Australian space icon: Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon

The impact of the Space Age was not just in science and technology - it was also in popular and everyday culture. If you were a kid growing up in Australia from the 1960s until the the 1990s, you would have been familiar with a children's television icon: Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon. Mr Squiggle is a huge part of Australian television history, but I'm more interested in what the programme says about how space travel was perceived in the 1960s and after.

Squiggle basics

This is Mr Squiggle's theme tune:

Here's Mr Squiggle
With lots of fun for everyone
Here's Mr Squiggle, sing a happy tune
You can see we're as happy as can be
Mr Squiggle, the man from the Moon.

Mr Squiggle was the brainchild of political cartoonist and puppeteer Norman Hetherington. The pencil-nosed puppet's television debut was in 1959. At first Mr Squiggle was part of a six week stint on the Children's TV Club on the ABC, but soon gained his own stand-alone programme. Margaret, who married Norman in 1958, wrote the scripts for the show while Norman performed all the character voices. (Note that while Norman has his own Wikipedia page, Margaret doesn't).

Children would send in their 'squiggles', and Mr Squiggle used his pencil nose to make them into pictures, accompanied by a female sidekick. Other characters included Bill Steamshovel, Gus the snail, Merv Wallop and his nephew Wayne, Reg Linchpin, Doormat, the grumpy Rocket and a talking Blackboard.

Mr Squiggle lived at 93 Crater Crescent on the Moon and travelled to Earth every week in his rocket or by going for a 'space-walk'. He could also break out into gravity-defying 'space-walks' spontaneously in the middle of shows. Sometimes, if Rocket was very grumpy, Mr Squiggle would use an umbrella for the descent. 

The action takes place in a very ordinary, regular backyard, with gum trees, in the fictional location of Bandywallop. (The Collins dictionary defines Bandywallop as 'Australian informal: noun. An imaginary town, far from civilization'). There's a rainwater tank where Bill Steamshovel hangs out, and old, weathered yards surrounded by bush. I guess part of the appeal of Mr Squiggle, as we got so much US and UK children's television, was that it was set in Australia with Australian accents and culture. 

Mr Squiggle's female sidekicks were:

Miss Gina (Curtis) (1959-1960),
Miss Pat (Lovell) (1960-1975),
Miss Sue (Lloyd) (1975),
Miss Jane (Fennell) (1975-1986),
Roxanne (Kimmorley) (1986- 1989).
Rebecca (Hetherington) (1989-1999)

Notice a change? Somewhere in Miss Jane's tenure, those pesky feminists [sarcasm font] got in the ABC's ear about the sexism of the female titles, which classify women according to age, marriageability, and ownership by a man.  'A few years ago, the ABC told us to start using Ms instead of Miss,' Norman said in a news interview. 'But Ms Pat doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? It sounds like it's short for miserable. So since 1986 we've simply had Roxanne and now Rebecca.'

Miss Pat is the one I remember most. She was played by Patricia Lovell, who went on to become an influential movie producer (eg Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli).

Miss Pat helps Mr Squiggle out of his rocket

The science fiction writer Terry Dowling was a resident guest on Mr Squiggle, from 1979 to 1982. He wrote songs and performed them on the programme with his guitar.  Comedian and radio personality Mikey Robins played Reg Linchpin for a year in 1989-1990. The programme ended in 1999. 

Two books were spin-offs from the series. Margaret Hetherington wrote them, and Norman did the illustrations. They were Mr Squiggle and the Great Moon Robbery (1980) and Mr Squiggle and the Preposterous Purple Crocodile (1992). There was also a colouring book in 1989 - Mr Squiggle and His Rocket Activity Book. 

Mr Squiggle won Penguin awards in 1984 and 1989. He was the guest of honour at two science fiction conventions, and been part of two exhibitions at the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne. The Mosman Art Gallery, in the suburb where Margaret and Norman lived, had an exhibition called Mr Squiggle: Who's Pulling the Strings? in 2005. In February 2019, the Royal Australian Mint, in collaboration with supermarket chain Woolworths, issued a special release of Mr Squiggle $2 coins to commemorate the puppet's 60th anniversary. They also held an exhibition to go with the launch.

I was living in Sydney when Mr Squiggle was on his 30th anniversary tour. I was determined to go. Me and my friends (who were mostly colleagues from the icecream shop where I worked part-time) were the only unaccompanied adults there!

Squiggle space

Space wasn't really the point of Mr Squiggle - after all, most of the action took place on Earth, in the bush setting of Bandywallop. Space was more the backdrop. All the same, it's an indication how deeply entangled space became with everyday life in the 1960s. Mr Squiggle was launched only two years after the first satellite reached orbit, Sputnik 1 in 1957. Many people were talking about lunar exploration being just round the corner, and indeed, in 1959, the USSR has a major success with the Luna 2 probe becoming the first human object to land on the Moon (or crash land, at any rate). In the meantime, the UK and Australia had already launched the first rockets from the Woomera launch range in South Australia.

