Thunder Raining Poison: The Lineage of Protest Against Mid-Century British Nuclear Bomb Tests in Central Australia

Abstract

In 2017, at the Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the most extraordinary artwork was shown. Simply titled Kulata Tjuta (fig. 1) it consisted of traditional spears, kulata, assembled to form the spherical shape of a mushroom cloud emanating from an atomic bomb test. A bright light was at its centre, and beneath were empty piti (food-gathering bowls), empty because the land as a source of food had been contaminated. This was a joint exhibit of sixty men and women, many senior Anangu artists from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia. In an adjoining gallery space a video installation of nine screens showed archival footage of country, while the artists spoke, many for the first time publicly, about their memories and experiences of being close by when a series of atomic bomb tests were carried out by Britain in remote locations in Australia. One elder and prominent artist, Ilawanti Ken, said of this exhibit: