The Whiteness of the Bomb: Nuclear Weaponry, Race and the Nation in Australian Indigenous Poetics

ABSTRACT This article reads contemporary Australian Indigenous poetics to substantiate the argument that nuclear threats inherently reproduce the same colonial tendencies of ontologic-epistemic categorisation and social hierarchisation through which terra nullius was claimed. Given the legacy of family destruction, forced assimilation and genocide advanced by colonial powers, and the incursion of nuclear industries on sovereign land, it is unsurprising that Indigenous people have yoked nuclear industry with a history of bio-political efforts to control life and land. In analysing nuclear threats in the poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann and Lionel Fogarty this article will contextualise and historicise Indigenous Australian relations to the nuclear imaginary. Highlighting the risk to Indigenous communities at each iteration of the nuclear cycle, this essay will contextualise the threats to Country through which Indigenous spiritual lives are unified. It will be argued that Indigenous-led representations of nuclear weaponry can only be properly critiqued when framed through the constructs of race, nationhood and the history of colonisation in Australia.