That was not the end of the matter. The Australian authorities were not happy about being denied specific information on the Vixen A and B tests and began exercising an unprecedented capacity to stall and hinder the test program (albeit temporarily), to the chagrin of the British test authorities. The Royal Commission noted, ‘The 1960 proposal for assessment tests, which included the Vixen B tests, caused Australian officials, particularly in the Department of Defence, to question the existing procedures for approval of the program. It was apparent that decisions which demanded political input were being taken by the AWTSC, through its Chairman, without reference to the appropriate Ministers’. The AWTSC was not a free agent; it had been established to represent the interests of the Australian Government and citizens. People were starting to notice that this was not actually how it was operating.
Titterton had gone too far. His attempts to push the Vixen series through the approval stage gave credence to allegations that his first loyalties were to the AWRE and not to his employer, the Australian Government. Australian officials began to have doubts about a process that saw safety information from Aldermaston being sent only to Titterton, whereupon it often stopped altogether. The new and more dangerous kinds of tests on the range made this increasingly unacceptable.
The dynamics at Maralinga were changing, and Titterton’s unquestioned status started to crumble. At this point Menzies got involved in the exchange of messages over the political implications of the plutonium tests. According to the Royal Commission:
When told of the UK proposal, the Australian Prime Minister consulted with senior Departmental officials whose advice contained the warning that Australia had very little information concerning these particular tests. It was not clear to them that the AWTSC [was] any better informed though it was possible that the Chairman had been given some information by AWRE officials.
In reality, Titterton was far better informed than any other Australian official, but, in a conclusion of the Royal Commission, he ‘played a political as well as a safety role in the testing program, especially in the minor trials. He was prepared to conceal information from the Australian Government and his fellow Committee members if he believed to do so would suit the interests of the United Kingdom Government and the testing program’.
A letter from the British deputy high commissioner Neil Pritchard to Maurice Timbs in the Prime Minister’s Department attempted to play down Australian annoyance over the Vixen series and smooth away the growing disquiet. ‘As I understand that your Government would like some further information about the additional trials, which for convenience have been given the codename of “Vixen B”, we have now been asked to advise you as follows.’ The letter then set out some basic information about Vixen B in five dot points, including the claim that the AWRE safety statement given to Titterton for the safety committee gave ‘details of the likely contamination and of the precautions to be taken’. The letter concluded with a plea for rapid resolution of the remaining issues so Vixen B could be added to the MEP and pointed out that ‘the experiments have been agreed by the [Maralinga] Board of Management subject to this formal approval and all precautions are in hand. We expect the United Kingdom Servicemen to arrive early in July’.
The UK Government clearly assumed that the experiments were approved as part of the broad agreements already in place. The British were keen just to get on with it and appear to have been surprised that the Australians were asking questions. In fact, there was no formal approval at this stage. After Allen Fairhall received and reviewed this letter, he wrote to Defence Minister Townley, indicating his support for Vixen B but handing the matter to Townley for the final decision. ‘Defence officials investigated the new situation and noted that, outside the AWTSC, knowledge of the trials was limited to the very general comments about them in the UK High Commissioner’s note.’
The Australian Government did not approve Vixen B until 18 August 1960 and conveyed this to the UK high commissioner on 30 August. The Defence Department in particular was concerned about how little information was getting through, though it was concerned less about the safety arrangements than ‘the possibility of knowledge of the arrangements falling into wrong hands. It was a matter for political judgement how serious any embarrassment stemming from such knowledge might be’. When the Defence Department finally approved the tests, it included some new conditions for approval of future Maralinga tests: ‘The way was then clear for further discussions about some more formal channels of communication between Australia and the UK authorities in addition to the original AWTSC/AWRE channel’.
