sections of the union leadership were making clear that they had no wish to confront the government on the issue, public opinion was becoming increasingly critical of uranium mining. A poll taken in July 1976 found that only 22% felt that uranium should, as a matter of duty, be exported to other countries. Hiroshima Day demonstrations on August 6 and 7 that year were the first notable demonstrations against uranium mining, 500 people demonstrating in Adelaide.
In September, a tour by US antinuclear campaigner Dale Bridenbaugh and US-based Australian paediatrician Helen Caldicott drew increased attention to the campaign. Uranium mining had become an important public issue by the time of the October 1976 release of the first Fox Report.
Uranium shares rose after Fox presented his judgment that the dangers involved in mining and milling uranium and in the operation of nuclear power reactors, properly regulated and controlled, were not enough to justify a veto on the mining and selling of Australian uranium. In order to obtain this verdict, one company alone, Ranger Uranium Mines Pty Ltd, had spent $1 million on submissions to the inquiry.
Fox recommended that no decision be made to resume exports until a second report dealing with the Northern Territory deposits had appeared, and widespread public debate had taken place. But the mining companies were quick to demand an immediate go-ahead.
Influential figures in the Labor Party found nothing to protest against in the report; opposition leader Gough Whitlam called it an admirable document. But in the union ranks, the debate on uranium mining continued. The ARU reaffirmed its ban and indicated that, if necessary, it would defy the ACTU executive on the issue.
Mass movement under way
The environmental organisations campaigning against uranium mining were spurred by the appearance of the first Fox Report. At a press conference, spokespeople for the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Movement Against Uranium Mining and Friends of the Earth joined the ARU in declaring that they intended to mount a struggle as big as the campaign against the Vietnam War. On November 6-7, 1976, a national consultation of anti-uranium forces decided to demand a five-year moratorium on the mining and export of uranium.These statements were timely; within weeks, the need for a militant campaign again became obvious. Ignoring the Fox Report's call for comprehensive and widespread public debate before uranium exports were resumed, the Fraser government announced on November 11 that it would allow the immediate export of over 10,000 tonnes of uranium oxide to meet existing contracts.
In effect, the government had given the go-ahead for uranium mining in the Northern Territory even before the Fox commission presented its second report. Mining companies whose finds were located in the Territory were given permission to export quantities of uranium that could not be supplied from existing stockpiles.
The government was confident that divisions and confusion within the union movement would prevent a resolute response. For a time, Fraser's gamble seemed justified.
Queensland unions which would be involved in the handling and transport of uranium repeated their defiant statements that they would not allow it to be exported. But instead of receiving support from ALP leaders, the workers whose lives would be at immediate risk from the export of uranium met with betrayal.
On November 17 the federal parliamentary caucus of the ALP decided to support the fulfilment of all existing export contracts, taking a position essentially the same as Fraser's. This decision was soon endorsed by the ALP federal executive, by the parliamentary caucus of the Queensland ALP and by the NSW ALP state council.
In pushing through this sell-out, the Labor hierarchy was aided by the fact that the miners at Mary Kathleen, the only uranium mine producing at that time, refused to support the bans. The miners were members of the Australian Workers Union, one of the largest and most conservative unions in the country.
Although the Labor leaders were able for a period to stop the unions from becoming the main centres of opposition to uranium mining, they could not prevent that opposition from growing. On November 19, 1976, 3000-4000 anti-uranium protesters marched through the streets of Melbourne.
[Continued next issue.]