MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Hello!
Welcome to the long-delayed third edition of the Militarism in the NT newsletter. I plan to send out a newsletter with updates on US and Australian military plans and presence in the NT, and perhaps in northern Australia more broadly, roughly monthly.
Further information on the context and intention behind this newsletter at the bottom of the text.
Defence lobby groups pushed for Tanami Highway sealing
The Tanami Highway, which is currently being sealed between the Warlpiri community of Yuendumu and Halls Creek, where it meets the already sealed Great Northern Highway, is being upgraded under the Australian Government’s Roads of Strategic Importance (ROSI) program. The highway is already sealed between Alice Springs and Yuemdumu. The highway would create a much more direct sealed route between Central Australia, where the Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility and the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar are located, and the North-West Coast, where multiple US and Australian defence installations, including the Harold E Holt naval communications and space surveillance station, are located.
The Tanami highway sealing will also benefit the Browns Range dysprosium mine in the northern Tanami Desert, hyped as the “first significant dysprosium producer outside of China”. Dysprosium is a rare earth element essential for producing high-performance magnets used in military guidance systems, power motors and actuators in fighter jets (F-35), drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, propulsion systems and sensors in Virginia-class submarines, radar systems, and precision munitions.
The Tanami Highway upgrades, costing $1.1 billion in total, were announced in 2018, and construction commenced in 2022. Sealing the entire highway to Halls Creek is projected to take until the mid-2030s. Former WA Liberal senator Alan Eggleston lobbied for the highway to be sealed on military grounds. “We’ve been going on for some time now in the Coalition of the need to increase defence presence along the North West coast especially around the North West shelf”, he said in 2013. “A fishing boat came and tied up under a rig just last week, which is everyone’s worst nightmare … so the defence element of [the Tanami Highway upgrades] is pretty important.”
A group called the Tanami Action Group, fronted by an automotive influencer, was formed to lobby for the road upgrades. In a 2014 submission to the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia, the Tanami Action Group claimed the upgrades were essential to “safeguard and advance” strategic interests in north-west Australia. The lobby group argued that sealing the Tanami would enable “defence bases in the north-west to be more easily supplied by road from the population centres of the south-east”; reduce “reliance on more difficult to defend and vulnerable coastal routes”; and enable “substantial ground forces to be concentrated in the region much more quickly than is currently possible”.
Following Labor’s federal election victory in 2022, another lobby group – the North West Defence Alliance – advocated for the swift completion of the Tanami Highway upgrades. The North West Defence Alliance is composed of seven local governments across the Kimberley and Pilbara. The Alliance’s funding sources are not publicly declared. The shire presidents of the seven councils comprising the Alliance have been enthusiastic cheerleaders for an intensified military presence in the region, consistently berating national authorities for their alleged “defence” failings in North West Australia.
The Alliance’s slick website describes the North West region’s predicament thus:
The vast north-west of the Australian continent covers one million square kilometres over the Kimberley, Pilbara and Gascoyne. It contains the world’s greatest mineral province with enormous reserves of iron ore, natural gas, oil, lithium, copper, gold, cobalt, manganese, zinc, lead, rare earths and other minerals vital for today’s technological society. Here, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in mines, ports, offshore facilities and huge gas plants. But the area is sparsely populated, with approximately 100,000 people and only a few dozen Defence personnel.
Since 2022, the Alliance has featured in a flurry of ABC News articles claiming that the region – “the powerhouse of the country” – is being left entirely undefended. In the tradition of the former Liberal senator representing the region, the Alliance alleges that asylum seekers arriving by boat pose a threat to the region’s offshore oil and gas facilities, as well as being a “biosecurity risk”. It insists that populations across North West Australia “feel vulnerable to foreign attack” and advocates for more “defence installations such as missiles and large-scale bases” to be built across north west Australia to “protect the region’s export industries”.
The North West region is already subject to a significant military expansion. Like the Tindal air base in the NT, the RAAF base Curtin, just outside the town of Derby, is undergoing upgrades and extensions to enable the servicing of Australian and US fighter jets and bombers, allowing it to support joint bombing operations. The Harold E Holt naval communications station has recently been expanded to include a space surveillance telescope, assisting the US war machine’s efforts in “fight[ing] to protect and defend the U.S. and Allies from attack in, through and from space”. Joint US – Australian war games, called Exercise Talisman Sabre, have previously included military exercises in the region, and are likely to do so again in the future.
US Funds Continue to Flow into the NT for Military Build Up: the Bradshaw Field Training Area
The Bradshaw Field Training Area in the NT has recently been upgraded to support military training activities that “rival the size” of the biannual Exercise Talisman Sabre, involving 35,000 military personnel from nineteen countries.
The upgrades to the Bradshaw field were undertaken “as part of the US$747 million United States Force Posture Initiatives Northern Territory Training Areas and Ranges Project”, a joint US – Australia funded project which aims to expand training and “interoperability” between US and Australian land forces. While it’s acknowledged that the project involves “significant US investment”, the exact breakdown of funds is not publicly available. The upgrades were overseen by NT construction giant Sitzler and included upgrades to the Nackeroo airfield to make it capable of accommodating Boeing C-17 Globemaster and MV-22 Osprey aircraft, including space to park 12 such aircraft, construction of a new medical facility and accommodation camp for 250 military personnel, and the creation of an “urban operations training facility”.
