Dear all,

Heading North from Port Augusta, the outback stretches endlessly before you.

It is hot, dusty, dry and drippingly empty.

The Stuart Highway winds slowly west and then north, skirting the magnificent Flinders ranges.

It passes between vast, inland salt lakes, remnants of an ancient inland sea that evaporated millions of years ago leaving a rheumy white crust as the only memory of water.

A warning sign on the shores of these desolate lakes, covered like ice, tells you that there are unexploded bombs out there in the fastness.

It is an omen of things to come.

As the endless, barren scenery stretches away from every side, broken only by the occasional, lonely desert oak the temperature climbs beyond forty degrees.

Every breath taken is hot, the water warm and disgusting to drink, but drink you must or die.

Eventually the highway turns northwards and makes its way through the Woomera prohibited area.

Far to the west lie the notorious sites of Maralinga and Emu junction.

The Maralinga Tjartuja were the indigenous people of the land when they were disposessed of it and moved elsewhere while the British carried out atomic tests.

Maralinga means fields of thunder in Tjartuja, a name that became synonymous with the tests that were carried out there.

The Tjartuja have a dreaming, that once there was a Moth ancestor, and that he lies beneath the fields of thunder, and that he should not be disturbed.

For if his sleep is disturbed, then all his children will awaken in the land, and they will spread slowly, and all life will sicken and waste as they are touched with their wings of creeping death.

The British exploded their bombs.

Signs were put up, in English, warning of the dangers of residual radioactivity.

Nobody told the Tjartuja, travelling through their ancestral lands, and they wondered at the strange, odd smelling clouds.

As the dreaming foretold, slowly, the land and they, sickened and died from the radioactive fallout of the bomb testing.

The Tjartuja knew that despite the harsh beating sun and the arid landscape, that there was water deep within the earth.

For the desert oak sends its roots down deep and drinks of it.

The poison crept into the deep subterranean lake that underpins most of the land.

Nobody listened to the Tjatuja.

They sickened and slowly died.

'We are aboriginal women - Yankunytjatjara, Antikirinya and Kokatha. We know the country...we are born on the earth, not in the hospital. We were born in the sand. Mother never put us in the water and washed us when we were born straight out. They dried us with the sand. Then they put us - newborn baby - fireside, no blankets; they put us in the warm sand. And after that, when the cord comes off, they put us through the smoke. We really know the land. From a baby we grow up on the land.'

(Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta)

Woomera is still a protected military zone, and now the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta are worried that a plan to store nuclear waste there will further cause them ill health and sickness.

The dry dusty plains break at Kupa Pit, or Cooper Pedy, where a vast ugly landscape of churned earth and digging machines tell of the miners forays into the bowels of the earth in search of the precious opal stone.

People live underground in vast subterranean caverns, it is too hot and dry to live above it.

It is a frontier town, where tough, hardened miners gather to tell tall tales of the gem that got away.

More later.

yechydda,