Life
The anti-nuclear protests of the 1980s are a distant memory in Fremantle, which hosts an American Virginia-class submarine of the sort promised under the AUKUS deal. By John Kinsella.
Where are the anti-nuclear protesters?
It astonishes me that the fervent opposition to American nuclear warships so prevalent in Fremantle and environs during the 1980s is so greatly diminished. Today it is limited to essentially online activity, or small-scale physical protest such as that staged by Stop AUKUS WA at the Western Australian Defence Forum last month.
Now, full admiration for those protesters who work tirelessly and often against the indifference of major media networks, but larger-scale cross-demographic protests seem almost non-existent. I am sure this frustrates many who are opposed to the AUKUS war-sell, and who commit their time to resisting it out of deep ethical concern. But actions such as those well-attended protests staged almost a half century ago at Fremantle Harbour – the peace fleets of small watercraft and the highly engaged politics of nuclear refusal – have largely vanished.
How on earth has it got to the point where the USS Minnesota, a Virginia-class “fast attack” nuclear-powered submarine, can hold court at HMAS Stirling on Garden Island? Meeandip is the Noongar name for the island, though Noongar rights seem to be given scant regard when it comes to the naval facilities there.
So much propaganda has been spun around the Minnesota’s longer-than-usual residence, including tours of the submarine by local media and gut-wrenching hypocrisies from the commanding officer about the beauty of hearing whales below the surface. We have learnt about the sub’s technical specs and sophistication, its deadliness, about the living conditions for its cloistered crew, and even its “green” credentials.
All of this is part of the AUKUS sell to the locals and to Australia as a whole. Not a lot of hard sell needs to be done locally – it’s a fait accompli that reaches its radioactive tentacles into all walks of life, just as mining does. Everyone knows someone who knows someone involved in the AUKUS influx. The quick transition to a proxy war-servicing global arms setting has been frighteningly deft and efficient.
In the heart of the Labor electorate around Rockingham town is the service and leisure centre of the HMAS Stirling naval base, where the reality of jobs fuses with a philosophically receptive sense of the “national good”. The heavy-industry strip of Kwinana/Naval Base is the oceanside refinery endgame for the mining industry, and its service/employment demographic is psychologically synched to perform for this upping of the military ante. HMAS Stirling has gone from what was essentially a military outpost to a key in a nuclear-fuelled maximum-scope military projection of power. Meeandip and its surroundings are being made into overt, self-promoting targets.
Much was made of a small Chinese flotilla orbiting Australia, conducting live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea and causing the rerouting of commercial aircraft. It’s been a warmonger’s perfect storm and a strategist’s propaganda coup. There was plenty of noise around this “foreign incursion” – in international waters – but little around the embracing of the nuclear gambit that so many once protested against. If it were not for AUKUS, would the Chinese flotilla have been here at all? It might have, of course, but then again it might not.
As someone who was involved in peaceful protesting against nuclear warships (and all war machinery) and has maintained the rage, I travelled down to Rockingham and Cape Peron recently to get a sense of how a day passes in the blast zone. Whatever the complexities and differences between people, their day-to-day processes continue without any evident protest. There’s no Greenham Common-style camp outside the naval base, there’s no graffiti of protest. There’s just an endless stream of traffic – tradies, base workers and so on – across the causeway.
Since I was last down that way, I notice across the water that buildings have risen at the base and that things are bustling along. There’s a sign at a car park not far up from the base on the edge of an environmentally protected area that warns to watch for thieves. The irony is deadening. The limestone formations on the cape are incredible and the marine life remarkable, if under constant pressure from development. The propaganda milks this correlation between industry, the military and the environment as something that works in harmony, when it so clearly does not.
When I was 18, I worked at one of the jetties on the industrial strip supervising the loading of ships, as an independent eye to ensure each vessel was balanced. I was there shortly after a leak of caustic soda into Cockburn Sound. The millions of tonnes of highly toxic sludge behind the partially shutdown Alcoa alumina refinery is just one of many threats in medias res, for all the “remediation” efforts.
The protests of the ’80s weren’t simply “alternative”, “bohemian” or middle class. In my early 20s, I did a season working at the CSBP fertiliser factory in Kwinana and a close friend who worked full-time there as a scaffolder and rigger was equally committed to an anti-nuclear future.
When nuclear warships made regular visits in the ’80s (as they have continued to do), they anchored off Gage Roads, which left them sitting in sight of the lusher, wealthier coastal suburbs of Perth, or moored in Fremantle Harbour. It was easier for the somewhat greener demographic of Fremantle to focus protest and to draw on threads of other activism. Environmental groups merged with anti-war groups and localism with broader global concerns.
HMAS Stirling today is secure and off-limits to the general public. The rudiments of the island wharves and base are visible across the sound from the mainland, and a substantial part of the island is a Class-A nature reserve. Small boats do make landfall, but you can’t cross the causeway without clearance.
In other words, the dynamics of protest are constrained. Increasingly aggressive anti-protest laws around the country have made Australia’s arrest rate of environmental activists the highest in the world, according to a recent Bristol University study. But it still astonishes me that some who oppose the nuclear gambit might not at least protest in an ongoing way at the entry of the base, or maybe in Rockingham.
There is a camp school a little further along the cape on the mainland, and in front of it there’s a blue tree painted so as to bring attention to mental-health issues – I find the irony beyond tragic. There’s an inherent acceptance of the changes taking place in the locality’s vulnerability and susceptibility to potential nuclear accident (from the submarines’ onboard reactors but also from the future storage of radioactive waste on the island), and in its becoming more of a military target than it was. I feel there should be protest implicit in this dead tree, but there’s apparently not.
Something has shifted in the collective psychology of responsibility across an array of social demographics in Western Australia.
Despite the intense heat on the day of my visit, the lawned and treed foreshore area of Rockingham town is bristling with the lunch crowd, the beach umbrellas are up. The island is exquisitely visible five kilometres across the sound, the waters gentle, large ships waiting to take on their industrial loads or grain, the smokestacks of heavy industry emitting away and the naval base gearing up for the deepest engagement with nuclear power and its consequences that Australia has experienced outside the British–Australian atomic tests of the 1950s.
If protesters can find the necessary impetus to “culture jam” Peter Dutton’s absurd, ecologically and socially threatening nuclear power plant policy, surely they can extend these activities to the local and mobile nuclear threat of the AUKUS submarines in a physical, peaceful and fully committed way. Some are already, but more of us need to do so. The nuclear submarine threat is one underwritten by both the Coalition and Labor. As one banner read at the protest at Dutton’s recent Lowy Institute speech, “Nuclear Lies Cost Us All”.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Silent protest".
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