“We didn’t offer up our land…We’re still fighting for food, about education, health and poverty issues, how can we be fighting against uranium mining and waste dumps of top of all that?”

- Mitch

Inhabited aims to reveal the myth of uninhabited and lifeless places that is created by politicians and industry promoting nuclear activity in Australia. The idea that the outback and the desert is “the middle of nowhere” shows that the notion of Terra Nullius, brought on by European invasion, has never left us.

In 2005 the then environment minister Brendan Nelson announced the federal government’s decision to establish a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory. At the time he said “Why shouldn’t people living in the middle of nowhere have a radioactive waste dump on their land?”.

Traditional owners and Indigenous communities suffer most directly the impacts of the nuclear industry but their voices are the least heard. These images are the result of journeys with Friends of the Earth into the Australian outback, and meetings with Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples directly affected by uranium mining in Australia. With the current nuclear debate the wishes of the inhabitants are too easily dismissed.