![]() Meanwhile a Greenpeace campaign was in full swing to protest against French military testing of nuclear weapons on Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. This short film (below) sheds further light on what happened. I still remember the veterans who had been subject to the blasts being interviewed on TV news broadcasts. Not long afterwards, in 1985, the McClelland Royal Commission investigated secret British nuclear tests on Australian soil, including Maralinga, in the 1950s. (The band’s singer, Peter Garrett, even went on to stand for the Nuclear Disarmament Party although he didn’t get voted in.) I bought it upon release in 1984 and remember feeling incredibly impassioned by the lyrics, which were filled with political messages about the nuclear threat we all faced. I still remember the terrifying image, depicting Sydney Harbour after a nuclear strike, on the front cover of Red Sails in the Sunset, an album by Australian rock band Midnight Oil. It frightened me so much I still remember writing English essays about nuclear war and angst-filled poetry about world peace.Īustralia may have seemed a long way away from the two main adversaries, the USA and Soviet Union, but anxiety about the nuclear threat was very real at that point in time. ![]() At the time there was a very real fear that Armageddon was just around the corner. ![]() Fiction – paperback Vintage Classics 320 pages 2009.Īs a teenager in the 1980s, I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War nuclear arms race. ![]()
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