Yami fought good fight Tireless campaigner stood up to British over desert nuclear tests
A HERO, fighter and gentle outback pioneer who opened the nation’s eyes to nuclear atrocities committed on Australian soil has passed away.
When Yami Lester was a young child, playing with toys in the red sand of his outback community just south of the NT border, he saw a black, metallic mist floating across the plains.
The British government had been conducting the notorious Totem nuclear tests in the desert, and an unexpected wind change would change Mr Lester’s life irreversibly.
“It was coming straight over and blocked the sunshine. It was like a cloud, a thin cloud, blocking the sun,” Mr Lester said in 2015.
The radiation mist blew over his remote home of Wallatina and, he said, robbed him of his eyesight and made his countrymen deathly ill.
“It went right across from here, 70 miles across. A black mist,” he said.
“And after that, all the people, we all got sick ... vomiting, diarrhoea, sore eyes, skin rash, everything like that.
“They were blaming the black smoke. They knew.”
Despite the scars left on his life and outback landscape, Mr Lester fought relentlessly to shine a light on the horrific repercussions inflicted on Aboriginal people by the British tests. He organised a legal team and travelled to London, where he demanded justice from the government scientists involved in the secretive desert tests.
He ruffled enough feathers to be noticed in his home country – the publicity of which would eventually help him to trigger the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia.
A lack of evidence to prove that the radiation had made his people sick meant the com- mission ended without proper closure – although it could not rule out that Mr Lester had lost his sight due to the black mist at Wallatina.
It resulted in compensation for the Maralinga Tjarutja people and long-term clean-up operations to restore the land.
Aside from his antinuclear advocacy, Mr Lester achieved great feats in leadership and preserving languages in the NT and South Australia.
He lived and worked in Alice Springs, on a mission, then as a linguist, and helped lead the Institute of Aboriginal Development in its early days.
Also woven into his rich lifetime were marriage, fatherhood, directorship of the Pitjantjatjara Council, running cattle and working mines.
His children have also taken up his lifelong battle for justice – his daughter Karina Lester recently travelled to New York for United Nations negotiations on a historic treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
Chief Minister Michael Gunner said yesterday the “lifelong Aboriginal rights campaigner and Maralinga atomic test survivor Mr Lester will leave a powerful legacy to all Australians”.
“Mr Lester was a key Aboriginal leader who embraced the challenge of bridging two worlds. He never let his blindness hold him back, he was sharp as a tack in negotiating at the highest levels of business and government,” he said.
“He was regarded by many as a force of nature, with a powerful personality and deprecating wicked sense of humour – a unique Australian, one of a kind.
“Mr Lester’s life was a life of great hardship and challenge, met with great courage and foresight, and he achieved great change. “Vale Yami Lester OAM.” It was expected that a state funeral would be offered for Mr Lester in South Australia.
Mr Lester’s name and image used with permission from the Lester family.