By: Timothy Large
Date: August 17th 2016
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
HAWKER, Australia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Enice Marsh remembers the black clouds of "poison stuff" that billowed from the northwest after British atomic bomb tests in the 1950s spread fallout across swathes of South Australia.
Now a new kind of radioactivity could head to her ancestral home in the remote Flinders Ranges - a nuclear waste dump.
"To me, it feels like a death penalty," said Marsh, 73, standing in the cemetery of the outback town of Hawker, where many of her relatives are buried under red earth.
"We are one big family and the land also is family to us. We care for the land just in the same way we care for our family."
South Australia is at the heart of a debate over the nation's nuclear future that highlights a familiar tension between quick economic gain and long-term custodianship of land occupied by Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years.
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