Again, Len Beadell played a central role. His amazing bush skills, surveying expertise and seemingly instinctive knowledge of the requirements made him best placed to look out over the land and say ‘here’. He had found Emu. Now Penney turned to him once more. Beadell later recalled they wanted somewhere closer to the Nullarbor so they could use the train line, ‘so I went on a 500 mile expedition, discovered a new site altogether which we called Maralinga. That was the same thing all over again – the village site, the connecting roads, the weapons area and the airstrip’. Maralinga was the final destination for the British nuclear tests in Australia. Beadell described the moment when he found the site with his small team of bush bashers: ‘We all knew immediately that this was going to be the place. The saltbush undulations rolled away as far as we could see, even through our binoculars… We solemnly wrung each other’s hands and just gazed about us in all directions for half an hour’.
The site was within the Great Victoria Desert, to the north of the Nullarbor Plain. The Beadell expedition also found remarkable evidence of Aboriginal civilisation – what Chief Scientist Alan Butement, with Beadell at the time, described as the ‘Aboriginal Stone Henge’. This arrangement of numerous piles of large and smaller stones and slivers of shale seemed to form an enormous arrowhead, positioned on a vast claypan between Emu and Maralinga. But, noted Butement, ‘there was not time to make a detailed study of the area’, and that was the end of that. The commissioning of the Maralinga site proceeded without any concern for this priceless relic of an ancient civilisation. The process included erecting survey beacons by December 1954 and choosing the locations for a permanent 3000-metre bitumen airstrip, and a road to Watson, a small railway siding settlement to the southwest. The Australian Services Task Force and the Kwinana Construction Company set out the engineering works. Kwinana was an Australian-based company wholly owned by UK firms that had not long before built an oil refinery in Western Australia. In no time, the preparations for a nuclear test site began, including building quarters for the thousands of men who would live there. Bristol freighter aircraft arrived from Britain, bringing with them the means to build a weapons testing range from scratch.
Although remote, the site, originally known as X300, was more amenable than Emu Field, with better access, more reliable water supplies and enough flat land to construct an airstrip, a railway siding and a village, built in a pleasant, heavily wooded area. Penney was overjoyed. He consulted with Butement, but Penney was the one to be convinced. And he was. Maralinga soon became one of the few places in the world where nuclear bombs were detonated.
The red desert site was officially named Maralinga in November 1953, a month after Operation Totem, and preparations began immediately to test the local meteorological conditions for their potential effect on fallout. A formal agreement to carry out atomic tests at Maralinga was signed by the two governments on 7 March 1956, following talks in London in 1955 between Menzies and Churchill’s successor as prime minister, Anthony Eden. The Memorandum of Arrangements indicated that Maralinga would be available to the British ‘for a period of 10 years which may be extended by mutual agreement’, and the area would be rent-free. The agreement specified that no hydrogen (thermonuclear, fusion) weapons would be tested there, and that each test to be carried out would be separately agreed by the Australian Government, under the veto of its AWTSC. The document also provided for data from the tests to be shared with the Australians. The British did not often do this, however, which increasingly became a point of contention for the Australian Government.
A top-secret Cabinet minute from a meeting of the Prime Minister’s Committee dated 16 August 1954 recorded the acceptance of the British request to commandeer the new site. The minutes noted that the committee agreed ‘in principle to the establishment of a permanent testing ground and to co-operate with the United Kingdom in the proposed new series of tests’. The meeting also agreed to direct officials from the Treasury, Defence, Supply and Prime Minister’s departments to report on the nature of the Australian contribution to, and participation in, the tests. ‘These officials would need to consider in particular the ability of the Service Departments [navy, army and air force] to provide servicemen for construction and other purposes associated with the tests.’ The meeting decided against sending an Australian technical team to the UK for a briefing on the series, preferring instead that the UK send a team to Australia, presumably for reasons of cost. They agreed to co-operate with the UK on initiator tests known as Kittens, scheduled for early 1955 as the first tests at Maralinga. These followed the original Kittens tests at Emu Field in 1953.
Ten days after the meeting of the Prime Minister’s Committee, an interdepartmental committee meeting considered what the government had agreed. It was chaired by Frank O’Connor, secretary of the Department of Supply, and attended by high-level officials including Professor Leslie Martin, the academic physicist and defence adviser soon to head up the AWTSC. A report from the armed services departments on their respective levels of commitment to the project did not make encouraging reading. The report estimated the construction would need a workforce of between 225 and 250 personnel. The navy was unable to make any personnel available, and the army would commit personnel only if the government determined Maralinga to be a higher priority than any other ‘cold war task’. Only the air force was prepared to put boots on the ground, offering a token 50 personnel for the construction task.
All three services were under multiple pressures. The Korean War in the early 1950s had sapped their resources, and these were further drained by an ongoing commitment to the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation. The interdepartmental committee referred the matter of diverting defence resources to the Maralinga project back to the Defence Department, since this ‘was a task beyond the competency of the committee’.
The British were briefed on these concerns. A secret letter from RR Powell in the British Ministry of Defence to JM Wilson in the British Ministry of Supply indicated that Frederick Shedden, the secretary of the Australian Department of Defence, had ‘strongly advised’ them not to push Menzies too hard on this: ‘Any suggestion that we regarded Maralinga as more important than Malaya might upset the Australian agreement to accept commitments in South East Asia’. Australia was somewhat torn, wanting to co-operate as a good former colony while attempting to deal with existing postwar imperatives.
This document also recorded the reluctance of the Department of Works to divert resources to Maralinga to carry out construction using civilian labour. ‘It was suggested that such means of carrying out the task should be attempted only in the event of its being found impracticable to devise a plan for the utilisation of Service labour.’ No-one in the services really wanted a bar of the huge work involved in establishing a massive new military facility in the Australian desert. The meeting noted that the financial contribution to the cost of building Maralinga would have to come out of the Defence budget: ‘As there was no margin within the Department of Supply’s allotment to provide funds for this project, the committee proposes to advise that it is unable to make any proposal to Cabinet as to what financial contribution, if any, Australia should make’.
This committee discussed the need for Australia to get some scientific and technological benefit out of the Maralinga project. It tentatively suggested that ‘consideration be given to offering the services of a small scientific unit to assist in a defined operation, e.g. measurements, which would in consequence involve full indoctrination in atomic science for those Australian scientists taking part’. At this time, Australia was considering setting up the technology to create plutonium out of its uranium. If this development occurred (it never did), ‘we would then be in a much stronger position to claim a right for Australian scientists to participate in the work’. Australia had not been party to the results of operations Hurricane and Totem, and some frustration came through in the minutes’ suggestion that, ‘as atomic weapons would be vital to Australia’s defence, a firm request should be made to the United Kingdom for information on the results of future tests for strategic planning purposes’. Read in their context, these remarks seem forlorn at the very least, if not outright deluded.