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La romance fraustralienne: France, Australia form mutual admiration club while Antarctic station drowns in toxic trash

La romance fraustralienne: France, Australia form mutual admiration club while Antarctic station drowns in toxic trash
The old abandoned buildings at Wilkes, 1988. (Photo: Lieutenant Andrew Stanner, Royal Australian Engineers / Wikimedia Commons)
Tiara Walters
By Tiara Walters
7 Oct 2024
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Daily Maverick braved bureaucratic frostbite to read the Antarctic Treaty’s 112,000-word annual meeting report, uncovering a code that only diplomats may be able to crack. Apparently, in Antarctica, one can abandon an area of hazardous waste equal to 45 football fields for decades while being ‘fully' compliant with the region’s environmental laws. Yup. We’ll explain.

Grappling with issues of overwhelming global public interest, this year’s Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) was held in Kochi, India, by 29 decision-maker states in a closed chamber — that is, behind the usual drawbridge and hermetically sealed doors. 

A close reading of the meeting’s newly issued preliminary report offers telling clues to why reporters’ pens were not de rigueur in that chamber. Yes, off limits to journalists, the substance of the 10-day event hosted at the end of May tackled a range of awkward issues, such as emperor penguin protections thwarted by China. And — how do we put this delicately — fields of buried rubbish festering in the world’s most famous natural reserve for more than 50 years.

Une comédie diplomatique: Clean, cleaner, cleanest Antarctica?


Thanks to ABC Australia’s June exposé, we already know that East Antarctica’s Wilkes Station marks a kaleidoscopic debris party scattered across 33 hectares — including abestos-riddled buildings, “hazardous substances” and thousands of fuel drums. 

The US, in 1957, had transferred Wilkes’ management to Australia, which was forced to leave the increasingly ice-swallowed buildings about 12 years later. 

Next, the Australians promptly set up shop just 3km away at Casey research station — still one of the country’s main Antarctic research bases today — ferrying back and forth 1,000-plus overwintering expeditioners for five decades or so without cleaning up the mess. About 4,000km south of Perth, Wilkes remains a site under Australia’s control and was never transferred back to the US.

In 2022, a more enlightened generation of Aussies launched the “Cleaner Antarctica” campaign. And, in February 2024, a French government inspection team rocked up, documenting this sorry state of affairs in lurid detail. Par exemple, the inspection team found 3,000 “rusted” fuel drums in “poor condition”. “Some drums had been spotted at sea”, as well as oil slicks near the site. Adélie penguins and other seabirds breed within 1.5km of this station. 

Wilkes, the report concludes in several instances, presents a significant pollution risk to coastal and marine ecosystems.

So to the meeting’s preliminary report, which does not reveal an inch of the toxic fallout smeared across the equivalent of roughly 45 English premier league football fields. Apart from a citation to the publicly available inspection report, it does not mention that Wilkes poses a “significant risk”. 

As though Antarctica were a DIY instruction manual, the preliminary report does, however, identify “a number of points of caution and possible areas for improvement”.

To find France’s inspection notes, snap on your latex gloves, haul out your shovel and dig it up on the treaty’s documents archive. 



Diesel oil drums at Wilkes, 1988. Casey Station is visible to the left on the skyline across the bay. (Photo: Lieutenant Andrew Stanner, Royal Australian Engineers / Wikimedia Commons) 

‘Avoiding responsibility’ — in a ‘highly compliant’ way?


Yet, France and other treaty states think that Australia is a shining example of compliance to the Madrid Protocol — the treaty’s environmental constitution. 

The whole meeting, in fact, “thanked Australia and France for their inspection reports and welcomed the findings of high compliance in all inspected facilities”.

How is it possible to be highly compliant even as your dirty legacy is transmogrifying into snowy horrors in the backyard? We asked Professor Donald Rothwell, a world authority in Antarctic law at Australian National University.

“The Madrid Protocol does not retrospectively create clear clean-up, remediation and waste-disposal obligations for abandoned research stations such as Wilkes,” Rothwell explained. “Australia is bound by its own environmental laws to clean up the abandoned Wilkes research station, but mechanisms for making the government accountable under Australian environmental law for its conduct in Antarctica are weak.”

