UNE > News and Events > Browse by article > Archaeologist to re-establish international space link

Next Armidale launches inaugural German Festival March 2, 2005  

Previous Brush with fame as Chancellor’s portrait hung at UNE February 28, 2005 

Archaeologist to re-establish international space link

March 01, 2005

Pic Woomera.jpgAn Australian archaeologist who has become an international authority on the cultural significance of space-age hardware is travelling to the Guyana Space Centre in South America to re-establish the historic link between it and Woomera in Central Australia.

Dr Alice Gorman, an Honorary Research Associate at the University of New England, will tell staff of the European Space Agency how, in 1971, their predecessors moved from Woomera Rocket Range to the “spaceport” at Kourou in French Guyana to develop the Europa II rocket, the ancestor of the Ariane launch vehicle.

Dr Gorman will explain the sense of betrayal experienced at the time by many Australians who felt that they had been let down once again by bureaucrats and politicians on the other side of the world. (In 1960, Britain had cancelled the development of the Blue Streak rocket at Woomera without consulting its Australian workforce.)

While at Kourou she will pursue her research, examining the space programs of Britain and France in the context of “colonialism”. “These programs relied on the use of colonies such as Australia, Algeria and French Guyana as ‘unpopulated’ launch sites,” Dr Gorman said. (In a paper appearing in the next issue of the Journal of Social Archaeology she discusses the aspirations of powers such as the United States to “colonise” space, exemplified by the planting of the American flag on the Moon.)

The occasion for Dr Gorman’s visit to Kourou is the presentation of a history of Woomera, "Fire Across the Desert" by Peter Morton, to the library at the Guyana Space Centre. Mr Juan de Dalmau, the director of the Summer Session of the International Space University (ISU), invited her to be part of the proceedings after hearing her lecture on cultural heritage at Woomera at last year’s ISU Summer Session in Adelaide. “My talk will focus on the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO, the precursor of the European Space Agency) at Woomera, Australian reactions to its departure from Woomera in 1971, and ELDO’s interaction with Aboriginal culture at its tracking station on the Gove Peninsula in the Northern Territory,” she said.

A vivid product of this interaction, and a focal point for her talk, is a bark painting from Gove that transforms a traditional symbol for a ceremonial ground into the depiction of a rocket, full of pale-coloured people. (This painting is on display at the South Australian Museum.) Dr Gorman said she was intrigued by historic and cultural links between the “Space Age” and the world’s oldest cultures. “My research has looked at how Woomera constructed a unique identity using Aboriginal culture and language, at the same time as the local Kokatha people were dispossessed of their country,” she explained. “In 1947, at the same time that Woomera was being set up, France established the Colomb-Bechar range in Algeria. Rocket scientists from Colomb-Bechar ended up working at Woomera and at Kourou on the Europa rocket. I want to explore the way colonial administrations in these places interacted with the existing population, whether Indigenous or migrant, and the kind of stories that were told about the coming of the ‘Space Age’ to the desert or the tropics in these seemingly remote places.”


Media contact: Dr Alice Gorman on (03) 5885 2735 or Jim Scanlan (UNE Public Relations) on (02) 6773 3049.



Posted by Jim Scanlan at March 1, 2005 10:09 AM