Constructing/curating Woomera: a topology of displacement between northeastern Europe and Central Australia

Peter Carleton Scriver, Steven Cooke and Andrew Saniga

Landscape Research, 2025, vol. 50, issue 7, 1173-1189

Abstract: Through the 1950s and 1960s, top-secret rocket testing across a vast swathe of Australia’s arid interior continued to entangle the antipodean island continent in the geopolitical aftermath of WW2. So did the fast-growing settler-colonial nation’s post-war immigration policies. This paper focuses on Woomera, South Australia, the remote base settlement for these Cold War operations, and the role of ‘new Australians’, directly recruited from the ‘Displaced Persons’ camps of post-war Europe, in its initial construction. At the comparatively intimate scale of the surviving material and archival traces of the former ‘rocket-town’, now largely dismantled, we interpret the content, inspirations and tactics of a curated installation within the recent Immigrant Networks exhibition, and how these reveal the mnemonic spaces and associations of the people who built Woomera, and their individual journeys of redemption from the deracinating experience of war, through this harsh interior landscape, to new lives in a strange new land.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2025.2526505

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