Inheriting Isotopes: The Androcene and the End of Nature in the Great Victoria Desert A-Bomb Test Sites

The “Great Victoria Desert, arid wasteland in southern Australia” declares Encyclopaedia Britannica (2021). The desert as wasteland fed into Cold War British Boosterism and Commonwealth Cringe, along with a confirmation bias towards Australia’s larger fiction terra nullius (“Nobody’s land”). During British A-bomb testing the Enlisted and Overlooked experience their own consummate ravaging as radioactive fallout­ reshapes future generations. Bill McKibben’s “end of nature” (1989) plays out globally as Homo sapiens become “homo strontium,” incorporating, and living within, a world impregnated with Man-made (sic) strontium-90. 

In this chapter, biography links past stories with the future realities of the Cold War era. Key players (T.E.Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown, and E.M. Hull, The Sheik) flesh outthe backstories of Britain’s desert imaginary formed from imperial and empirical encounters in North African, Arabian, and Algerian deserts during WW1. Structured as Double Helix entanglements, Great Victoria Desert narratives by Australian contemporaries Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (1938), Charles Duguid, Doctor Goes Walkabout (1977), and Len Beadell, Blast the Bush (1967)) intensify the slow violence (Nixon 2011) of Maralinga’s chemical and chromosomal fallout on Black and White Australia.

Keywords: Androcene; natureculture representations of North African, Arabian, and Great Victoria Deserts; WW1; Cold War; British Government A-bomb tests; Maralinga; Anangu; strontium-90; T.E. Lawrence; Gertrude Bell; E.M. Hull; Charles Duguid; Daisy Bates.