ABSTRACT |
This is not a paper that will tie itself within a theoretical framework
more than is absolutely necessary. I say this because the narratives I
am going to talk about have been silenced for over fifty years, their
protagonists have been ridiculed in public, labelled exaggerators and/or
distorters of the truth, publicly slandered and finally and most
importantly removed from the pages of Anglo-Australian and Australian
History. Beyond Belief presents the auto/biographical voices of
men and women, civilians, military personnel and Aboriginal people who
formed part of or were affected by the testing of British atomic weapons
on Australian territory during the 1950s Australia, though independent
at the time, was clearly responding to old colonial metropolitan ties
and “other political expediencies” when it acquiesced to Britain’s
request to test atomic weapons on its territory.…Until
very recently, the auto/biographical narrators have been effectively
silenced by successful gagging on the part of Australian and British
governmental and military authorities. The Hibakusha, as the survivors
of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are called, are, in this case, not only those
who suffered the immediate effects of radiation at the time of the
texts, but also their descendents. The paper will go together with
slides of the bomb sites and those affected.
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