Women United By A Really Hot Topic
The Age
Saturday November 21, 1998
It was a sunny 21 in Maribyrnong yesterday, but a cold day for the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta women's group. Back home, it gets to up to 50 in summer.
But the 16 women from Kokatha, Arabunna, and Antinkarinya Aboriginal people - communities from Port Augusta to Coober Pedy in South Australia - weren't here to talk about weather.
The Federal Government wants to put a national radioactive waste repository called Billa Kalina on Kokatha land, 180 kilometres south-east of Coober Pedy.
The women voiced their opposition to the proposal at the opening of the second annual Indigenous Solidarity Gathering at Pipemakers Park.
The waste comes from all over Australia and authorities want to dump it in the desert, where the women say it will infiltrate nearby Aboriginal communities' air, bore water and land.
A spokeswoman, Ms Rebecca Bear Wingfield, said most of the women -``my mothers, my grandmothers, my aunties, my sisters" - rarely left their own communities.
``Some people had a six-hour drive from Coober Pedy to Port Augusta where we left at 5am on Tuesday on the first Ghan train to Melbourne and we got here at 10pm the next night," she said.
``But the fact that so many women from such a diverse area are prepared to come to Melbourne highlights the importance of this issue to our people."
She said it was highly dangerous to move thousands of barrels of nuclear waste to a place that had already housed the Woomera rocket range and the Nurrunga American base.
Ms Wingfield's mother was exposed to radiation in 1953 from atomic testing at Emu Junction near Coober Pedy in 1953. Some women present yesterday had walked in craters from the Maralinga atomic blast as children.
Ms Bear Wingfield said: ``We're just like any other people. We're family who are concerned for our family and our children's children.
The Indigenous Solidarity Gathering, a forum for grassroots Aboriginal and environment groups to exchange information and ideas, continues today and tomorrow.
© 1998 The Age
