Contaminated Country: In Conversation with Jessica Urwin
About
Analyses environmental injustice, Indigenous land rights and Australia's nuclear historyDuring the twentieth century Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear programs of numerous global powers. From uranium extraction to weapons testing, Australia's lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development and was subject to rampant nuclear colonialism. Aboriginal communities, bearing the brunt of these processes, persistently resisted, reclaiming their rights to Country and demanding reparations.
As Jessica Urwin shows, extraction, testing and waste disposal have caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and cultural harm to Aboriginal communities and lands. Tracking the colonial mechanisms Australia used to pursue nuclear industry, Urwin simultaneously highlights how Aboriginal peoples rejected and reshaped those same mechanisms. Contaminated Country reveals how Australia's nuclear past has been entangled with colonialism locally, nationally, and internationally.
Jessica Urwin is a Lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Tasmania interested in the intersections between nuclear processes, environmental (in)justice and colonialism. She has published in several leading history journals and her work has received numerous awards, including the American Society for Environmental History's Rachel Carson Prize, Australian National University's John Molony Prize for History, and Australian Academy of Science's Moran Award for History of Science Research.
Dr. Tilman Ruff is a public health and infectious diseases physician, was Co-President of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW, Nobel Peace Prize 1985) from 2012 to 2023, and is a current board member. He has been active in the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia) (MAPW) since 1982 and is a past national President and current International Councillor. From 2005, he was a co-founder and founding chair of the governing bodies of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), an initiative of IPPNW and MAPW. In 2017, ICAN became the first Australian-born Nobel Peace Laureate "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons". The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), negotiated at the UN that year, entered into legal force in 2021 and now includes over half the world's nations. He is a member of the TPNW Scientific Network.
Join Jessica and Tilman at the Afterword Cafe.
Date
Wednesday 8 July 2026 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM (UTC+10)Location
Fullers Bookshop
131 Collins Street, Hobart TAS 7000
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Contaminated Country: In Conversation with Jessica Urwin
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