Nuclear Aesthetics against the Colonial Desert

Abstract From 1956 until 1963, nuclear weapons developed by Britain were being detonated in the mulga and saltbush plain of Maralinga, South Australia. A large tract of the Western Desert was bombed, burnt and radioactively contaminated. This article analyses how this history has been engaged with in the works of artist Jonathan Kumintjara Brown (Pitjantjatjara, 1960–1997) whose ancestral lands were directly impacted by the Maralinga nuclear testing program. Through close examination of selected works I show how Brown critically interrogated nuclear colonialism in Australia. Nuclear colonialism describes the claiming of politically peripheral land for nuclear mining, testing and development. The work of Brown is argued to be an example of nuclear aesthetics and is shown to redress the material, cultural and historical invisibility of radioactive contamination at Maralinga, revealing the impacts that it has had on the ecological, cultural and physiological health of the South Australian desert and its people.