In the opening sequence of the show, you didn't see Mr Squiggle's home on the Moon, at 93 Crater Crescent - just his rocket descending through the atmosphere. It was a ratty old rocket which had been patched up. Mr Squiggle was sealed inside as if it were a coffin; his tall pointed hat peeked through the nose cone and his pencil nose had a porthole allowing it to poke out too. While it's grey in the animation, the puppet rocket was a lovely shiny silver on set.

Still from the animated opening sequence

Rocket didn't speak, but conveyed his feelings through his whistle (which you can see on the side) and a blower of the kind you have at children's parties. Rocket's whistle calls resembled birds you might hear in the bush.

Children really believed that Mr Squiggle lived on the Moon - and, apparently, that Australia Post delivered there. The Mosman Art Gallery's exhibition, Mr Squiggle: who's pulling the strings?, showed an envelope addressed in a child's hand to 'Mr Squiggle, The Moon'.

Children have always had a special relationship with the Moon. A turn-of-the-century study looked at the feelings and beliefs of North American white children. Many felt the Moon to be very close, and they looked on it as a confidante who would keep their secrets. Many of them talked to the Moon or to the man/woman in the Moon. It was part of their universe in an intimate way. (You can find out more in my recent book).

It's interesting that we never see the Moon in the programme. Mr Squiggle is not the only inhabitant; after all, he has a suburban street address. Occasionally he would mention different activities such as cultural festivals (eg Settler's Week!) taking place there. There may have been a reason behind this. With so much lunar science going on, perhaps it was safer to avoid being locked into one vision of it. Perhaps it was preferable to leave the Moon in the children's imagination, as fluid and creative as their squiggles.

We might also ask what kind of being lives on the Moon. In Margaret and Norman Hetherington's vision, Mr Squiggle had particular characteristics. As Richard Bradshaw (2010) described it, he was imbued with 'the qualities of a blessed child: kindness, vulnerability and resourcefulness'. He was happy to ask Miss Pat or Miss Jane to hold his hand while he drew. The gentle Mr Squiggle was a contrast to the sinister space of Cold War politics and the shadowy aliens with their elusive UFOs.

Mr Squiggle was never presented as an alien. To the contrary: as Norman's friend, the cartoonist Steve Panozzo, remarked, Margaret and Norman 'even went to a science fiction convention as special guests because Mr Squiggle is considered Australia's first astronaut.' If Squiggle was the first astronaut, then the Bandywallop back yard was Australia's second rocket launch site, as Woomera had been operating for a decade already when Squiggle made his television debut.

Squiggle space vs real space

Rocket was very different to the sleek rockets colonising playgrounds in this period (Gorman 2017). The trend in the US to build metal rockets as climbing apparatus for children was brought to Australia in the 1960s and 'took off', so to speak. One of my favourite playground rockets is in Ulverstone, Tasmania (home of Tastrofest). This geocaching location has reconfigured the Ulverstone rocket as Mr Squiggle's back-up. I don't know how common this connection was, but at least one person made it.

Mr Squiggle's ramshackle rocket was also a contrast to the hi-tech missiles, sounding rockets and satellite launchers that made Woomera one of the busiest launch sites in the world throughout the 1960s. There was much overlap and category confusion between weapons and space rockets; my colleague Fraser MacDonald has argued that children's toy rockets do something similar in confusing the categories, a way of dulling the sinister aspects of this technology, inculcating them into a set of values.

Unlike the Cold War missiles of the time, Rocket was quirky and mostly harmless. 

While it doesn't emerge in the show, Norman and Margaret were certainly aware of the Space Age events unfolding around them. Norman drew a map showing Rocket travelling from the Moon to Earth and back again. In a 1989 interview by Melissa Jones in the Australian Women's Weekly, Norman said 'Did you know he has clocked up more interplanetary travel, with his backwards and forwards, than the American and the Russians together?'

The Apollo astronauts did not encounter Mr Squiggle's lunar suburb, but Mr Squiggle certainly noticed what they were doing to his habitat. According to Jones (1989), he was extremely concerned by the litter the astronauts left behind. Squiggle was an early space environmentalist. In an interview with journalist Clive Robertson on television that year, he alluded to the problem of space junk:

Mr Squiggle: 'Do you know, the traffic problems up there are something terrible.'
Robertson: 'What, the satellites, you mean?'.
Mr Squiggle: 'That's it! You never know who you're going to bump into. And they have parking meteors everywhere, and then there's the Milky Way - there's so much traffic it's turning sour!'

This was quite prescient - now there is a field called Space Traffic Management which is devoted to figuring out how to safely co-ordinate satellite launches and operations among the growing population of junk created from defunct and exploded spacecraft. This small exchange indicates that awareness about environmental issues in space were starting to seep into popular consciousness.

More than one character had a space connection. Talking and having attitude weren't the only characteristics which made Gus the Snail unusual: he also didn't have a shell. In the early shows, he had a television on his back in a nice meta sort of way. This was replaced with a flowerpot in later years.  But the idea that Gus had the capacity to pick up radio signals remained. He had a satellite dish and his own satellite, which could be used to communicate with Mr Squiggle on the Moon. The satellite dish looked like a colander painted silver with some knobs on it: more improvised, domestic-scale space technology.

