Australian Black Indigenous Settlement Camps

Colonialism, as often as it is referred to in our modern day society, is usually referenced in the past. We operate with the assumption that most, if not all land on earth is mostly connected to each other, thus the act of a state colonizing an inhabited area in our day and age is almost unimaginable. However, there exists many recent instances of colonial expulsion and colonial occupation. Indeed, let me tell you about the time when the Australian government forcibly removed a Black Indigenous people from its home turf so that the government could proceed with nuclear missile tests.

Historically suppressed, First Nations Australians are severely underrepresented in Australia, and more interestingly their blackness is often forgotten. The incredibly diverse and historically old indigenous communities of Australia have in recent decades celebrated their blackness and expressed an affinity to the Black struggle, and so it is imperative to mention and emphasize their blackness in our analysis; for the struggle of Black Indigenous communities across the world is a vital part of the global fight against anti-Blackness.

Starting in 1955, the United Kingdom began a project entitled "The Blue Streak Missile", which was the creation and development of an Intermediate-range ballistic missile, i.e. a nuclear missile. However, due to the high costs of the project, the missile's development was abandoned. Instead, the program was tweaked and they began developing what was to be called the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO). ELDO used the infrastructure of the Blue Streak to test out a launch system called Europa, for which they tested out using ballistic missiles; so, in some way, the original project persisted.

In the early 1960s, the first of three tests for the ballistic missiles were deployed and set to fall at the Woomera Range Complex, an aerospace military facility located in the desert of South Australia, the native home of the Pintupi people. The Pintupi were forced into settlement camps where the government stated that they would be culturally, religiously and linguistically assimilated. (Hundreds of deaths and other violent/abusive mistreatments of children at these settlement camps have been reported over the past years.) Historically, the Pintupi were a nomadic tribe that had kept close to no contact with European settlers since their arrival. Once the government began planning the missile tests, most Pintupi were grouped and sent off to assimilation camps, however a small faction stayed in the area during the tests and contact with them disappeared until October 1984.

Emerging from the desert in October of 1984, The Pintupi Nine, often called "the Last Nomads", were a family composed of two wives, four adolescent brothers, and three adolescent sisters. Aside from one of the brothers, (named Piyiti, who returned to the desert), the children grew to become renowned artists. With The Pintupi Nine seemingly being the last of the Pintupi residing outside of Australian society, in 1984 the Pintupi were entirely displaced by the Australian government for the sake of nuclear imperialism; a failed military ambition since Australia failed to develop its own successful program.

With the rise of the BLM movement across the world, we have seen several Black Indigenous groups taking a stand and sharing their community's history with racial colonial oppression. Like the West Papuans, the Pintupi are part of a larger conglomerate of the Black diaspora that has been oppressed and erased by a state seldom mentioned in the fight against anti-Black racism. But Black Indigenous people are real, they have been here for thousands of years, and we must never let the colonial powers that be successfully erase them from our global psyche.