Nuclear Fallout

Associate Professor Elizabeth Tynan PhD is co-ordinator of the professional development program at the James Cook University Graduate Research School. She is a prominent researcher of the history of British atomic weapons testing in Australia. Her first book on the topic (Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History and the CHASS Australia Prize for a Book in 2017. She is a former journalism academic with a background in both print and electronic media, specialising in science writing and editing. Her PhD from the Australian National University examined aspects of the British nuclear tests in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Her new book about British atomic tests in Australia, The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia, was published by NewSouth Publishing in May 2022.

Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her second book, The Exclusion Zone (UQP 2023), is out now. 

Professor Ian Lowe AO is uniquely qualified to tell this story, following a long career in universities, research councils and advisory groups. Lowe is the author of several books, including Living in the Hothouse (Scribe, 2005), A Big Fix (Black Inc., 2005), A Voice of Reason (UQP, 2010), Bigger or Better? (UQP, 2012) and The Lucky Country? (UQP, 2016). He is also the author of a 2006 Quarterly Essay on the prospects for nuclear power in Australia, and a ‘flip book’ with Professor Barry Brook, giving the two sides of the argument.

Ashley Hay is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose work includes The Railwayman’s Wife, A Hundred Small Lessons and Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions. A former editor of Griffith Review, she also works as a mentor and facilitator, and as editorial consultant for the Climate Justice Observatory.