have decided to lay low, make some work, but just recently…

We arrive at Maralinga late afternoon on the 9^th of November 2011. It’s nearly a full moon; sort of eerie, just strange mostly. Using the old phone box at the gate, we call the caretaker Robin and his partner Della who eventually come down and let us in through the gates. We follow his truck along the old Maralinga road, turn left at the junction <  Village – Forward Area > and into the remnants of the Maralinga village, once host to over 10,000 servicemen over eleven years.

Road to Maralinga

Travelling to Maralinga for the first time after hearing so much about the effects the British nuclear blasts had on Indigenous people and Australian and British personnel, I didn’t really know what to expect. I think I imagined I would find some sort of overwhelming obvious physical evidence of the blasts, but what finallyappeared for me was a space full of so much remnant history and memory.

Between 1952 and 1963, the British government tested twelve atomic bombs and hundreds of smaller ‘minor trials’ at Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia and on Monte Bello Island, off the Coast of Western Australia. The reason for this is that after the end of WWII, Britain, Australia’s ‘mother country’, was losing power and was eager to become part of the global nuclear arms race. Australia of course complied readily, with the then Prime Minister Robert Menzies pushing it through without even consulting the cabinet.

Read the rest and watch our video ‘Maralinga Pieces’ on the latest issue of timemachine:

http://timemachinemag.com/current-issue/

In part looking at British colonial legacies and reflections on contemporary australian culture and identity; this video contains in situ footage from the Maralinga nuclear test sites as well as the Maralinga village shot in 2011. In an attempt to show the space in which these tests occupied as well as the physical and metaphysical environments that were and are contaminated ; I wander these sites, following a nuclear veteran retrace his steps from fifty-five years ago; and in his footsteps, I, this generation, attempt to understand what really happened here.

Between 1952 and 1963 the British Government performed nuclear weapons tests at Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia and Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia. A total of seven major nuclear tests were performed, and up to 700 minor ‘dirty’ trials were also conducted. Many Aboriginal people and nuclear veterans have either died or are still suffering the physical and psychological effects of these tests.

The first of the major test series at Maralinga was codenamed Operation Buffalo; it consisted of exploding four nuclear bombs, the first named One Tree was 12.9 kilotons equivalent. The fallout was found as far away as the Northern Territory, New South Wales and Queensland; these tests were heavily criticised as they were exploded in inappropriate conditions (McClelland Royal Commission 1985).

At 4:15pm on October 9th, 1957, Taranaki, the last of the seven major nuclear tests and last of the Operation Antler series, exploded suspended from a balloon; it yielded a massive 26.6 kilotons of TNT equivalent, almost twice as much as “Little Boy” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The Maralinga village, located over 1000km north-west of Adelaide in remote South Australia, hosted over 10,000 servicemen over the entire eleven years the project was underway. The village contained an airport, photography lab, bar, swimming pool, tennis court, football field, cricket pitch and cinema; not many of these structures are left today, but what does remain is mostly overgrown, crumbling or used as a pit for radioactive materials.

Today, much of the area that hosted these blasts in the Maralinga-Tjarutja traditional lands, are off limits and are still radioactive.

–
The ‘Operation Buffalo’ project is a work in progress in conjunction with my MFA in photomedia at Monash University.

This video and selected photographs will be exhibited as part of the Manifestations of Now; We Australians exhibition at No Vacancy Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne from the 11th-26th of April 2012. Opening night is Sat 14th April, 2012, 7-10pm -

Artists involved:  MONIKA BEHRENS, BOATPEOPLE.ORG, JESSIE BOYLAN, BROWN COUNCIL, SAPNA CHANDU, ZHEN, BINDI COLE, EVA FERNANDEZ, ANN FUATA, JANE KORMAN, KEITH LIM, MISO, PAULA DO PRADO, ROBERTA RICH, CARL SCRASE, DARIO VACIRCA, MICHAEL WARNOCK, PAUL YORE –  see: www.weaustralians.org for more information.

