HOMESICKNESS: AUSTRALIAS’ INVOLVEMENT IN THE PRODUCTION OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS (AGENT ORANGE & DIOXINS) USED IN SOUTHEAST ASIA DURING THE AMERICAN-VIETNAM WAR AND THE SUBSEQUENT ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION THAT CONTINUES TO LEACH INTO SYDNEY WATERWAYS AND IN INNISFAIL WHERE AGENT ORANGE WAS TESTED .
On the site of IKEA Homebush Bay (which flows into Sydney Harbour) once stood the Union Carbide plant, one of Australia’s biggest chemical plants. Between 1949 and 1976, this factory was a major supplier of herbicides and Dioxins - the primary constituents of the chemical weapon Agent Orange - a powerful chemical defoliant used in the Vietnam War. About 50 million liters of Agent Orange was sprayed throughout Southeast Asia by the US military destroying crops and a quarter of the rainforests in Southern Vietnam. It is reported that these chemicals continue to contribute to birth defects and cancer clusters in army veterans, the Vietnamese diaspora and other populations exposed to these chemical defoliants from this conflict.
About 8000 liters of Dioxin contaminants were buried underneath Homebush Bay during the building and preparation for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. These buried chemicals continue to seep into the river as chemical leachates. Because of the hazardous health implications, fishing and swimming is banned up the Homebush Riverine Estuary up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Unlike most other river systems where chemical contaminants are eventually diluted and flushed out to sea, the tidal flow of the estuary causes a concentrated reflux of contaminated water into smaller tributaries like Duck River upstream. Coincidentally, Duck River stretches deep into surrounding suburbs namely Fairfield, Bankstown, Auburn, Lidcombe and Parramatta. These suburbs have historically been the geographic catchment for some of Australia’s largest refugee diaspora and immigrants from Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
Further, there is also a patch of tropical forest (deemed climatically analogous to the jungles of Vietnam) in far North Queensland that is still recovering from the testing of these chemical agents (Agent Orange, other Dioxins and DDT) in the town of Innisfail.
Australia’s active role in the industrial complex of chemical warfare continues to have profound longterm environmental, ecological, health and economic impacts on communities living in both Australia and Southeast Asia.
Although Australia was the led nation drafting The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons in 1992, this country has never officially acknowledged its’ role in producing and testing chemical weapons that led to the destruction of a quarter of the jungles and farmlands in South Vietnam and undocumented health impacts on Aboriginal and regional test-site exposures. Chemical warfare continues to persist in the bodies of water and the actual bodies of soldiers, Vietnamese people and Aboriginal communities who continue to be exposed to these chemicals.
NOTES:
- The endangered Green and Golden Bell Frog now only survives in the contaminated pools of water around Homebush Bay. Largely dying due to a global Chytrid fungal infection, the chemical leachates at Homebush have ironically kept the fungus under control. Allowing for these frogs to breed and survive in profoundly contaminated waterways.
- There are also other global Dioxin contamination sites/stockpiles throughout Southeast Asia, the Pacific and the US. One site of particular interest is along the Passaic River and polluting Newark’s Ironbound neighbourhood (near the old site of the Diamond Alkali factory).
- James and his aunty have been working with family friends in Sydney to catch Dioxin contaminated fish from Parramatta River to make homemade fish sauce and forbidden fermented products (images below) in and from these contaminated suburbs.