The Australian space conundrum

Mr Squiggle is very typical of a theme I've noted in how Australians conceive space - as a backyard activity (Gorman 2011). It's low key, low scale. Although Australia was the third nation in the world to launch a satellite from within its own national borders, this achievement has never really been celebrated. In general Australians have been content to boast about collaboration with the US, particularly in the Apollo missions. Honeysuckle Creek tracking station and the Parkes radiotelescope were key facilities in all the Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972.  Their roles are conflated in the very popular film The Dish (2000). The dramatic re-entry of Skylab in 1979 is fondly remembered by Aussies, and celebrated in Western Australia - but few people know about the amateur Australis Oscar 5 satellite launched in 1970 (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year), or the second Australian scientific satellite, FedSat 1, launched in 2002. Until 2018, Australia didn't even have a space agency. The way I see it, there's something that makes us uneasy about high technology.

I guess what I find interesting about Mr Squiggle is that this theme of backyard space is already in place in 1959, and it never develops further. Squiggle doesn't get a bigger and better rocket. Miss Pat doesn't make a trip to the Moon. Events in Australian space aren't incorporated into the show, in the way that they were for US Sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (also very popular on Australian television). I don't want to speculate too much about cause and effect; but Mr Squiggle is an exemplar of this uneasy relationship: a reluctance to leave the bush behind. High technology is translated into something gentle and safe. Perhaps this is a form of risk aversion.

I'm not saying Australians were not interested in space - far from it. In the 1950s, there were speculations about commercial spaceports at Woomera and post delivered by rockets. People flocked to see full-scale models of Russian spacecraft at the Sydney Trade Fair of 1961. Children dreamed of being astronauts, and so did the grown-ups. Newspapers reported on scientific advances and space events all round the world. And every night, from the 1959 to 1999, Mr Squiggle brought a little bit of the Moon to Australian living rooms. Space was associated with humour, not a political existential crisis such as the US faced. Maybe Aussies were too complacent. I don't know. I've been tugging at this thread for a while now, trying to understand how Australia understood itself as a space identity.

But it's always possible that Squiggle would have rejoiced in recent developments, such as the establishment of the Australian Space Agency in 2018. He might have upped sticks from the safe old Moon and moved further afield too. 'If he [Norman] was doing it [Mr Squiggle] now, he’d go to Pluto or Mars,' Rebecca Hetherington told a reporter in 2016.

If Mr Squiggle made the bush backyard into a space scenario, he also followed Australian bush traditions in his residence at 93 Crater Crescent. I think his statement to Roxanne (1987) captures something very charming about life in our little neck of the solar system:

'That's one of the nice things about the Moon. It's always afternoon tea time'.

Fun Squiggle stories

In 1993, the musician Prince changed his name to a symbol. Some called him Mr Squiggle. Richard Wilkins relates an interview he did with Prince in 2003:

'What about when you changed your name? That was all a bit weird. What was that all about?' 'I was both having fun and at war with the record label. They said to me, "Prince is contracted to us. You can't change your name and just be somebody else". They owned me. That's when I came up with the symbol thing'. 'We used to call you Mr Squiggle', I told him. 'That's funny', he said generously and half-heartedly. He probably didn't get the connection, since Mr Squiggle was only on TV in Australia'.

In 2009, opposition politician Christopher Pyne used 'Mr Squiggle' to insult Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The Prime Minister wasn't phased and commented: 'Many of us on this side of the House would always stand up for the integrity of Miss Pat and the entire crew out there on Mr Squiggle'.

PS: sorry about the weird font changes, I couldn't fix it!

References

Bradshaw, Richard 2010 Eulogy for Norman Hetherington 1921 - 2010. OPEN: Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter Issue 11

Gorman, A.C. 2018 Gravity's playground: dreams of spaceflight and the rocket park in Australian culture. In Darran Jordan and Rocco Bosco, ed. Defining the Fringe of Contemporary Australian Archaeology. Pyramidiots, Paranoia and the Paranormal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 92-107.

Gorman, A.C. 2011 The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon. Journal of Australian Studies 35(4):529-546

Jones, Melissa 1989 Mr Squiggle chalks up 30 years. The Australian Women's Weekly p 65 (reproduced at http://members.optusnet.com.au/kringunny/squiggle.htm)

Solman, Peter 2010 Norman Hetherington Remembered. A personal recollection by Peter Soloman. OPEN: Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter Issue 11

Wilkins, Richard 2011 Black Ties, Red Carpets, Green Rooms. Chatswood: New Holland

Wilson, Peter J. and Geoffrey Milne 2004 The Space Between: The Art of Puppetry and Visual Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press

Seven reasons to love French aerospace

One of the happiest months of my life was when I rented an apartment in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, so that I could do some work in the archives of the Musee de l'Air et de l'Espace at Le Bourget. Every morning I'd go down to the boulangerie on the ground floor of my apartment building for fresh pain and delight in the simple pleasure of perfect bread and butter. I may not have spent quite as much time in the archives as I intended, but what the hell.