In a time when artists are battling each other for grants, everyone is competing for jobs and the GFC has hit things pretty hard;  I have decided to sell my original exhibition prints from 2008-2010 in hope of making a bit of $$ to create some new work and pay the rent. These works are from the series’ ; Autonomies; Portraits of the NT Intervention, Homelands; photographing place across Australia, Sajeen/Prisoner; a state imprisoned inside and out, The Sound of Jets; images of overt and hidden violence in Palestine/Israel, The Bottom of the Lake; A village funeral procession in rural Mozambique, Running away from home; portraits of Tanzanian women talking about Female Genital Mutilation, &  I was born; Portraits of Gazan youth.

These images have travelled with me from house to house and I would much rather see them unrolled and up on peoples walls. All of the images below are available for purchase; selling prices are labelled or nearest offer, they are unframed and AS IS (i.e. some pin marks in the corner of the borders).

If there are any other images on my website: jessieboylan.com that you like that aren’t shown here, I would be more than happy to get them printed for you.

In solidarity,
Jessie

See: http://jessieboylan.wordpress.com/print-sales/ – for the images

while it pours springs last days
down the gutter, drains, tunnels to the sea

we make a home for ourselves here
pulling up 35 years of other peoples lives

the last spring days have gone, a new flood flows now…

the outback backyard has stories of its own. im yearning to learn them,
one by one by one,

06 september;

The landfill fire. The tip worker showed me where it started in the Little Sisters town camp> “there’s probably a track in there, where they go scavenging at night, but I wouldn’t leave your car here and I wouldn’t go walking around on your own…” – He’s referring to the community that lives just 200m away from the landfill, just south of the Gap in Alice Springs. So, the fire starts in the town camp, then seeps into the landfill, then shoots toxic fumes back over the camp….

–
Later we go to Margie Lynch’s country. Her, her sister Pamela and their family set up a protest camp 40km north on the Stuart Highway at the Two Sisters dreaming site; ngkwerenenehe, telling the CLC (Central Land Council) to get fucked – they’ve been ignored/bypassed in consultation processes for mining exploration. They’re going straight to the top, to Gillard, they say.

“…the struggle has been going for 27 years, or longer if you really look into it,” – a struggle to protect the land, “our father and mother always said no to mining, we have to carry out that wish” “Land rights is there to protect the land, not sell it off for mining.” It makes people fight against their own families, splits it right down the middle, and while people are doing that, the companies and govt are looking around the land for the good shit, the minerals to send them sky-high.

Why is it that the same story has to be told so many times?

Tyrone, Pamela’s son, puts on his akubra and drives us down to the dam after the others have gone to bed, he’d fixed up the battered two-wheel drive not long ago, let the tires down enough for the sand, you don’t even feel the corrugation. Bloomers climbs a tree for kindling, and we light a fire, crack a few beers then Tyrone tells us about his mustering jobs, and near deaths-by-bull, and his dislocated knee. Down in south australia where he’s been working, there’s a fella who owns about 29 farms across the country; “he’s a billionaire,” must be, sitting somewhere in the city while the others work.

“…a lot of people don’t know how to work hard. Or even how to work. I’ve been coming out here all my life, to this country, and been fixing the fences for the cattle farms over there,” he points north. “I’ve been helping with lots of things, they told me I can go and get meat whenever I want, but I said, can you just let me shoot one when I want… so my friends in the back think i’m stealing cattle… and they let me, so that’s what I do.” he laughs.

He talks about the old spirits, walking this land, walking past him when he’s in bed laughing and carrying on, and he says “shh, keep going, i’m sleeping.” – We all laugh.

Whenever one of us slips off to go for a piss, he asked if we heard them when we went away from the fire, going ‘oooooh’ and talking, breezing by your head, maybe you wouldn’t even notice” – he’s trying to irk us.

“I used to sit in the river and drink too, until they started putting acid in peoples drinks, you’d turn away to talk to someone and they’d do it while you weren’t looking. It would burn peoples guts out. – some people would kill another man for a tin of tobacco.”

