Today is Hiroshima day. The 6th of August 1945 was a time when US imperialism reached its peak, claiming the moral authority to extinguish the lives of over a million people under the pretext of saving lives. The United States had already firebombed Tokyo, the capital of Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of people. The US is the only country on earth to have performed such an atrocity.
The Australian government refuses to censure its ally for the proliferation of this nuclear threat and have purchased submarines which are part of a nuclear force to threaten China in the Pacific and in the South China Sea. In Queensland, our state super fund (QSuper) invests in nuclear technology and weapons. Our Queensland state premier is sending weapons to Ukraine in furtherance of the conflict between it and Russia.
Members of her own party in the 1970s, Tom Uren and Georges Georges, would be horrified by the actions of both federal and state Labor governments. In August 1978, Tom Uren told us how he had been one of the first responders to reach Hiroshima after the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on that city. Tom was so shaken by what he saw he spent the rest of his life fighting against nuclear weapons and war. He and his comrades-in-arms, George Georges, were arrested in the ‘valley of death’ in Brisbane for their outspoken opposition to the mining and export of uranium. During one of his three arrests, this Senator for Queensland was taken into custody, assaulted and manhandled by police. Georges had moved across ‘the valley of death’ to prevent police from pushing demonstrators through the plate glass window of the Commonwealth Bank opposite King George Square.
They were both subsequently fined and jailed for their opposition to nuclear energy and arms. At that time the Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was trying to establish a uranium enrichment plant in Queensland. On 30 August 1979, the Australian Senate passed the following resolution about the arrest and incarceration of George Georges:
That the following matters be referred to the committee of privileges – (a) the failure of any appropriate authority in Queensland to advise the president of the Senate of the arrest and imprisonment of Senator George Georges; (b) whether the matter leading to the arrest and imprisonment of Saturday Georgia’s was of a civil or a criminal nature; (c) that, notwithstanding anything contained in the standing orders, the privileges committee, for the purposes of its inquiry and report, should have power to send for persons, papers and records.
It is to their shame that the current crop of parliamentarians do not take impending nuclear war as seriously as did Tom Uren and George Georges. Georges, who had been a senator since 1968, said: “Peace and nuclear disarmament is the most important issue of our time. Without peace nothing else is relevant. The threat of world destruction through nuclear war must be removed.”
I remember that on 5 August 1978 I participated in a march around King George Square with about 2,000 thousand people. We carried a coffin inscribed with “uranium disaster“. A banner read “Nuclear power – no future”. Placards carried the message “stop uranium mining” and “the people united will never be defeated“. The Kamikaze theatre troupe put on a show against the Fraser government’s ‘Uranium Decision’. As we arrived at the steps, people carrying the coffin were arrested by police under the street march ban pronounced to stop the anti-uranium movement.
A lone speaker stood at the bottom of the steps on top of the coffin. On the edge of the ‘valley of death’ he addressed the swelling crowd standing above him in what had become a natural amphitheatre. He wore a bike helmet as police carried batons and were willing to use them. He railed against the mining and export of uranium and against the government’s ban on street marches. As he was dragged from the coffin and thrown violently into a paddy wagon by task force under orders from the head of special branch, Les Hogan, democracy died. Police hit the lone speaker with a number of charges including assault police for which he was found ‘not guilty’. Senior Constable Nowitske lied before the magistrate claiming that his ‘wife had asked him that night why he had a bruise on his chest’. He claimed it was the man standing on the coffin who punched him. The protester was convicted of disobeying a police direction and holding a public meeting without a permit. He was fined $100 plus costs in default 14 days in prison. In all 10 people were arrested and charged. That sole charge of assault police was the only legal victory that could be claimed from the police attack on Hiroshima Day 1978. All 10 defendants were convicted and fined by the courts. There was another charge of stealing fabricated against the drummer from The Go-Betweens. This charge was subsequently dropped. During that year, a number of anti-uranium protesters had been arrested on Hamilton No 4 wharf as a result of attempts to stop uranium being shipped out from that port.
Australian governments sold out our movement against uranium mining and export. Enriched uranium gave rise to meltdowns and release of radioactive clouds from Three Mile Island (US), Chernobyl (Ukraine) and Fukushima (Japan). The United States, France and United Kingdom have exploded 318 nuclear devices in the Pacific since nuclear technology was developed and that is not counting what happened on mainland Australia as the Menzies government tried to join the nuclear club. The Australian government still wants to get into the nuclear bed with two of those countries (the US and UK) through the AUKUS agreement. Oppenheimer started a chain reaction that he believed would destroy the world. Hence the US government disabled his political critique of the doomsday weapon by spreading lies about him and saying he was keeping company with communists, ‘the enemy’ according to the political elite of the time.
Imperialism
In 1975, while hitch hiking around the Pacific, I stayed with Melanesian people in a small village on the Isle of Saint Joseph in the Loyalty group. During my travels to New Zealand, New Caledonia and the Loyalty islands I met many indigenous people who lived off the land and the sea. They had their own languages but the languages of the imperialists were imposed on them (mainly English and French).
One day, during the month that I stayed on the island of St Joseph, the French Navy turned up on the horizon. Probably one of their jobs was to provide security for the French test nuclear weapon tests in the Pacific. One evening, their officers came ashore with two films which they projected onto the wall of a local church. One was a bizarre Danny Kaye comedy about a mad scientist (dubbed in French). The other was a recruiting film for the French Navy. I got up early the next day to see young 18 and 19-year-old boys being taken on landing craft out to the warships on the horizon. I asked some local women, who were platting mats out of coconut palm leaves, what was going on. They told me that the boys had been conscripted into the French Navy for two or three years service.
In the ensuing years when the independence movement comprising young men and women was growing in strength, they took on their former military bosses and were corralled in some caves in the north part of the island of St Joseph. The rebels took some French nationals hostage. French paratroopers massacred 13 islanders by throwing grenades into the caves near where they usually cut copra. All forms of imperialism are bad. The US, France and the UK detonated 318 nuclear devices across the Pacific during those years.
The only Chinese presence I ever saw in that part of the Pacific was in Chinatown in Noumea, the only place you could get a good, cheap meal.
Ian Curr
6 August 2023