Here are a few reasons to love French aerospace.

1. Asterix 1

Asterix 1. Image source: unknown.

When France launched Asterix 1 on a Diamant rocket from Algeria in 1965, it became the third nation in space. Asterix 1 is named for the plucky Gallic bande dessinee character who successfully holds the Roman invaders at bay against all the odds. His namesake, the sub-conical striped-and-antennaed satellite, is quite simply super-cute, and one of my all-time favourites.

Image source: author.

2. Alexandre Ananoff

While working in the archives, I became aware of an influential French space visionary. The name Alexandre Ananoff (1910 - 1992) came up over and over again. He wrote about the mechanics of spaceflight, the kinds of spaceships we might see in the future, and social aspects of space exploration. This article, by Pierre-Francois Mouriaux and Philippe Varnoteaux, appraises his contribution to French space exploration. They say:

A. Ananoff was a real ambassador for astronautics and a pioneer in space education for the general public—probably the first one in France.

In addition, he advised Herge about aspects of spaceflight for the two Tintin volumes where the boy adventurer goes to the Moon.

3. Tintin walks on the Moon

Image source: Tintin.com

To be honest, I wasn't interested in Tintin as a child, and don't have any memory of the books being around. But when I became aware, as an adult, that Tintin had travelled to the Moon, that was a different story! Objectif Lune and On a marche sur la Lune (Objective Moon and We have walked on the Moon) tell the story of Tintin and Co's encounter with rocket scientists and spies at the central European launch site in the mythical country of Syldavie and their journey to the Moon on a very V2-like rocket. As far as I can tell, it's one of the earliest depictions of footprints on the Moon.

4. Kourou

Image source: Guyane Evasion

Kourou, in French Guiana, is where the launch site of the European Space Agency is located. It has an excellent museum and a huge amount of spaceflight history. I spent a week there in 2005, also working in the archives. I touched a rocket in the assembly building, and perhaps a tiny portion of my DNA survived launch and is now in space! (Stop having a conniption, this was not a clean room situation). I also visited the famous Iles de Salut, where best-selling author and escapologist Papillon was incarcerated. I didn't see an actual launch, although I did sit in the control room viewing area and imagine the hum and chatter when it was full of people. Every day I sipped Ti-punch and thought, read and talked space.  It was fabulous.

5. Cool space words

One day, as my plane descended into Adelaide airport, I noticed a plane without wings lying in the grass near the runway. Oh, I thought, it looks like a rocket. Then I realised. Fusee - the French word for rocket -  is the same root as fuselage, commonly used to describe the body of a plane. D'oh.

The cool wordage doesn't stop there, though. My friend Alexandre Ananoff has a word for spaceship: Astronef. This, I think, it the same root as navy, and the French word for space shuttle is navette.

Scaphandre is space suit, also used for diving suit. To me, it has a Homeric ring. Or it could be a character in Aeon Flux. 

French has a word for landing and taking off FOR EACH PLANET AND MOON. This is beyond cool, a new galactic level of cool. You've possibly heard the terrestrial version of these words if you've flown a French airline - aterrissage. Terre is Earth, and aterrissage is landing on the Earth. Alunissage is landing on the Moon, and amarsissage is landing on Mars. In a future multi-planet solar system economy, the precision of these terms could be very useful. 

6. Musee de l'Air et de l'Espace, Paris

Just check out these babies. Image source: Capcom Espace

This museum, located at Le Bourget in Paris, is amazing. I don't pay much attention to the aeroplane side of it, to be honest, but as well as all the aerospace you could want, there are BALLOONS. Yes, balloons. This is not a Monty Python drill: you can learn all about the golden age of French ballooning right here. Asterix 1 is there too. And there's all the French animals in space: spiders, kittens, rats. One of the things I love about this museum is that we're so used to seeing US-dominated space material culture. It really is striking when you see another national style of technology, and a useful reminder to remain critical of US space hegemony.

7. Le Petit Prince

By Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Continuing the entanglement of air and space, this classic work of children's literature was published in 1943 and is still a favourite with kids across the world. It's really a moral tale, but it has the enchanting conceit of tiny planets or asteroids which grow roses. It was illustrated by the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 

The little prince says:

I love listening to stars at night. It sounds like a hundred million bells.

Dismantling space infrastructure: thoughts on the shuttle launch pad.

It's the fate of industrial heritage: when no longer useful, it is dismantled, demolished, sold off for scrap.  This is what happened at Woomera after the end of ELDO and Apollo, and it's about to take place at the US Space Shuttle launch pad, 39B, at the Kennedy Space Centre.  The launch pad is quite historic. It was first used by the Saturn V for the Apollo 10 mission, which was essentially a test run for Apollo 11. Crews for Skylab were launched from it, as well as for Apollo-Soyuz.

Service towers will shortly be demolished, as they are custom made to fit the shuttle, and can't be reused for a newer vehicle.  Rather than a controlled implosion, which has been the method used in the past, the towers will be dismantled section by section and the metal recycled.  This approach protects the concrete foundations which can then be reused.

