Beverley Uranium Mine/ Lake Eyre and the Mound Springs. Nuclear issues

In a world where water shortage is becoming more and more real with each passing day, the two above mentioned documents show the blatant disregard of the large mining companies for our National Park listed salt lake. That is Lake Eyre, 'Australia's largest salt lake which has been identified by CSIRO as part of a wetland complex of world heritage value'.

Lake Eyre and the Mound Springs is on Kokatha country, and may very well be already contaminated by the activities of the large mining companies such as: BHPB, Western Mining Company and the United States military giant General Atomics/Heathgate Resources. As the documents show, the activities of these mining giants has been taking place under the noses, and without a doubt, with the permission of the federal, state and territories of the Australian Government.

Since the early 1950s, South Australians and the Kokatha people, amongst many other tribes on that country, have suffered and endured devastating effects because the Australian government wanted to appease its friends, the British, American and Russian governments. These nations used South Australia for their nuclear target practices at the expense of the Aboriginal people on that country, and as a result, my people the Kokatha became the victims of further mass removals, dispossessed and displaced from country and family.

My immediate family were among the first to suffer, first by government policies that gave country to pastoralists, and then the mass murders of the old people to keep them away from their own waterholes. Their normal hunting grounds were fenced off by pastoralists, and they had to resort to killing sheep and cattle for food. Of course that move then led to reprisals by the pastoralists, and many hundreds of thousands of my people were killed. These things have been going on since the invasion of our country Australia, and it happened all over Australia. I reckon our old people were too determined to keep on living the way they were used to, despite the wrongs that were being committed against them. That is probably why the Australian government let the other countries use South Australia as the place to test their bombs at Maralinga and other sites around the state, hoping that would kill off and poison the old people quicker - that is my personal reasoning anyway, and the nuclear issues document certainly backs up that reasoning as far as I am concerned.

It is very frightening to learn that the founder of General Atomics was involved in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki automic bomb construction. We are talking about a resource that has been operating on Australian soil since 1988, and they are still involved with the Beverley Uranium Mine in South Australia, 'despite Federal government committment that any new uranium mine required an environmental impact assessment (EIS) before mining' [see Doc]. The method that has been used for the processing of the uranium from this mine is very unsafe and is a serious threat to The Great Artesian Basin; who knows, it is probably already poisoned.

I feel that it is no use moaning and groaning about what has happened in the past, because we cannot change what has happened. We can, however, tell our stories about the good times before the bad, because it has to be told for our future generations.I feel that a great load has been taken off my shoulders because I have finally taken all my old notebooks out of the wardrobe and put it all down in this story. These documents on the nuclear issues were something that had to be told, and I wanted to add my personal view of the effects of those issues on me. I added the Andamooka family photo, because all those experiences with the rockets happened around about that time in my life. The next lot of stories will be more about the early days of my family's forced removal and displacement from country, and their early days in the mission home.