ABSTRACT
The Encyclopaedia Britannica's 2021 entry about the Great Victoria Desert (GVD) describes it as an “arid wasteland in southern Australia, that is Australia's largest desert.” The desert as wasteland feeds into Cold War British Boosterism and Commonwealth Cringe, along with a confirmation bias towards Australia's larger fiction terra nullius (“Nobody's land”). During British A-bomb testing, the enlisted and overlooked experience their own consummate ravaging as radioactive fallout reshapes future generations. Bill McKibben's The End of Nature (1989) plays out globally as Homo sapiens become “homo strontium,” incorporating, and living within, a world impregnated with Man-made (sic) strontium-90.
Key players, T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935), Gertrude Bell's Syria: The Desert and the Sown (2001) and E.M. Hull's The Sheik (1919) flesh out the backstories of Britain's desert imaginary formed from WW1 imperialist ventures in North African, Arabian, and Algerian deserts. Narratives by Southern contemporaries in the Great Victoria Desert are structured as Double Helix entanglements: key players-Daisy Bates' The Passing of the Aborigines (1938), Charles Duguid's Doctor Goes Walkabout (1977), and Len Beadell's Blast the Bush (2006)-intensify the slow violence of Maralinga's chemical and chromosomal fallout on Black and White Australia.
