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.

"Urwin sensitively traces the history of nuclear colonialism and its impacts in Australia . . . . Contaminated Country will be of interest to environmental historians and historians of Australia, as well as scholars from science and technology studies (STS) and the environmental social sciences. The book, too, should be of interest to a more general Australian public, as Australians continue to grapple with the nation’s settlercolonial past and ongoing present."

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