The training area, a former cattle station purchased by the Australian government in 1996, occupies 871,000ha of rainforest, woodlands and grass plains on the lands of the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples. The 1998 NT Environmental Impact Assessment for the Bradshaw field acknowledges that the area is culturally significant to the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples, and contains ancient paintings within the rock shelters along the Yambarran and Pinkerton Ranges. 160 Aboriginal sacred sites within the area are registered with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority.
The Environmental Impact Assessment also notes the biodiversity significance of the field, with 39 rare or threatened species and four ecologically sensitive habitats listed as present. A 2015 public environmental report for Exercise Talisman Sabre, which utilised the Bradshaw field, described the area as “part of a regional environmental corridor linking with [Judburra] Gregory National Park”. Mt Thymanan, within the Bradshaw field training area, is listed as a significant breeding ground for the endangered Gouldian finch, and is estimated to contain 5% of the total population of the species.
The field is named after pastoralist, land speculator and genocidaire Joe Bradshaw, who carried out at least 3 massacres of Aboriginal people on the lands now comprising the military training area, killing an estimated 60 people. He is also implicated in the deaths of an estimated 200 Yolngu people during his time managing the Arafura Cattle Station. To this day, the British Museum holds 112 Aboriginal artefacts from the Victoria River and Arnhem Land regions “donated” by Bradshaw.
The Bradshaw field is one of the largest military training areas in the world. A twenty-one year old article in The Age newspaper describes some of the appeal of the training area to US Forces:
Australia has one thing the United States lacks when it comes to training its forces in the Asia-Pacific region – lots of wide open space. US forces based on heavily populated Okinawa and Japan simply lack the space for large scale maneuvers. Political sensitivities limit the extent of realistic training on the Korean Peninsula. In contrast, the three Australian training areas slated for upgrade for joint Australia-US training are simply vast.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has been a consistent proponent of proffering the “wide open space” of Australian military training fields, including Bradshaw, as a key means of servicing Australia’s military alliance with the US and other so-called regional allies. “[T]here’s plenty of opportunity”, wrote John Coyne, head of the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Institute at ASPI in a 2019 article, “to increase our defence diplomacy efforts by offering regional partners space to train”.
The success of this strategy hasn’t stopped Coyne from angsting in a recent article that despite recent upgrades, the Australian military was not “maximising the utility” of training areas such as the Bradshaw field. While acknowledging the heavy use of the Bradshaw field by US marines based in Darwin, Coyne bemoaned “a noticeable reduction in the scale and frequency of ADF exercises in the NT”.
The Bradshaw field is electronically wired into the North Australia Range Complex, a network of major military training areas and ranges intended for large-scale multinational military exercises. Other key training areas networked into the North Australia Range Complex include the Mount Bundey training area 60 kilometres south of Darwin, and the Delamere air weapons range, 120 kilometres south of Katherine. The electronic networking of these ranges and training areas allows military personnel to use them for unified training exercises, effectively simulating wartime operations across a vast area. For example, the US Army Tactical Missile System was used for the first time in Australia during the 2023 Talisman Sabre exercises, where it was fired from the Delaware Range at a target on the Bradshaw field 260 kilometres away. The Bradshaw field and Delaware range are likely to be used this July and August when US Forces intend to test Lockheed Martin’s mid-range Typhon weapons system for the first time outside the US.
ABOUT THE MILITARISM IN THE NT NEWSLETTER
Many people are aware of US and Australian military presence in the NT, but perhaps less people are aware of just how much this military presence is intensifying as a perennially belligerent US prepares for war with China, and how much a new wave of extractivism in the NT is bound up with the US military industrial complex. For the fiscal year 2024/2025, northern Australia is “the top overseas location for U.S. Air Force and Navy construction spending, with more than $300 million set aside under the U.S. congressional defence authorisations for those years”, Reuters reports. Over the next decade, the Australian government will spend $30 billion on “hardening and upgrading” northern military bases, “partly to meet US requirements and partly paid for by the United States”.
The Northern Territory jurisdiction has participated in the US/Israeli holocaust in Gaza via the provision of intelligence gathered at the Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility in Central Australia to Israel’s Signals Intelligence National Unit, and on to the Israeli military. The Northern Territory government is also busy renewing settler dominion at “home” by imprisoning unprecedented numbers of Aboriginal people. Politicians and the media have once again manufactured a racialised crime hysteria that is seeing Aboriginal children being brutalised by the police, prison wardens and an ever-expanding private security and surveillance apparatus. The mayor of Alice springs has called for the military to be deployed in the town.
The newsletter is motivated by a desire to contribute to activist movements against militarism and extractivism on this continent, and the deprivations of ecological justice and land rights for First Nations they cause. It is conceived as a small contribution to the international fight against imperialism and an effort at solidarity with colonised and subjugated peoples struggling for liberation and justice. It is also intended to precipitate more reporting and investigative journalism on these issues on the part of independent journalists and journalists working within traditional media organisations.
Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested and/or forward me their email address and I’ll add it to my mailing list for future newsletters. If you’d rather not receive this newsletter in the future, let me know and I’ll remove your email address from the list.