Contaminated Country

The destruction and defiance that swirled around Australia's embrace of the world's nuclear order

Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth century. From uranium extraction to nuclear testing, Australia’s lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development. The continent was subject to rampant nuclear colonialism. However, this history is not just one of imposition. Aboriginal communities, bearing the brunt of these processes, have persistently resisted, reclaiming their rights to Country and demanding reparations.

As Jessica Urwin shows, extraction, weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal have caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and cultural harm to Aboriginal communities and lands. Yet Indigenous peoples all over the world have not only survived nuclear colonialism but challenged it time and time again. Tracking the colonial mechanisms Australia used to pursue a nuclear industry, Urwin simultaneously highlights how Aboriginal peoples refused and reshaped those same mechanisms over time. A groundbreaking book, Contaminated Country reveals how Australia’s deep nuclear past has been entangled with colonialism locally, nationally, and internationally.

Jessica Urwin is lecturer in environmental history at the University of Tasmania. This is her first book.Sutter Paul S. :

Paul Sutter is series editor for the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. He is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published five books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2005) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2015).Sutter Paul S. :

Paul Sutter is series editor for the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. He is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published five books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2005) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Jessica Urwin is a lecturer in environmental history at the University of Tasmania.

"Contaminated Country gives a new history of nuclear colonialism in Australia by centering Indigenous voices. Urwin examines processes that both included and elided Aboriginal people and also their resistance by presenting them as nuclear survivors rather than victims."—Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos

"Shows how nuclear industries continued colonial approaches by prioritizing settler goals, needs, and understanding over those of Indigenous peoples. Most importantly, Contaminated Country demonstrates the sustained resistance of First Nations people as they campaigned against dispossession and demanded remediation for themselves and their Country."—Heather Goodall, University of Technology, Sydney