When it did, this ancient landscape saw some remarkable sights. Hydrogen-filled balloons bobbing around in the bright sky, bristling with measuring gear. Fifty-five-tonne metal scaffolds called, inexplicably, feather beds rising from concrete pads to hold simulated nuclear warheads that glinted briefly in the sun before being blown sky-high with trinitrotoluene (TNT). A Royal Air Force (RAF) Valiant aircraft releasing a bomb 10 000 metres in the sky, creating a mushroom cloud 150 metres above the plain as men in summerissue military shorts turned their backs to its sun-like brightness. Fifty-two-tonne Centurion tanks and other military vehicles scattered around seven major bomb sites. A village with a cinema, a swimming pool and single-men’s quarters made from prefabricated garages eventually large enough to accommodate thousands of men. An airstrip that felt the weight of both military and civilian aircraft. A network of sealed roads covering 130 kilometres that made travel around the site fast and easy. Then, suddenly, the forces of history departed and the site fell silent. But never again would it be pristine.
In May 1984 virtually no rain will fall at Maralinga – only 22.6 millimetres for the whole month, falling in small bursts on four days. The bright, mild and mostly rainless days are conducive to the meticulous scientific testing of the radiation physics of the site, a search for any remaining traces of the radioactive elements let loose by the British nuclear tests. The scientists are making use of the most fundamental properties of radioactivity to do their search. Over time, radioactive elements such as uranium and plutonium undergo a physical transformation. The unique nature of these elements means that they emit several different kinds of electromagnetic rays (alpha, beta and gamma rays). As they do so, their properties and even their mass change. These rays have fundamentally different properties. Alpha radiation, made up of energetic streams of positively charged particles, is easily thwarted – alpha radiation can’t penetrate thick paper. Beta radiation consists of beams of electrons, which have a negative charge. It can penetrate more deeply, but a sheet of light metal such as aluminium will stop it. Gamma rays are like x-rays and can be stopped only by heavy materials such as lead.
These rays and other products of the unique nuclear physics of radioactivity can be detected. The scientists have come equipped to do this – to use their field equipment and later laboratory analysis to work out how much radioactivity this old site actually contains. The scientific authorities charged with this task are confident that they know what is there, based on information provided to Australia by the British. This due diligence survey will simply confirm the past surveys and reports. Dr Geoff Williams, Dr Malcolm Cooper and Mr Peter Burns are part of the small team of radiation specialists at Maralinga. Their job is to conduct some routine scientific investigations of the site so it can be officially handed back from the federal government to South Australia. After that, the land will be returned at last to its traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja people, who were displaced and dispersed in their hundreds by the British nuclear weapons tests that ended over 20 years ago.
At the time of this expedition to the site, which also includes scientists from the South Australian Health Commission, Williams, Cooper and Burns work for an organisation called the Australian Radiation Laboratory (ARL). It was once called the Commonwealth X-Ray and Radium Laboratory and will later change its name to the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) as its role shifts with the imperatives of the day. Each of these scientists will end up being involved in the story of Maralinga for years after this eye-opening trip to the South Australian desert. What they will find here will shock them, and soon after, the many layers of secrecy that have buried Maralinga will be stripped away.
For Geoff Williams in particular this visit starts a long association. He does not know about Maralinga from his schooling at Balwyn High in Victoria or his science degrees at Melbourne University; he first heard the name in 1978 as a young postdoctoral researcher working in the School of Molecular Sciences at Sussex University in the UK. Before that, like just about everyone growing up in Australia at the time, Williams knew nothing about Maralinga, a great Australian secret, barely recognised as part of this nation’s history. This trip is the first of dozens of expeditions he will make here on his way to becoming a leading expert on radioactive waste safety. He loves the beauty of the place, the sand dunes and mulga and birds, and takes the occasional moment to savour it.
By 1984, some aspects of the Maralinga story have been in the media for a few years. The South Australian media started to take an interest in 1976. The tone of their stories has been mostly negative, in contrast to the media reports from when the British nuclear tests were underway. By the 1970s, the events at Maralinga and the other test sites were no longer viewed with the same patriotic equanimity as they were at the time. An Adelaide taxi driver has told Williams that the people of Adelaide once regarded the Maralinga operation as a flag-waving exercise, and they had been proud to help Britain become great again following the war. But now, the driver said, you won’t find a person in Adelaide with a good word to say about the nuclear tests.
Despite the newly acquired media scepticism about the British tests, though, the scientific community is reasonably confident that the anecdotes of non-experts who know nothing about radioactivity overstate the dangers of the site. After all, the British scientists and military personnel did surveys and clean-ups before they left, and while a significant portion of this information remains top-secret, those in the know believe the site will be safe for the Indigenous owners to take over. The director of ARL Dr Keith Lokan has taken the prescient decision that the scientists working at Maralinga should not have formal security clearances, so as not to be tainted by reading the classified British record. So the Australian scientists will be able to speak about and publish freely everything that they discover at Maralinga, unconstrained by secrecy laws. Significantly, Maralinga is so far the only former nuclear weapons test site that has reverted from military to civilian hands. Once the handover is complete, everyone can move on. It feels like an obscure era in Australian history that is fast receding in the memories of the few people directly involved.
The ARL team has access to reports left behind by the British nuclear test authorities not classified as ‘top-secret atomic’ that tell them more or less what to expect. An abridged version of the Pearce Report, compiled by the British nuclear physicist Noah Pearce, sets out an account of the physical conditions at the site.
Pearce was part of the legendary nuclear elite, the small handful of sound inner-circle scientists from the AWRE headed by the dapper and distinguished Professor William Penney, the leader of the British tests in Australia. Pearce came to Australia for the first British test, Hurricane, at the Monte Bello Islands in 1952. He was involved with the two Totem bomb tests at Emu Field in 1953. He did not come to Maralinga until 1958 because he was diverted to the British hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific at Christmas Island (later Kiritimati), now part of Kiribati. But in the early 1960s, he directed safety arrangements for the highly dangerous plutonium tests from his home base in Aldermaston, visiting Maralinga only occasionally. After overseeing the clean-up operations at the site, he wrote a report. A heavily edited version of this report has been publicly available since 1979, tabled in federal parliament after media pressure, but the full report is secret, open only to those with sufficient security clearance. The federal minister for Mines and Energy Peter Walsh will release the full report later in 1984 as a direct response to the ARL’s Maralinga trip.