The Gong No 3 - ANFA
ANFA
After starting the year with a rush of optimism about my ability to produce The Gong as a weekly newsletter, I quickly came up against the hard fact that working for a living, making the revolution, and running a household leave little time for writing! Nevertheless, after many delays, I have produced another newsletter. For the time being, this will be an ‘occasional’ newsletter but I will continue to write as often as I can about the culture and politics of our beloved Gong.
Over the weekend of 15-17 March this year, the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance (ANFA) held its annual meeting at the Kum-ba-yah campsite on Mt Keira. Formed in 1997, ANFA (formerly the Alliance Against Uranium) 'brings together Aboriginal people and relevant civil society groups concerned about existing or proposed nuclear developments in Australia, particularly on Aboriginal homelands', primarily through its annual meeting held at a different location each year. This year, ANFA met in Wollongong as a gesture of solidarity, after Port Kembla was identified as one of three potential sites for an east coast nuclear-powered submarine base under the AUKUS military agreement. Delegates travelled from as far away as the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia for this first ever east coast ANFA meeting. It was a demonstration of their commitment to our collective struggle against nuclear harm.
The ANFA meeting was supported by Wollongong Against War and Nukes (WAWAN), a local group I helped form in March 2022 to campaign against the plan to put a nuclear submarine base at Port Kembla. In May last year WAWAN supported the historic South Coast May Day March for Peace, Jobs, and Justice in Port Kembla, which saw thousands of people come together in opposition to AUKUS and the subs base.
In the leadup to the ANFA meeting, WAWAN members liaised with local Aboriginal people, inviting them to the conference and engaging in conversations with elders about the nuclear submarine base issue. We were delighted when Aunty Doctor Barbara Nicholson, Wadi Wadi Elder and Wollongong Senior Citizen of the Year agreed to give a Welcome to Country for the meeting. Aunty Barb was born and raised in Port Kembla at the Kemblawarra Aboriginal Settlement at Coomaditchie. A writer, scholar, and lifelong fighter for Aboriginal rights, Aunty Barb has consistently supported the campaign against the subs base and shared with us her deep local knowledge. As part of her Welcome, Aunty Barb explained the significance of Mt Keira, known as Gheera in the Dharawal language of the local Aboriginal people. It is their grandmother mountain and a sacred women’s site and Aunty Barb asked us to deliberate there in love and peace, showing respect for one another and for the country on which we were meeting.
Speakers at the conference addressed a wide range of topics, including radiation and health, uranium mining in Australia, nuclear waste, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and AUKUS. In its concluding statement, ANFA emphasised that: ‘We must protect communities, Country, water, sacred sites and our animal kin.’ This year’s meeting was also an opportunity to remember Arabunna elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, former ANFA Co-chair, who passed away last year. Much of Uncle Kev’s work centred on the devastating impact of uranium mining at the Olympic Dam mine on his country in South Australia, particularly the extraction of water from underground aquifers and its impact on the sacred mound springs (Michele Madigan has written a moving obituary for Uncle Kev here).
Nuclear waste has always been a particular focus for ANFA and the network has supported a number of Aboriginal communities in successful fights to stop nuclear waste dumps on their land. The latest victory was at Kimba last year, when Barngarla Traditional Owners won their fight against a national radioactive waste dump on country. Delegates to the meeting at Mt Keira included Aunty Diane Stokes, a leader of the campaign to stop a nuclear waste dump proposed for Muckaty Station north of Alice Springs, and ANFA Co-Chair Trish Frail, who led a similar campaign at Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales.
One important subject of the three-day gathering was the potential for AUKUS to open the way for dumping of military-grade nuclear waste in Australia. Greens Senator David Shoebridge, a long-term supporter of the anti-dumping struggle, explained the threat posed by the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill currently before Parliament. The bill contains a loophole that would enable the disposal of US and UK nuclear waste, including waste unrelated to any submarines Australia may purchase from the AUKUS partners. This could allow Australia to become a dumping ground for ageing British and American submarines, which have proved difficult to dispose of until now. Highlighting the connection between dumping and Indigenous land rights struggles, Trish Frail explained:
Communities across Australia have been fighting against nuclear waste dumps being built for decades. With AUKUS, we will need an international nuclear waste dump and we know that it will be pushed onto First Nations’ land.
Her words were echoed in the Federal Parliament recently, when Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung Senator Lidia Thorpe raised concerns about this loophole, urging amendments to the bill to prevent Australia becoming the world’s nuclear waste dump and highlighting the disproportionate impact nuclear waste dumping would have on Aboriginal people, given that remote communities are frequently targeted dump proposals.
On Sunday morning WAWAN, the South Coast Labour Council, and ANFA intended to hold a public meeting with the delegates at the Port Kembla Heritage Park, near the southern breakwater of the harbour. This would have given delegates a chance to see for themselves the proposed location of the east coast subs base and take in the area’s natural beauty. But the heavens opened on Saturday evening, bringing heavy rain and providing a spectacle for the many desert people at the gathering, who told me of their amazement at seeing the water gushing down lush green mountain side. Organisers hurriedly texted, called, emailed, messaged, and posted our supporters, redirecting them from the Port Kembla site to the hall on Gheera. Thanks to rapid networking, we managed to reach most people who had planned to attend and soon people began arriving on the mountain.
