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The Koonibba Test Range’s rocket launches are making Country unsafe again, displacing Traditional Owners who were moved off the land for nuclear testing. By Claire G. Coleman.
The rocket tests threatening Country
“It so happens that we in Australia have the uninhabited spaces where they can be tried out.”
– “Atom bombs in our arid lands”, Sunday Herald, October 4, 1953, quoted by Elizabeth Tynan in “Maralinga and the Journalists: Covering the bomb tests over generations”
Uninhabited is a curious word. It conjures up different meanings to different people, depending on culture and circumstance. When seeking a site to test nuclear weapons (Maralinga) or a place to test missiles (Woomera) it is part of the definition of a perfect site: one does not want to test a bomb by bombing someone.
However, declaring any place on the Australian continent “uninhabited” defines that place as terra nullius – a statement that, after the Mabo decision, is impossible to defend, and should have been before. The only way for a place in Australia to be uninhabited is by the forced removal of the Traditional Owners.
Surely in these more enlightened times the language in the above quote would be unacceptable. We can no longer pretend Aboriginal lands are uninhabited, that they are or ever were terra nullius, some empty place that can be taken and blown to pieces with nobody able to complain about it.
Or so we would think.
This year the webpage for the Southern Launch-developed Koonibba Test Range, a commercial rocket test site that began operations in 2019, proudly states the chillingly familiar: “The range encompasses up to 41,000 square kilometres and extends up to 350 kilometres over uninhabited land.”
This so-called “uninhabited” land stretches 350 kilometres from the vicinity of Koonibba Mission, where many displaced people from Maralinga ended up, to near Maralinga itself. It is the lands of the Kokatha people, who were displaced by the development of the Woomera missile range and who took in the displaced people from the Maralinga, whose lands the missiles were to crash upon.
As a Noongar woman, I am keenly aware of the effects of displacement and of the fact there is no land on this continent that does not belong to an Aboriginal family, and no land on this continent truly uninhabited while the people still breathe. This was true in 1787, before the colony began; it was true in 1788, when the First Fleet landed; it was true in 1992, when the courts decided it was true; and it is true now. This entire continent always was and forever will be Aboriginal land.
Recent history has shown us – as anyone who has paid attention to Elon Musk’s SpaceX can tell you – that rockets fail: they fail to launch, they fail to reach their projected landing site, they fall from the sky. When they fail, they do so explosively.
This is why rocket tests are generally over ocean. If they rain fire upon the water, it is unlikely to do any serious damage. If, however, they can fire rockets over land, which makes them easier to retrieve, these tests will indisputably cause damage. In the case of the Koonibba range, that damage is to the land of the Kokatha people, to the lands cared for by Aunty Sue Coleman-Haseldine, who, like me, cannot believe they are “using that word”.
Aunty Sue is an important Elder and has been an anti-nuclear activist and land defender for decades. She is also family, although the exact nature of that connection could be considered complicated, stemming from the source of our shared Irish family name. Long story short – our Coleman ancestors were brothers.
Aunty Sue was born in Koonibba mission just before the Maralinga nuclear tests began destroying her Country and throwing fallout in her direction.
She is part of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, and she travelled to Oslo for the award ceremony.
She is a campaigner for peace and against weapons, so naturally she wants the launches to stop and she wants to bring to an end the militarisation of her sacred Country, the use of her Country to make weapons of war.
There’s more to it than that – she also wants her land to be safe and protected. The land is sacred and it’s the sacred duty of the people of that land to protect and care for it.
“That’s our home out there, that’s our pharmacy, our church, our school. It’s everything to us and that’s where we were brought up with the Dreaming stories and the sacred sites,” she told me.
“The people who have given the okay for this rocket launching company to go ahead and devastate – that’s the Koonibba council, the Koonibba community and the Far West Coast Aboriginal Corporation – so I’m fighting our own mob as well.”
The “extended downrange” of the Koonibba test site extends 200 kilometres past the northern border of the Far West Coast Aboriginal Corporation’s land-rights area, which arbitrarily follows the Trans-Australian Railway line, if you want evidence that land council areas are not determined by the ancient cultural borders. This provokes the question: who gave them permission to fire rockets 350 kilometres north?
“The ADF are involved and the Australian Space Agency, so this fight is actually quite big,” says Aunty Sue, a warrior, a fighter, a woman I’ve never heard of backing down from a fight, who has support from four generations of family. “I’ve got to keep this Country going for the next generation, for the animals. They don’t care about the animals – that’s the last thing they think about.”
Aunty Sue respects the system of laws but follows what I would call a greater law. “It’s the Dreamtime law, and that says you care for Country,” she says. “And I work with Seven Sisters and their sites are out on Country as well. The Mother of the Earth is one of the major rock holes out there, so I’ve got to look after all those places against all comers.”
If the rocket range is allowed to go into full development, it will be “like the Woomera rocket range. I won’t be allowed on Country”.
Aunty Sue has already been unsafe. When she exercised her right to be on Country, caring for Country, at a time when Southern Launch wanted to fire an experimental rocket, they did it anyway. “The rocket went off over the top of us, and for days after they were looking for bits and pieces of the – what do you call it? – the payload, that fell. That could have landed on us, but they just didn’t care. It was like Maralinga all over again.”
It is not just rockets launched from Country. Capsules and vehicles are being “returned” to the Koonibba site, often after launches from the United States, other times from orbit. Many of these “returns” are more like controlled crash landings.
That is when things go right. The reason they “return” these things to sites they consider “uninhabited” is that these crash landings are unsafe. Thus caring for Country is unsafe. Aunty Sue needs to call and check if there is any activity planned before returning to care for Country.
Aunty Sue does not consent to her land being used this way – her land is being colonised again. It is a double dispossession: land she was driven from by reckless nuclear testing, that was made radioactive, now used to test more rockets, which means she again is unsafe there.
On July 30, Aunty Sue released a statement on the @ westmaleeprotection Instagram account. She has stated unequivocally that she does not consent to rockets being launched from or landed on her Country. She is opposed to the militarisation of her sacred lands, to the use of her lands to develop weapons of war. She is asking for the Koonibba Test Range to be closed and asking the companies and countries using her land to desist.
No matter what you think of the space program, or of space flight in general, no matter what you think of weapons testing, no matter what you think of native title and land rights, surely we can all agree that the Gogada/Kokatha people have suffered enough from the weapons testing ambitions of others. Maralinga is on the borders of their land, the Woomera test range is on their Country, and now Southern Launch is firing rockets across their sacred homelands.
How can Aunty Sue care for Country when missiles streak across the Sky Country, when they fall from the sky, when she is removed from the land so they can throw rockets across it?
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 9, 2025 as "Country under fire".
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