Jose Perez-Morales is the launch pad project manager.  He feels quite odd about what is about to take place:

"I'm an engineer and my job is to build things.  You feel a little bit funny when you're demolishing things because that's not your nature. As an engineer, you're trained to build and make sure things last forever. It's kind of mixed feelings that you're tearing down something that took so much effort to put together." (Spaceflight Now)

As well as the service towers, electronics and cables have to be removed and upgraded if the launch pad is to be refurbished and reused.  Approximately 246 miles (sorry, can't be bothered to convert this at the moment!) will have to be taken out.  As you know, I have been taking a much greater interest in cables since working at the Orroral Valley Tracking Station, so I would like to find out more about this. In equipment rooms beneath the launch pad surface, Apollo and Shuttle-era electronics are also being removed.

Are they documenting all of this from a heritage perspective, I wonder?  Will they keep samples of these materials? 

At the Department of Archaeology seminar yesterday, we had three excavation reports, one on the excavation of an old water works in Adelaide.  The plans had been located, but the actual structures and their arrangement differed significantly from the plans, as the archaeological survey and excavation revealed.  This reminded me once again that the historical documentary record is insufficient to capture everything we might want to know about places, technology, and society in the past, and even the recent past.

Launcher 39B (image courtesy of NASA/Troy Cryder)

New entries on Dr Space Junk's Space Heritage List

I am still working away at this, and will have to do some serious thinking about it soon as I rashly promised to give a research seminar in May about how I made the list!

There are currently 44 entries in Dr Space Junk's Space Heritage List. In the last month, I have added the following:

Launch sites:

Baikonur (Russia)

Jiuquan (China)

Barreiro do Inferno (Brazil) (I love this - the "Gates of Hell"!)

The San Marco platform (Italy/Kenya)

Orbital:

International Space Station

West Ford needles

444 people have sent space heritage gifts on Facebook, so you can see it's not just me and my friends! Fortunately I found out recently how to track those which I have sent myself, so I can remove myself from the stats when I get to the stage of analysing them.

Sweden's Kronogard launch site and the noctilucent clouds

I would write about this even if it were not significant, just because noctilucent or "night-shining" is such a gorgeous word.

Looking (as I often am these days) for places or objects that satisfy the somewhat loose set of criteria I have established for my space heritage list. I currently have graduate students working on Nigeria, and places registered on national heritage lists, but this still leaves much for me to do.

Sweden is as yet unrepresented, and I discovered the existence of the Kronogard launch site, near Kabdalis in the far north. The Stockholm Institute of Meteorology, with assistance from NASA and the US Air Force, launched Nike-Cajuns from 1962 to conduct upper atmosphere experiments by releasing large quantities of talcum powder at altitude - artificial "noctilucent" clouds - and studying the effects. Experiments of this kind were also very common at Woomera, but my impression was that they were done during the daytime rather than night.

Archaeology in Rockets Galore

When the British Government starts building a rocket range in the Uist islands, the locals register their opposition in numerous ways, including destroying equipment and painting seagulls pink (rockets, protests, etc, just like Woomera and Kourou ....). And, of course, construction disturbs some archaeological sites:

Those who had accused the Government of a piece of hasty and ill-considered vandalism must have wished that they had kept silent when they heard of the praiseworthy assistance afforded to the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works by the Air Ministry. As a result numerous wheelhouses dating to the Iron Age in the first centuries of the Christian Era have been excavated, and also a Viking long house of the tenth century. It is hoped that some of these may be preserved, but should necessity dictate that launching-sites for guided missiles require their destruction, archaeologists will have the gratification of knowing through photographs more about these remains of former inhabitants of the three Uists than they would otherwise have done because the requisite funds for excavation had not hitherto been available.

As a read the book was rather unentertaining, but there are lots of wonderful quotes and it picks up on many of the themes I have been writing about.

The Kokatha and the Cold War

Another conference, another abstract .... Andrew Starkey and I are proposing this one for the Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference in December.

The Kokatha and the Cold War: Indigenous and technological heritage at Woomera, South Australia.

Andrew Starkey (Kokatha) and Alice Gorman (Flinders University)

In 1947, the Woomera rocket range was established in the supposedly “empty” desert north of Port Augusta in South Australia. Over the next 60 years, Woomera was Australia’s primary Cold War site, developing missiles and launch vehicles, and participating in US and European military and space programmes. It is still an active launch site. More recently the Woomera Prohibited Area has been opened to mineral exploration, leading to an increase in cultural heritage surveys.

The desert around the Woomera village is the traditional country of the Kokatha. The Woomera Heritage Centre, recently redesigned, separates the history of space technology from both Indigenous and pastoral occupation. In this paper, we examine the intersection of military and space technology with Kokatha heritage in the Prohibited Area. We argue that in order to understand its significance, Woomera must be contextualised as part of early Cold War space enterprises, where launch sites were located in colonised lands heavily impacted by the introduction of disease, dispossession from country, and development. Woomera can be regarded as a cultural landscape created by the establishment of a technological enclave within Indigenous country, with the underlying theme, from 1947 to the present, of nuclear arms development.

