The Dreaming

["Forward, Jonathan" <JForward@sitgbsd1.telecom.com.au>]

Hmmm - another thing that worried me at the time but which I was too slack
to write about at the time, being in my usual state of dolce far niente;
taken from GARDEN08.DOC, Robin Smith's interview, August 14, 1982, edited by
Andrew Marvick, "A Dijeridu Special":

'     As we were saying, Kate wrote The Dreaming after being upset by
 what has happened to the aborigines. For years they've been moved off
 their tribal lands, and even attacked, because of the white man's quest
 for precious metals--especially plutonium.
       "I think there's about two thousand aborigines left," says Kate.
 "Unfortunately their lands are where you find plutonium, a very rare
 metal which is used in bombs."'

A very rare metal indeed, considering it's made by bombarding purified
uranium with neutrons. What's actually dug out of the ground is plain
old uranium oxide, or yellow-cake. That's the stuff we still sell to the
French govt so they can refine it, make it into plutonium, and then play
see-island-make-go-boom, while we denounce them in the U.N. Good non?
I think there would have been around two hundred thousand aborigines
back in '82, rather than two thousand.

TSB