Mining of uranium took place in northern Australia in the 1960s.[1]
Subsequently, British nuclear testing took place at Maralinga, in the northern desert area of South Australia in the 1960s and early 1970s in northern and central Australia Both the uranium mining and nuclear testing destroyed many Aboriginal people's natural habitat, and decimated their population in northern and central Australia.[1]
To deflect any criticism of the testing, the Australian Government enacted the Australian Atomic Energy Act 1953,[2] forbidding publishing any kind of information about it. The penalty for violating the Act was imprisonment up to 20 years. B Wongar took around 5,000 photographs relating to the mining of uranium and the subsequent British nuclear testing, showing how these events affected Aboriginal Australians who lived in the area.[1]
During debate in Australian Parliament on the second report of the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission, an exhibition of this photographic collection, named Boomerang and Atom, at the Parliamentary Library of Australia in Canberra, was opened in September 1974. Two days after opening, the exhibition was banned by the government. The collection for decades was politically unacceptable for publication in Australia and the United Kingdom.[3]
A part of confronting photographs of this collection was originally published in Germany in the 1980s[4] under the title Bumerang und Bodenschätze[5] and, in 2006, published as a nonfictional book by Dingo Books in Australia.[6][7]