Tintin and the Syldavian rocket range

I was never really into Tintin as a kid, but on my last visit to France I picked up copies of Objectif Lune and On a marche sur la lune. I also included an analysis of Tintin's rocket range in the mythical country of Syldavie in a 2005 presentation about early Cold War launch facilities.

I've been thinking about this again lately - perhaps because there seems to be a resurgence of interest in Tintin.

In Objectif Lune, Professor Tournesol (I think he is called Professor Calculus in the English translations) is working on a moon rocket in a Syldavian research facility. It is located in a remote mountain area with rich uranium deposits and indeed an atomic research centre was the first installation at this site.

Professor Tournesol says:

"They put out a call to experts in different countries, specialists in nuclear physics, and the work began. It goes without saying that the research is exclusively directed in a humanitarian sense. No question of making atomic bombs here. On the contrary, we are researching the means to protect humanity against the dangers of this new engine of destruction".

So much packed into this brief statement! The thing that strikes me forcibly is the emphasis on international cooperation, freely given. Immediately after WW II, in France, the USSR and the USA, German rocket scientists were virtual prisoners - actually so in the USSR, but even in France and the US they were corralled away. I'm not sure if we are to read Frank Wolff, Tournesol's right hand man at the facility, as a German.

Then there are all the complex moral issues of working with nuclear energy .... no need to go over this ground. What's interesting is the assumption that a rocket to the moon will of course be powered by nuclear energy. In the 1950s, the USA was working on a nuclear rocket, and later on they trialled nuclear power sources in military telecommunications satellites.

Despite the peaceful intentions of the Syldavian project, the facility is crawling with secret police and there is the constant threat of sabotage.

La Terre et l’Espace: Rockets, Prisons, Protests and Heritage in Australia and French Guiana

As promised a long time ago, here is the abstract for my Kourou article which has just come out in the journal of the World Archaeological Congress, Archaeologies [3(2):153-168]

Abstract

Space technology is often represented as global, modern and placeless. But one of the earliest forms of space site, the rocket range, tends to be located in places of a very specific kind: remote and seemingly empty colonies. Because of their distance from the metropole, these places also lend themselves to hosting prisons, detention camps, military installations, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste. All of these establishments, including rocket ranges, have inspired reactions of protest. These themes are explored at the rocket launch sites of Woomera (Australia) and Kourou (French Guiana). In 2005, Créole groups in French Guiana were demonstrating against the construction of a new launch pad near Kourou that disturbed archaeological material. My arrival, to deliver a talk proposing that protests in Woomera sixty years earlier were an essential part of the heritage of the space age, revealed the entanglement of imprisonment and protest with space exploration.

Resumé

La technologie aérospatiale est souvent représentée comme étant globale et moderne, et comme n’ayant pas de point d’attache géographique particulier. Néanmoins, le site de lancement, l’une des formes originelles du site aérospatial, tend à être localisé dans des endroits spécifiques: des colonies éloignées, et apparemment vides de populations. Du fait qu’ils sont sités loin de la métropole, ces endroits ont aussi tendance à accueillir des prisons, des camps de détention, des installations militaires, des armes et des déchets nucléaires. Tous ces endroits, y compris les sites de lancement, ont inspiré des réactions de protestation à leur encontre. Ces thèmes ont été explorés aux sites de lancement de Woomera (Australie) et de Kourou (Guyane Française). En 2005, des groupes créoles de la Guyane Française ont manifesté contre l’établissement d’un nouveau site de lancement près de Kourou, dont la construction a perturbé les vestiges archéologiques de l’endroit. Mon arrivée, (pour présenter une communication proposant que les manifestations ayant eu lieu à Woomera soixante ans plus tôt constituent un élément essentiel du patrimoine de l’ère aérospatiale), a mis en avant le lien étroit qui existe entre emprisonnement, protestation et exploration spatiale.

Spaceport blues - Kourou and Soyuz

I've just finished writing a paper for Archaeologies, the journal of the World Archaeological Congress. The issue, edited by Marcia Bezerra, is called "Archaeologists without borders" and I decided to write about my experiences in Kourou.

This wasn't easy to do. I wanted to convey something about my emotions, the feeling that I had been suddenly precipitated into an unstable situation where I couldn't predict the results of words or actions. This kind of stuff doesn't always work well in academic writing (and, I never want to sound too postmodern - it makes my scientist's soul cringe). But the evolution of my understanding of Kourou was inextricably linked with certain people, discussions, places. Making a coherent, and yet not wanky, narrative out of it was like pulling teeth. Well, the teeth were duly pulled and I think I like how it's turned out.

No idea how long the article will take to be published. I haven't tackled the abstract yet - perhaps I will post it when finished.

Did I actually describe what happened in Kourou in the blog?

Spaceport good for Woomera's heritage - media release

This was released yesterday, 10th April.

