Rocket Men in Woomera

Woomera is the location of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base that supervises the missile test range that was setup jointly with the RAF after the Second World War. Initially it was over 100,000 square miles – the area of New Zealand or Colorado – but now it’s half that and still the biggest in the world.

The ride on the Stuart Highway to get here from Coober Pedy and onwards to Port Augusta is mind numbingly boring – 650Km of nothing at all except the odd errant emu to keep you awake.  A chunk of the highway is also marked as a landing strip for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

If you wanted to put a missile testing facility in a place where nothing could get damaged, then here it is in the sterile centre of Australia. Indigenous Australians would and did take issue with this assumption but their voices were not heard in the 1940s.

In the town that is now publicly accessible there are two blocks of old missiles on stands with very rudimentary little plaques. All rusting, peeling, and fading in the fierce sun – signs of a more glorious past for the aerospace industries of two countries now both eclipsed by larger military industrial complexes. Weapons like Blue Steel that was a precursor to cruise missiles and the incomprehensibly named Sea Slug.

Not shown in the local displays is the fact that Woomera was also the site of an immigration processing centre built in 1999. A sign of a different political development and a desire to keep refugees along way from public view. It didn’t work. The centre had capacity for 400 people but grew to 1500 and led to riots inside the camp and massive protests outside. It was closed in 2003 and most of the people there given temporary status whilst their asylum claims were being processed. It was actually run by a US private prison company showing the reach of this particular pernicious recent development.