Gillian Bouras named it. 'Despair is surely a great temptation in today's extremely troubled world,' she wrote recently.
'What can one feel except helpless in the face of the stark realities that confront huge numbers of ordinary people through no fault of their own?'
She quotes the 416 BC Thucydides: 'the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must'.
Last Friday 29 April, I spoke with one of those suffering people facing her own stark reality. She is not an asylum seeker, but she was thinking about them in the midst of her own great sadness.
'I'm sitting here trying to eat my weetbix and keep my thoughts calm,' said Enice Marsh, Adnymathanha Elder/Traditional Owner for the Flinders Ranges area of SA. 'But do you know what I was thinking? Originally Australia was colonised by boat people. Now we have boat people trying to get into Australia. Let them come. But colonisation is again attacking the First Nations people and poisoning their land.'
Enice and the other Adynamathanha Elders had just received the shattering news that the former South Australian Liberal Senator Grant Chapman's part-owned property Bardioota is 'at the top of the list' to be the site of Australia's national radioactive waste dump. (Politician-speak for being almost certainly the eventual site.)
The proposed dumpsite is adjacent to the Yappala Indigenous Protected Area. As one Yappala resident, Regina McKenzie, later described it, 'It's like getting news of a death.'
The situation certainly exemplifies the Thucydides analysis. In her interview for ABC's AM program an hour before our own phone conversation, Enice spoke of her 'total surprise. It's a disaster. I feel absolutely shattered.'
"In a repeat of the one of the Kimba owners' comments some months back, Chapman seems to be ill-informed regarding what will actually be deposited on the property."
Outlining the numerous times that the Traditional Owners had asked the State Minister for the Environment and the Federal Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg to visit the site, she could only conclude, 'But all this has come to no avail — it's all been totally ignored.'
On Friday Frydenberg managed to have it both ways, in what seems to be a now fashionable way to go about such announcements. 'There is no final decision.' And yet, there is only one site remaining from what was a 'self selection' offer by the original 28 property owners and the shortlisted six.
Frydenberg described the selection process to date as 'rigorous'. However,