I walk away for a piss, and hear the tall grass whistle in the wind, and i’m damn sure I can hear the spirits laughing.

The road trains look more impressive at night, 3, 4, 5 carriages long, their lights evenly spaced, shooting down the highway, like a plane about to take off.

I tuck into my swag under a few drops of rain and listen to the sounds of the night out here, there’s a wind, and straps flap against the back of a car, and the dog scuffles around…

August 31;

Walatinna, home along the highway,
today, from outside Pt. Augusta to here,
our camp, an old railway workers camp, maybe
and the freight-trains country-song
rumbling past,
not much but the road this day,
how many times, I tried to count,
have I travelled this highway before

the owl on the side of the road, just before Marla,
just before the Walatinna turnoff,
reminded me of when Steve and I came out here
for the second time,
and the owl led us all the twenty-two kilometres
to the campsite at night
we’d sit on the porch
and drink light beers, and not talk
about the bomb, or what is was like
growing up out here

but instead, to talk about the time,
the talking clock
and the football
and the dogs
and the green green grass

how it is to feel so at home
in a place that’s so far away from
the day to day
but all the time spent here
listening, learning
what i’ve come to know
and remember

September 1st;

The ants had a trail here,
long before I arrived,
and kept their trail for long afterwards
just me, in between, with ants in my
book, hair, and bed,

the wasps and redbacks that
inhabit the toilet here
“lift the seat to check that you don’t get bitten”

the moving/shifting of the swag as the sun
arches the sky
to keep beneath the
humpy’s humble shade
an urge to connect with the world
outside of here, by technological
bytes, wavelengths and satellites
at least to tell my love I love her
but she knows this already.

An early morning walk before
this day spent avoiding the sun and
reading, writing, sipping water
and now a warm beer,

took me on the road to Marla
and lead to miles of surrounding scrubland;
I can almost envisage the black mist
billowing up all those years ago
and covering this land; and all those that
lived in it, untold, unprotected from the blasts.

I tried to jog this morning, my shadow limping about
from a strained sacrum,
sometimes I don’t recognise this shape,
like a reflection reflecting something different
to how you’d like to see yourself
and the wind, like cars,
or maybe it is a car,
or, a plane,
maybe i’ve flown over here before.

September 4th;

Here in Alice Springs now,
the embers of trails through this town
the renegade party in an undeveloped block
in the centre of alice springs

the cops swing by, tell us to “put out the fire,
or it’ll cost you thousands, and stop drinking,
it’s not allowed”

people walk past amazed, some baffled
by the ferals and shaved-head boot-wielding
dancers,
others want to join in, but feel the need to take the piss
and hover on the outside,
and just stare,
most people oblivious, or just don’t care,
fuck off, im dancing here,
on this common ground,

and the police return, to drag away one of the only
aboriginal people
and force her into the back of their paddy wagon,
“she’s passed out on the ground and no one is
looking after her, we’re doing a good thing,
taking her in to get sober,”
“we are looking after her, she’s free to be here” we say
“you dont know her, we know her,” they say,
“she’s like this all the time, we have to take her in”

and later they return to do the same thing,
to commit such
blatant
racism,

I wonder if that’s how they get trained
“chuck em in the back if they’re black”
“leave em sprawled on the ground,
freely intoxicated, if they’re white.”

they fuckin forced her in there,
she was screaming, fuck off, let me go,
those fuckers.

We walk home the 30 minutes through the industrial outskirts
of town, some warehouses thump with beats,
late into the night,
every fence barks along the railings,
and I crash into my swag under the big planet-sky
this little pocket of life, so neatly tucked away,
ready for a politicians PR stunt,
or a TV camera’s angle, of poverty and harshness
what a landscape, way to live, they think,
who made it this way, I wonder….

the escape just 10km out of town,
gotta know someone to get directions
to this waterhole-haven
colours like pastel sun-setting
yes, paint it like that,
kind of a landscape,
sell it for thousands and dont give them a cent

return to backyard couch,
redwine and sleepless nights
listening to the town
rocking out,
tripping out,
over some fences over there..