ABSTRACT
This article explores the connections between anti-nuclear activism and the physical spaces of Sydney, Australia. In particular, it traces how a new generation of Australian peace activists in the 1950s and 1960s sought to dramatize the implications of a nuclear weapon exploding over Sydney by highlighting the extent of potential devastation on the city. This activism different from its predecessors in several ways, most significantly how it utilised public space to present its demands to the public. In addition, a younger cadre of activists added to this public by engaging in confrontational tactics of direct action and expressive protest that signalled a radicalisation of peace protest in Australia. In broader terms, the protest marches, vigils, cavalcades, pamphlets, posters and ephemera produced by Sydney anti-nuclear activists highlighted how much the threat of nuclear war hovered over the city and those activists determined to prevent its occurrence.
The very nature of the nuclear threat – as Australians saw it – was geographically expansive. Radioactive fallout, too, was invisible and somewhat abstract. Moreover, the remote location and secrecy of British and American defence facilities on Australian territory made it difficult for anti-nuclear activists to utilise these sites as targets of protest, like their counterparts in Britain and the United States had done. As such, in cities such as Sydney, activists struggled to find an iconography in these early Cold War years that linked urban spaces to the themes of nuclear threats they aimed to communicate. The advent in the 1960s of a more expressive politics of anti-nuclear activism – one that demonstrated the physical magnitude of nuclear weapons and their ever-increasing destructive capabilities – was a timely development that affected activists’ abilities to communicate their messages in such urban terrain.