A proposal to give Woomera’s space facilities a new lease of life has been strongly endorsed by a Flinders University academic involved in the preservation of historic sites associated with the “space race”.

Dr Alice Gorman said that using Woomera as a spaceport for the growing space tourist industry would help to preserve its unique heritage values.

Dr Gorman, an internationally recognized expert on the archaeology of space exploration, said that Woomera is one of the earliest rocket ranges in the world, and played a significant role in the Cold War and the space programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

The redevelopment proposed by astronaut Dr Andy Thomas during his recent visit to Australia could incorporate planning to retain significant launch pads and buildings, or to re-use them in a fashion sympathetic to their historic significance.

“In its heyday, Woomera was the second busiest spaceport in the world, after Cape Canaveral,” Dr Gorman said.

“The USA used Woomera to test components, and to track the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programmes. Europe launched nine Europa rockets there before moving to French Guiana in the late 1960s. Australian expertise was vital in developing Britain’s Cold War missiles. In those days, people expected that astronaut missions would soon be launched from Woomera, taking Australians into space on a regular basis.”

But with the closure of the Apollo program and Europe’s decision to relocate its launch facilities to Kourou in French Guiana, the infrastructure and expertise centred in Woomera and the headquarters in Salisbury dissipated. Today, people at Kourou, and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, established in the same year as Woomera, are largely unaware that this remote outback location in Australia was also a major player in the “Space Club.”

Dr Gorman said that once historic structures are abandoned, they start to deteriorate, but if they can be adapted to a new use, their chance of survival is greatly increased.

“There are many successful examples of the reuse of heritage structures, and if done according to principles like those in the Burra Charter developed in Australia, it’s a win-win situation,” Dr Gorman said.

Last year, Dr Gorman convened a symposium at Flinders University, bringing together experts on the history of Woomera. Some of the themes that were discussed included Indigenous lives after the rocket range, Woomera as a Cold War site, the place of Woomera Village in the history of post-war town planning, and the challenges of managing space heritage.

“Everyone agreed that Woomera was significant not only for the part it played in Australian history, but on an international level,” Dr Gorman said.

“Space tourism isn’t just about going into orbit – there are space places on Earth too. It would be very appropriate to recognise and value Woomera’s heritage by giving it a new space future.”

MEDIA CONTACT: For more information contact Alice Gorman on 0428 450 418.

Home on the Range: a symposium about heritage at Woomera

Home on the Range: the Cold War, space exploration and heritage at Woomera, South Australia

A symposium

4th November 2005

12.30 midday – 6.00 pm, Room 149 Social Sciences South, Flinders University

Hosted by the Department of Archaeology, Flinders University

Cost: Free

All welcome to attend. Please register by calling 0428 450 418 or email zoharesque@bigpond.com

In 1947, barely two years after the Second World War, Britain and Australia signed a joint agreement to develop ballistic missiles in a region perceived as remote and barren: the red desert of South Australia. Len Beadell, “the last of the explorers”, surveyed a rocket range and a town that became known as Woomera, an Aboriginal word for spear launcher.

Woomera was an integral part of the development of space capabilities for Britain, Europe and the USA, through the launch pads and tracking stations established in and around the boundaries of the vast restricted area. In 1967, Australia joined the “Space Club”, becoming the fourth country in the world to launch a satellite. Until the 1970s, Australia was at the forefront of developments in both civil and military technology. The infrastructure provided by Woomera enabled Britain to conduct a series of nuclear tests at Maralinga and Emu Field. Woomera was very much a Cold War place.

Throughout this period, families were raised and gardens nurtured in the town of Woomera. Under the watchful eyes of security, swimming carnivals and football matches took place; annual balls with beauty competitions, and an endless stream of visiting dignitaries and royalty stepped off the tiny planes to visit Australia’s premier weapons and space facility.

Today, the huge launch pads lie in ruins and the township is experiencing a decline in population. Woomera is remembered more for the detention centre than its glory days as the world’s second busiest spaceport. How can we understand the heritage of Woomera and what it means for contemporary Australians? This symposium explores aspects of Woomera from secrecy and security, town planning, and technology, to Indigenous perceptions of the landscape.

Presenters include:

Associate Professor Peter Morton, Flinders University, author of “Fire across the desert”

Dr Alice Gorman, University of New England

Dr Christine Garnaut, University of South Australia

Mr Geoff Spiers, museum consultant for the new Woomera Heritage Centre

Mr Phil Czerwinski, Archaeologist, Australian Cultural Heritage Management

Mr Andrew Starkey, Indigenous Liaison Officer, Defence Support Centre, Woomera

Ms Andrea Williams, Honours graduate, Flinders University

Mr Kael da Costa, Project Co-ordinator, Murray-Darling Basin Commission

For more information please contact Alice Gorman on 0428 450 418 or zoharesque@bigpond.com

Kourou controversy

The teaching term is now over at the University of Western Australia. What a relief! I was giving four lectures a week, all requiring a lot of preparation, and I had hardly any time to think of anything else.

Now, finally, there is space in my head to write about Kourou for Sky and Space magazine.

