HOMESICKNESS: AUSTRALIAS’ PRODUCTION OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS (AGENT ORANGE & DIOXINS) USED IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE SUBSEQUENT LEECHING THAT CONTINUES TO PERSIST IN SYDNEY, AND INNISFAIL WHERE IT WAS TESTED ON MAMU COUNTRY.
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 Litres of Agent Orange was sprayed throughout Southeast Asia by the US military destroying crops and a quarter of the forests in Southern Vietnam. It is reported that these chemicals continue to contribute to birth defects and cancer in army veterans, Vietnamese people and other populations exposed to these chemical defoliants during the conflict.
About 8000 liters of Dioxin contaminants remain buried underneath Homebush Bay - Sydney’s 2000 Olympics site and its shopping centers and apartment complexes. These buried chemicals continue to seep into the river as chemical leachates. Because of the hazardous implications on human health, fishing and swimming is banned up the Homebush estuary and west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Unlike most other river systems where chemical contaminants are eventually diluted and flow out to sea, the tidal flow of this estuary causes a concentrated reflux of contaminated water back up stream into tributaries like Duck River. Coincidentally, Duck River runs through suburbs such as Fairfield, Bankstown, Auburn, Lidcombe and Parramatta. These suburbs are the geographic catchment for one of Australia’s largest communities of refugees and migrants from Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
There is also a patch of tropical forest (deemed climatically analogous to the jungles of Vietnam) in Innisfail Queensland that is still recovering from the scientific testing of these chemical agents (Agent Orange, other Dioxins and DDT). Australia’s active participation in the industrial complex of chemical warfare continues to have profound environmental, ecological, and economic impact not only at the sites of impact, including in communities living near the sites in Australia where Agent Orange was produced and tested.
Although Australia was the led nation drafting ‘The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons’ in 1992, our national contribution to the catastrophic destruction of a quarter of the jungles and farmlands in South Vietnam and testing on regional and Aboriginal communities have never been acknowledged on a global stage. Chemical warfare continues to persist in the population of soldiers, Vietnamese and Aboriginal communities that were and 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 keeps the fungus under control, allowing these frogs to survive in profoundly contaminated water systems.
