Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia - Softcover

Urwin, Jessica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 029575379X ISBN 13: 9780295753799

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

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

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 029575379X
• ISBN 13: 9780295753799
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296