My Kourou experience was very different to my expectations. I was to give a presentation about Woomera, and they asked me to censor it, removing all references to the 1947 protest about the impact of Woomera on Pitjantjatjara people, and to the detention centre. Why would I be talking about the detention centre (one might ask)?  Part of my argument is that Woomera has been a landscape of protest since 1947 until the present day. I also made the mistake of calling the detention centre a concentration camp in my abstract. This is accurate by whatever definition you use. Wikipedia says "the term refers to situations where the internees are persons selected for their conformance to broad criteria without judicial process, rather than having been judged as individuals". The use of this term caused some consternation, apparently.

Unbeknownst to me, at the same time that I was proposing to speak about all these issues, a protest was actually happening at Kourou over the construction of the new Soyuz launch pad. The Guyana Space Centre feared that knowledge of the Woomera protest would fan the flames of rebellion among the local populace.

In some ways I wasn't displeased to think that ideas and history could have so much impact that a lone Aussie archaeologist was a threat to European space operations. On the other hand, the ethical dilemma I faced made me deeply uneasy.

Spaceport Queen rides again

I wasn't mistaken. The delightful Juan de Dalmau does want me to give a presentation about Woomera at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana! I am so excited.

And now I'm thinking of other possibilities. The local music scene, for example. I must re-read Papillon, for Devil's Island is just off the coast and it was one of my very favourite books when a teenager. And of course I must master some of the more complicated French tenses and increase my French space vocabulary a thousandfold.

Here are some examples of French space lingo:

fusee - rocket

micropesanteur - microgravity

navette - space shuttle

scaphandre - spacesuit

I love the word scaphandre. It reminds me of the river Scamander, somewhere in the region of Troy. Very Homeric.

I am the Spaceport Queen

I may have neglected to mention that Juan de Dalmau, Director of the International Space University and lovely man, has invited me to participate in a professional tour of the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana next year. And I believe he wants me to give a lecture. I think that's what he suggested; I was so overwhelmed I may have misunderstood. But if he was serious I am determined to deliver it in French. French spoken with an English accent (and Aussie too I hope) is, my French friends tell me, as sexy as English spoken with a French accent. Well, I can live in hope.

Secrets and lies

Yesterday I was flicking through the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, thinking that I might find some discussions of Woomera in the 1950s volumes. I didn't, but there was a lengthy article discussing the geology and geomorphology of the area. The author had conducted fieldwork between 1945 and 1950, and was presenting a report aimed at managing pastoral activites in the north-west of the state. So you would think he might have fallen across the fact that a bloody big rocket range was being built out there, and this might possibly have some impact on said activities! As an Adelaide resident, he could hardly have failed to notice the protests of 1947 when plans for the rocket range became known. But no, there was no mention at all of Woomera or the rocket range.

Of course it's possible that at this early stage any impacts of the range on local environment or people were unclear, but still, you think he'd have just mentioned it in passing.

Perhaps it was a security issue then.

Rocket art

Yesterday I went in to the South Australian Museum with my colleague Geoff Spiers, who has redesigned the Woomera Heritage Centre. We wanted to find the photograph and artefact collections of A.B. Jay, one of the last Native Patrol Officers at the Woomera Rocket Range. The curator told me of a painting in the Museum depicting depicting an ELDO rocket. The painting was done by one of the Arnhem Land Yunupingu family in 1967, when there was an ELDO tracking station up there. It is an extraordinary piece of work. As it is unlabelled, you wouldn't necessarily recognise the motifs unless you were already aware of its subject. And I knew nothing of it because I am a stone tool person, not a rock art person! (Indeed I have always found rock art rather boring, but I suppose they think the same of stone tools). Aboriginal art contains many depictions of Macassarese trepangers and European ships, and it hadn't occurred to me to look towards art to investigate the interaction of Aboriginal people with the space age.

Gibber Gabber

Back from Woomera, utterly exhausted. The weather was glorious but I spent much of my time inside, at the Heritage Centre and the library, researching old newspaper clippings and the Woomera newsletter Gibber Gabber. And what a rich mine it turned out to be! I traced the activities of the Natural History Society, who collected artefacts and went looking for rock art sites, and of the Moonwatch group, formed to track Vanguard 1 optically in 1957. There were many notices about Moonwatch meetings but the Gibber Gabber was strangely silent on the event of Sputnik 1's launch. Later, however, the Moonwatchers were happy to report sightings of Sputnik 3. (The moon referred to was the artificial satellite). The idea of having volunteers undertake tracking was promoted by Fred Whipple of the US IGY Committee.

As well hard work, some happy hours were spent in the ELDO bar ....

Rocket lineages

Yesterday I watched a short film by space artist Louise K Wilson about the Spadeadam missile test site. I was very struck by the similarities of the physical remains of launch pads to both Peenemunde, where Wernher von Braun developed the V2 rocket, and on the other side to Woomera, where the British descendants of the V2 were launched.

Also, if you've had trouble trying to post a comment, I hope that problem will be remedied soon ....