Apprehending the Slow Violence of Nuclear Colonialism: Art and Maralinga

Abstract

Standing in the south-eastern Western Desert, barely north of the Nullarbor Plain, at ground zero of a nuclear test, is an uncanny experience. From 1956 to 1963, seven ‘conventional’ nuclear weapons explosions and hundreds of other unconventional and dirtier experiments were carried out at the South Australian site that the British and Australian testing authorities named ‘Maralinga’ (an appropriated Garig/k word from the other side of the continent that meant ‘thunder’ or ‘place of thunder’).429 We stood at the spot where the weapon