Local musician Mauri Mulheron kicked off the gathering with classic peace movement songs, telling us how he had grown up listening to Down By the Riverside as a child attending marches during the Cuban missile crisis. As we sang along, the music brought everyone together as we settled in for a couple of hours of speeches and storytelling. The meeting heard from local unionists and ANFA delegates who shared their experiences dealing with the after-effects of nuclear weapons testing in South Australia and against nuclear waste dumps and uranium mines.
In my speech I shared my own long journey to the meeting held in my hometown, which began in Yokohama, Japan, in 2012, when Arabunna elder and then ANFA Co-Chair Peter Watts came to Yokohama to speak at the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World. Over two days at the Conference I heard Uncle Peter and the Australian delegates share their stories of the anti-nuclear struggle in Australia and took them to visit the encampment then maintained outside the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry responsible for nuclear regulation. I later developed a talk based on the information I learned from Uncle Peter and the delegates, sharing it at activist spaces across Tokyo and working with Japanese activists to produce a solidarity banner that was gifted to the movement in northern Australia.
Unknowingly, I had actually encountered ANFA’s organising power the previous year, when the Alliance helped bring Diane Stokes and other Traditional Owners for Manuwangku (Muckaty) from the Northern Territory to Wollongong in July 2011 as part of their national tour against a nuclear waste dump proposal. Following the meeting, Nat Wasley from Beyond Nuclear Initiative, came down to Wollongong to help us start a local campaign group, The Wollongong Anti-nuclear Group (TWANG), which campaigned over the course of 2011 in solidarity with the Muckaty people and with people affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Both Diane Stokes and Nat Wasley returned to Wollongong for ANFA this year, closing a circle that had opened for me 13 years earlier. Aunty Diane brought her granddaughters with her this time, to teach them about how to fight for country and to pass on the stories of the struggle. It was a good example of how connections in peace and anti-nuclear movements are built over decades.
As at other climate camps and anti-summit protests, time took on a peculiar quality at ANFA. Things seemed to slow down as we took time outside of our usual routines for one another. For me, being at the Kum-ba-yah camp and hearing Aunty Barb’s call to deliberate with love was particularly significant because it evoked memories of the Love: Art, Ideas, Music, Politics festival I helped organise at the same campsite back in 2017. The Love festival created a temporary commune on the mountain over the course of a weekend, where we tried to chart a course out of the dark valley politics had entered at that time. Eating together played an important role at both gatherings and the communal kitchen fuelled by the love of volunteer cooks sustained the attendees and created the informal space necessary for strong relationships to be forged.
One of the ways that peace and anti-nuclear activists in Australia, including leading lights of ANFA like Uncle Kev, have made time to forge these long lasting connections to country and to one another has been through peace walks. these walks take place over weeks and even months in different parts of the country. They combine witness with protest against nuclear harm as the participants trace the connections between significant sites of nuclear harm such as uranium mines, military bases, and power plants with their own bodies. Many of the delegates to this year’s ANFA conference had participated in or organised peace walks over the years. Some had walked the epic eight-month journey in 2003-2004, from the Olympic Dam uranium mine at Roxby Downs, South Australia, to Canberra and then to Japan, where they walked past Fukushima and other nuclear sites before converging on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I have written about this walk here).
This year’s ANFA meeting was also the launch for the Peace Walkers Against AUKUS, who began a one-month walk from Port Kembla to Canberra in opposition to the military pact. The walkers were present throughout the weekend, helping in the kitchen and looking after our children, joining in the discussions and painting banners. I saw some of them again in Wollongong a few months later, when a carload of participants from Canberra and Nowra turned up to support the community blockade held outside steel manufacturer Bisalloy in May. Bisalloy exports armoured steel that is used by the Israeli Defence Force in their genocide in Gaza. It was another reminder of how relationships forged in struggle can come back around in unexpected ways, when we make the time and space.
Over the course of the ANFA weekend I felt part of a strong and caring community. The journeys delegates make year after year to support one another’s struggles have created a movement powerful enough to disrupt states and mining companies in their plans for dumps and mines. I felt incredibly privileged to be included in this year’s gathering and to be able to lean on the strength of an Alliance that has battled for more than twenty years to stop the nuclear industry.
Here in Wollongong, our movement against the nuclear submarine base has grown steadily, from the first rallies and small public meeting in April 2022, to the thousands who turned out in Port Kembla on May Day last year. I fear that dark times lie ahead for all of those who care about peace, country, and one another. All the more reason to make the time to connect like we did at ANFA. Gatherings like this are one of the ways that we will forge the unstoppable current needed to turn back the tide of war and climate chaos and create a different future.