The old abandoned buildings at Wilkes, 1988. (Photo: Lieutenant Andrew Stanner, Royal Australian Engineers / Wikimedia Commons)



Cormac Cullinan, a prominent South African lawyer who helped suspend Shell’s seismic surveys off the Wild Coast, home of the sardine run, is now also drafting an Antarctic “rights of nature” constitution under an expert alliance seeking “legal personhood” for the region. 

“The fact that France concluded that Australia is fully compliant with the Madrid Protocol despite the large amount of waste around its decommissioned Wilkes Station illustrates the limitations of the Antarctic Treaty in protecting Antarctica,” argued Cullinan. “Under the treaty, a group of 29 states, each advancing their own national interests, make decisions about Antarctica. Those states are able to avoid responsibility for cleaning up and removing waste generated before the Madrid Protocol came into force because the protocol is not retrospective.”

“France seems to be invoking ‘environmental, logistical and financial constraints’ as a form of excuse or even justification for Australia’s failure to do a proper clean-up of Wilkes station. The parties rarely appeal to these constraints when they want to build new infrastructure,” observed Professor Alejandra Mancilla, an Oslo University political philosopher and editor of a new Antarctic colonialism handbook. 

“They are willing to spend millions of dollars to leave a mark in Antarctica, but are much less willing to spend millions to delete those marks. Many times the parties have tended to interpret the protocol in too lax a manner, maybe prioritising delicate political balances above the real protection of the Antarctic environment,” said Professor Mancilla. 

Taming The Thing


This may explain why, among other types of weird waste in Antarctica, there is a suspected cache of unexploded ordnance buried at (or even under) the world’s biggest Adélie penguin rookery at the Ross Sea (about 2,400km east of Wilkes). 

To be investigated by the New Zealand defence force in the upcoming research season, the ordnance was reportedly brought to terra incognita by Sir Robert Falcon Scott and peers, who, in the apparent act of fearing some kind of guest appearance of The Thing, may have left behind the actual Thing for future humans to deal with. 

The Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) insisted it was “taking steps to manage” its own Thing.  

“Australia plays a leading role in international efforts to protect the Antarctic environment including through conducting and applying polar science and engineering focused on environmental risk and remediation,” said the AAD. “This includes prioritising the assessment of risks associated with the Wilkes site and completing comprehensive contaminated site assessments at all Australian stations as part of the ‘Cleaner Antarctica Programme’.” 



The AAD’s full response to our repeated questions on compliance, accountability, gaps in the Madrid Protocol, environmental stewardship, Wilkes’s clean-up history, and the objectivity and content of the inspection and preliminary reports. We also proposed a greater ATCM transparency model similar to UN conferences, where confidential talks and media updates may co-exist, but received no response.  

Mutual gold stars


France inspected Australia. 

Australia inspected France. Both countries gave each other glowing feedback. 

They argued that the inspections were independent, offering the opportunity to “share best practices”.

However, “that Australia and France mutually inspected their existing and former research stations under the Madrid Protocol, raises issues as to how independent and objective their ATCM reports were”, Rothwell noted. 

So how about that objectivity thing? Will Fraustralia snap on their latex gloves and put the dirty facts about Wilkes’ buried trash in the final version of the meeting report, due to be published by the end of the year? Despite extending comment deadlines, Daily Maverick did not receive answers to repeated sets of comprehensive questions sent to Australian and French state authorities on these matters. 

According to a Cleaner Antarctica document submitted to the Antarctic Treaty in 2022, a changing climate raises the likelihood that melting ice will release and mobilise the contaminants of historical waste into Antarctica’s fragile environment.

“Many parties have undertaken considerable efforts to minimise the environmental impacts of past waste disposal sites and abandoned work sites in Antarctica,” the document says. DM

Part Two of Daily Maverick’s analysis on the Antarctic Treaty’s 2024 preliminary report will be published on 9 October. Read here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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