On Friday 26 August in Adelaide, Yankunyjatjara Elder Edie Nyimpula King was awarded the 2016 Perpetual Trophy of the prestigious Gladys Elphick Awards for her decades of work 'in standing up for culture, country and community'.
On Saturday 3 September, in Port Augusta, Edie (pictured) was keeping up the struggle, singing again the Seven Sisters inma, strong in its demands for a clean country and protection for the future generations.
Unable then to stop the flow of tears, she paid tribute to her former companions' heroic struggles. 'Ivy Makinti Stewart, Kampakuta — Eileen Brown, Eileen Unkari Crombie' amid all the other heroes — the brave fighters for country and the future generations against the nuclear industry and its proponents in South Australia; women who had immortalised that inma in the same obedient re-enactment of the Seven Sisters and their demands to care for country.
Its cry: Irati Wanti — leave the poison! Have nothing to do with it! No radioactive waste dump in our country!
But why is such responsibility for country and the health of its people — forever — so hard? And ongoing! Why is the destruction of country — its lands and waters and huge risks to the future generations — forever allowed to be normalised?
Indeed how to explain the current normalisation of the new threat — of importing high-level radioactive waste across the Southern Hemisphere oceans and its dumping onto the lands of South Australia. And this with the seemingly full permission of a government and perhaps a peoples, both of whom will be long gone in the 'hundreds of thousands of years' which the nuclear royal commission itself admits such material must be isolated.
Poll results during the third week of September revealed that 50 per cent of those polled agree to welcome such waste with 35 per cent against and 15 per cent undecided.
Of course the full throttled media campaign must take credit for much of this.
"Perhaps the barrage of pro-nuclear forces/strategies explains why there's no explosion of outrage either in South Australian society or in church and faith groups against this extraordinarily destructive scheme."
Recently the Adelaide Advertiser had a front page story entitled 'Nuke fear for kids'. The heading would surely lead one to believe that (surprisingly) SA's only daily paper had a front page article about the substantial risk that the proposed importation of international high-level radioactive waste will be for the present and future generations of South