Maggs Bros. Ltd.

A striking and rare poster for an anti-nuclear rally and march held at Belmore Park in Sydney on Saturday April 1^st 1978.

Rich in uranium mines and considered to be conveniently remote, Australia and its outlying islands was both a production and testing ground for British nuclear weapons in the 1950s. By the 1970s uranium mining in the Northern Territory had picked up again as a supply for international nuclear power, however one of the key areas of uranium deposits was also an Indigenous land preserve. The Labor government committed to proceeding with the mining, and by the late 70s a series of grass-roots anti-nuclear groups had organised in protest. The Movement Against Uranium Mining was one such group, later coalescing into a national organisation called Uranium Moratorium.

The graphic depicts a mushroom cloud over six repeating images derived from a photographic portrait of Truganini (c. 1812-1876), taken by Charles A. Woolley. Truganini was an Indigenous Tasmanian woman, believed to be one of the last speakers of the Tasmanian language. Commonly described as the "last Aboriginal Tasmanian", this moniker has more recently been rejected as a convenient mythology of a "vanishing race". In the context of the anti-nuclear movement, she represents a caution about the encroachment of destructive mineral extraction and the potential for nuclear war or disaster on the already fraught issue of Indigenous land rights.

OCLC finds one copy only, at the State Library of New South Wales.