The science itself is amazing. A once largely worthless heavy element, uranium, had suddenly and dramatically revealed its hidden explosive energy potential at the beginning of World War II. Physicists working in Britain recognised the significance of ‘splitting the atom’ and developed practical ideas about how to fashion an explosive device. They handed these over to the US Manhattan Project. Within six years, the basic physics that had brought to light hitherto unknown capacities in uranium had resulted in a bomb powered by uranium being dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later was powered by plutonium, a step-up in technology. Plutonium, a most unnatural and dangerous material, is one of the most important things to understand about Maralinga, because when plutonium fell to earth there it changed the landscape forever.
Australia’s media underwent a profound transition during the decades of this story. The articles published in the Australian media at the time of the nuclear tests, and particularly in the early years, were often deferential to Great Britain, overtly patriotic, uncritical of atomic weaponry or actively in favour of it, focused almost exclusively on storylines provided by official information, and lacking scientific detail or analysis. Almost always, statements from test personnel and from the Australian Government immediately allayed any safety concerns raised in these stories. Many of these assurances were shown later to be unfounded. A few contemporary stories were critical of delays to scheduled tests or raised questions about the safety of Indigenous people in the area and the cost-effectiveness of the Maralinga facility. Some were apparently motivated by ideological opposition to the federal government. But the general thrust of most stories and editorials was support of the test series and the nuclear ambitions that underpinned it. The high-profile scientists involved, such as Penney and Titterton, were not subjected to scrutiny.
This began to change in the mid-1970s with a series of stories characterised by a productive scepticism towards the governments involved in the testing, a far higher level of scientific literacy and insight, a diversity of sources and a willingness to confront the government with evidence of untruth and cover-up. With hindsight both the initial phase of secrecy and cover-up and the later uncovering seem inevitable. In fact, the same information controls were in operation in the late 1970s, and the Coalition government of the time, under Malcolm Fraser, was no keener to reveal the truth of Maralinga than the Menzies government before it, albeit for different reasons. But the rising voices of aggrieved military veterans and the advocacy of a small number of politicians such as Tom Uren provided new sources. The markedly different ways the British tests were covered by journalists in the two eras can be explained largely by the approach of the media and the anger of those harmed by the tests, not by changes to the operation of government. The journalists did a much better job in the later era, forcing a lot of the story into the light.
In the saga of nuclear colonialism portrayed in this book, a non-nuclear nation ceded part of its territory to an emerging nuclear nation to test the most destructive weapons ever invented. Australia provided the site, the political backing, many of the running costs of the Maralinga range and some of the logistics and military personnel. But the UK was always in charge. The absence of close contemporary scrutiny of these tests by either the Australian Government or the media allowed the test authorities to conduct experiments of exceptionally high risk and lasting danger. Many hundreds of Indigenous people lost access to their homelands and their traditional ways of life, swept away from the desert test sites like detritus. Military personnel from all the countries involved, but especially those of Britain itself, were exposed to radiation that may have made them ill. The test series included particularly dangerous experiments that left significant radioactive contamination at Maralinga. The nuclear tests were not subjected to the media scrutiny and analysis befitting their importance until many years later. In fact, the British nuclear tests are among the most significant events in Australia’s history not subjected to contemporary media scrutiny.
What are we to make of the events at Maralinga in the 1950s and 1960s? Australia was not a nuclear power. The nation was in a highly ambiguous position – it was the staging ground for nuclear weapons testing, but the tests themselves were run with obsessive secrecy and control by another nation, the ‘mother country’ herself. This made Australia, at least initially, curiously powerless and inept in dealing with the tests. The absence of media coverage and public debate created a gap in most people’s understanding of Maralinga, making it in many ways a uniquely tangled national issue, still obscure and perplexing. The fallout from nuclear colonialism in Australia was plutonium-soaked land, certainly, but also growing recognition of the risks inherent in abdicating control over the nation’s destiny. The mysteries of Maralinga and its toxic legacy continue to haunt Australia as the red dust of the old desert test site still swirls and the thunder echoes across the plain.
1
Maralinga buried, uncovered
Mid-May 1984, autumn, and the plains of Maralinga are cooling down after a hot summer. At the moment it doesn’t get much above 22 degrees Celsius during the day, unlike in summer, when the daytime temperatures can exceed the mid-40s. At this time of year it goes down to a chilly 5 degrees Celsius overnight. The Maralinga lands are to the north of the Nullarbor Plain, on the eastern edge of the Great Victoria Desert, Australia’s largest desert. Maralinga is 850 kilometres from Adelaide and just north of the Indian–Pacific train line that carries passengers and freight across the continent. Tietkens Well, dug by the English explorer William Henry Tietkens in 1879, is the earliest token of European presence. The landscape is mostly flat, with some gently sloping hills on the horizon and many sand dunes. Most of the terrain is capped by rugged travertine limestone, up to 3 metres thick in places, forming a rocky crust. Its top surface has been busy eroding over millennia into dust that swirls constantly and often whips up into fierce, blinding storms. The overwhelming colour of the landscape is red, broken by the olive green of the stunted, scrubby saltbush, the needle-leaved mulga and the tussocky spinifex that dominate the vegetation. Bird life abounds – there are over 100 species in the area, including bellbirds, honeyeaters, bustards and kingfishers, and bird song is one of the dominant sounds, other than the wind.
The abandoned Maralinga atomic weapons testing range forms part of the western extremes of the much larger Woomera Prohibited Area, a chunk of South Australia that could accommodate England within its boundaries. The British used Woomera for even longer than Maralinga, to test postwar rocket technology. The entire area was surveyed by the legendary Australian bushman Len Beadell, who lent an air of larrikin myth to this vast expanse of outback. He told rollicking tales of his surveying adventures during the mid-1950s, assessing the land for its usefulness for testing atomic weapons. The surveying project was top-secret at the time, though Beadell later wrote about it in two popular books that told the story of his time in the bush. Beadell and his men liked what they saw at X300, as they dubbed the area, and reported back to Professor William Penney, the head of the British nuclear weapons test authority, that it would be perfect for the task. Penney visited to see for himself, spirited there secretly in October 1953, and was well pleased. ‘It’s the cat’s whiskers’, he said. History would soon follow.