TOTEM - Inheriting the disavowed: nuclear testing and its cultural symptoms in Australia
Creators: name: Roberts, Annelise
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2021

description: This dual creative/critical thesis examines the impact and legacy of the British nuclear testing program in Australia through the lens of a hypothesised cultural symptom called the 'desultory': a dull, avoidant half-heartedness, the signs of which, I argue, are apparent across various Australian cultural sites touched by nuclearism. In the scholarly dissertation, I use textual analysis to develop the concept of the desultory and suggest that its emergence can be traced to the conjunction of the existential anxieties of the nuclear era with the disavowal of colonial violence. The first body chapter, '"Knowing this Country": confronting the nuclear uncanny in Aboriginal life writing', considers the 'black mist' - a phenomenon witnessed in the wake of the first nuclear trial at Emu Field, S.A., in 1953 - as an instance of the 'nuclear uncanny', and conducts a reading of a work of life writing by nuclear witness and Anangu woman Jessie Lennon in which the various uncanny disruptions of the nuclear age are revealed to be bound up with processes of colonialism, the repressed cultural material that returns in the uncanny event. Lennon's strong proclamation of Aboriginal survival through the work of life writing allows a clearer picture of the desultory settler mechanisms of obscuration to emerge. The second chapter, 'Atomic Totem: appropriating Aboriginality to imagine the bomb', suggests that the prevalence of Aboriginal-derived symbolism, imagery and language in representations of the nuclear project is further evidence of a cultural process of disavowal. In government surveyor Len Beadell's 1967 memoir and in the appropriative naming practices evident throughout the nuclear testing operations, Aboriginality is both evoked and denied; ironically, it seems, the potential nuclear apocalypse is the only space in which the actual relationship between Indigenous and settler Australia can be faced. These two chapters provide a theoretical outline for the association between nuclear anxiety and the unacknowledged violence of Australia's colonisation, furnishing the conceptual ground for the broader project's theorisation of the desultory. The creative component of the thesis, an epistolary novel called 'Totem', continues the work of theorising the desultory by other means. In 'Totem', a white nuclear veteran of the testing at Emu Field, South Australia, addresses a series of recollections to an unnamed descendant. Speaking from a 'bardo' between life and death, the veteran is compelled to undertake the telling of his life story and the event at its core - his flight through the mushroom cloud of the Totem I nuclear test - by a sense that it is important for him to impart a legacy; he is hampered in this mission by his own forgetfulness, uncertainty and fear. In the drama of the difficulty of telling his story a picture emerges of intergenerational silences, alienations and violences; victimhoods and complicities; and the odd correspondence between the dull muteness of Canberra suburbia and the sublime emptiness of the testing site at Emu Field. Meanwhile, in a series of interludes, a woman works steadily on a strange document - part memoir, part essay - against a backdrop of urban social dysfunction and decay. Her short treatises on plutonium, bushfires, and native Australian sedatives form a kind of return correspondence that culminates in a chronicle of an expedition to the heart of the continent in search of a foundation for her enquiry that has so far evaded her. Thematically, the novel dwells in the space where colonisation and nuclearism overlap; as suggested by the title - a word that refers both to an icon of Indigenous ancestry and to the first nuclear test on mainland Australia - Aboriginal dispossession is the 'ground zero' of this narrative. In Totem, both the shock of the nuclear event and the confronting reality of colonial violence are diffused into atmospheres of dulled complicity, in which clarity is elusive.