White Fellas Owning the Land, Black Fellas Belonging to the Land: Mapping Institutionalised Racism in Australia

Abstract: Access to resources and the holding of dominant perceptions about the environment is about power, the thesis is looking deeper into the structures that allow a new form of nuclear colonisation to control the life of the Aboriginal people in the South Australian desert. The question of the thesis is whether the Department of Education Science and Training has produced a Draft EIS containing a racist discourse. The aim of the thesis is to describe the structures in the draft EIS, to show how certain discourses and meanings systematically are privileged. The history of Australia, the term terra nullis (empty land) and the conquest of traditional indigenous land is presented as a background context. The nuclear landscape can be perceived and experienced differently. It can be seen as a landscape of national sacrifice or as a geography where spiritual and cultural life are woven directly into the landscape itself. Different cultures create different landscapes, one group views areas within the region as sacred landscapes and Aboriginal homelands, and the other see the same areas as wastelands of little economic and productive value. The social determinants that shape wasteland discourse are those of a colonial history where Aboriginal communities generally have been, and still are, excluded from institutional processes.