"The end of the world's happening!"

by Paul Cockram (in the Braidwood Times)

I lived in Tennant Creek NT for a decade or so and during that time I got to know some interesting bods and heard all sorts of tales, both tall and true. This one is a true recollection.

Ross Alley, a long-time resident of the Northern Territory, sadly no longer with us, remembered the day of the 1988 earthquake.

“It was in the morning, around about 10 or 11, I think, and I was in the old Tennant Foodbarn at the time down at the back shelves there buying some drinks and that to take on the road.

“I'd come about half way up the aisle when the earthquake started. All the shelves started falling in and one of the girls, I think she might have been a shopper too, grabbed hold of me and said, ‘Hey what’s going on; is the end of the world happening?’.

“Everything was falling down and everyone was pouring out the front of the shop – yeah and we had to fight our way through all the fallen groceries and that to get out the front. We just stood there ’til it finished.

“They were all panickin’, they all just rushed out the front. When I got there they were all standing out on the footpath! Quite an experience, I'll say!

“When I went out the front, I had the old Toyota then, and Auntie was sittin’ in the car and she was panickin’. She said, ‘What’d I touch? ... the car was shaking, shaking, shaking’. She said, ‘I thought I’d touched something and then it started rattling or something!’.

“It was quite an experience. Then on the way out of town we was out near Phillip Creek and I thought I blew a tyre in the car, it was shakin’ that much but when I got further up the track we realised there was another earthquake out there. Yeah, so it was quite an experience really.”

* * *
I was reminded of this story when I read that a group of Aboriginal traditional owners have negotiated with the Federal Government to lease their land as a nuclear waste dump. The place is Muckaty Station and it’s only 120km north of Tennant Creek.

As you can imagine, if they were drums of radioactive waste falling off the shelves, the story would lose some of its comedy-capers feel.

According to the government’s Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, there is already 3,500 cubic metres of radioactive waste around Australia in need of safe storage or disposal.

As it becomes clearer that ‘clean coal’ is just a nonsense made up by coal companies to buy time for new mines to open, the nuclear option will start to appeal to more people. It’s true that nuclear power stations do not emit carbon into the atmosphere but they do produce deadly waste products that must be stored safely for thousands of years.

Nuclear powered electricity, like coal-fired power, is just another way of propping up today’s wasteful energy use by leaving a large debt to be paid by our children.