Totem and Ore

Totem and Ore is a collection of 5,000 photographs taken by B Wongar in the 1960s and early 1970s in northern and central Australia. The collection is about the negative effects on Aboriginal Australians who lived through the mining of uranium and the British nuclear testing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 2019, John Mandelberg released a documentary film inspired by the photographic collection, called Totem & Ore.

Background
Mining of uranium took place in northern Australia in the 1960s.

Subsequently, British nuclear testing took place at Maralinga, in the northern desert area of South Australia in the 1960s and early 1970s in northern and central Australia Both the uranium mining and nuclear testing destroyed many Aboriginal people's natural habitat, and decimated their population in northern and central Australia.

To deflect any criticism of the testing, the Australian Government enacted the Australian Atomic Energy Act 1953, forbidding publishing any kind of information about it. The penalty for violating the Act was imprisonment up to 20 years. B Wongar took around 5,000 photographs relating to the mining of uranium and the subsequent British nuclear testing, showing how these events affected Aboriginal Australians who lived in the area.

During debate in Australian Parliament on the second report of the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission, an exhibition of this photographic collection, named Boomerang and Atom, at the Parliamentary Library of Australia in Canberra, was opened in September 1974. Two days after opening, the exhibition was banned by the government. The collection for decades was politically unacceptable for publication in Australia and the United Kingdom.

A part of confronting photographs of this collection was originally published in Germany in the 1980s under the title Bumerang und Bodenschätze and, in 2006, published as a nonfictional book by Dingo Books in Australia.

Film
In 2019, Waikato Institute of Technology academic and filmmaker John Mandelberg released a documentary film, Totem & Ore, inspired by Wongar's book. For Mandelberg, it has been a journey explained as, I was fascinated by his story. He was from Eastern Europe and wrote fiction like an Aboriginal about the clash between white people and Aborigines. His first three novels became known as "the nuclear trilogy" and they told a grim story about the testing that took place in the 1950s. He showed that uranium dislocated communities where testing took place. Mandelberg's documentary had its world premiere at the Hiroshima International Film Festival on 24 November 2019 and became part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum collection.