In the end, Titterton’s decision to keep the details of the series secret from his employers sidelined him. The departments of Supply and Defence eventually bypassed him altogether and went direct to the AWRE. The depths to which he had sunk in the estimation of the Defence Department and the Prime Minister’s Department was evident in a rather brief and uninformative letter written by the secretary of the Department of Supply John Knott. Titterton had written a lengthy letter to Knott on 24 August 1960 in which he set out the growing uneasiness he was hearing from both the Defence Department and the Prime Minister’s Department over Vixen B. Titterton was concerned about a view, particularly of Maurice Timbs from the Prime Minister’s Department, that the safety committee did not have enough information on the exact nature of Vixen B to properly assess its safety. ‘The [AWTSC] takes a most serious view of this: it reflects on our integrity and suggests that we agreed to trials without knowing whether they were safe or not.’ There was a veiled threat in Titterton’s letter: ‘We would feel it most improper for us to continue in our work unless we can be assured that we have the complete confidence of the Prime Minister’s Department, the Department of Defence and the Department of Supply’.
The letter prompted a lukewarm reply from Knott two days later, which said in part, ‘May I say at once … that you and your Committee have the full confidence of the Department of Supply and equally I feel sure would this be so [sic] in respect of all other Departments and officials concerned’. It appears that Supply was the only Australian department that came forwards with the requested vote of confidence. From the other two, there was silence.
The AWTSC was a belated and ineffectual attempt to give Australia some say in the ground-shaking events taking place on its own turf. The AWRE really became comfortable with the committee only when Titterton took over the chair in 1957. Before that, Leslie Martin had played as straight a bat as he could but scored virtually no runs. Under Titterton, the committee became a sham, giving the appearance of playing a serious role but in fact undermined from within by someone who had no intention of keeping the Australian Government properly informed. But if Australians as a whole were badly served by the safety committee, for one group in particular the British nuclear tests were profoundly devastating.
7
Indigenous people and the bomb tests
Long time ago, before whitefellas came, Anangu lived on their lands for thousands and thousands of years. The land was their life. They loved the land. They cared for the country. They knew all its secrets and they taught those secrets to their children and their children’s children, tjamu to tjamu (grandfather to grandson), kapali to kapali (grandmother to granddaughter).
Yalata and Oak Valley Communities with Christobel Mattingley, Maralinga: The Anangu Story, 2009.
Whitefella sent us away. Whitefella came to this place and sent us away.
Tommy Queama from Ooldea, speaking through an interpreter at the Royal Commission, 1985.
In June 1956 the Department of Supply chief scientist Alan Butement wrote a furious letter to the controller of the Weapons Research Establishment, an Australian Government organisation based at Salisbury, near Adelaide, that ran the rocket range at Woomera. Department of Supply native patrol officer Walter Mac-Dougall had threatened to publicly disclose the potential harm to local Indigenous people after a weather station associated with the Maralinga test range was propose
d at Giles. The controller, HJ Brown, set out MacDougall’s concerns in a memorandum. Butement responded, ‘Your memorandum discloses a lamentable lack of balance in Mr. McDougall’s outlook, in that he is apparently placing the affairs of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations’. Justice James McClellend described this as ‘one of the most telling of all statements to come before the Royal Commission’. Maybe it was also telling that the chief scientist did not know how to spell MacDougall’s name.
McClelland found strongly against the British and Australian governments for their treatment of Aboriginal people, not just at Maralinga but also on the mainland adjacent to the Monte Bello Islands and at Emu Field. ‘If Aborigines were not injured or killed as a result of the explosions, this is a matter of luck rather than adequate organisation, management and resources allocated to ensuring safety.’ The damage done to the Indigenous populations was perhaps the most contested and tragic of all issues relating to the British nuclear tests in Australia. It was colonialism in microcosm and speeded up.
The murky status of Aboriginal people in Australia at the time was at least partly to blame. Aboriginal people did not have the federal vote, they were not counted in the census, and their affairs were not discussed in any depth in the Australian mainstream. They started to get the vote, state by state, from 1962. This makes somewhat fanciful Ernest Titterton’s comment to the Royal Commission that if the Aborigines in the area hadn’t liked the tests they could have voted the government out. Not until a referendum in 1967 were they included in the census. Shockingly, only a couple of generations ago, in some parts of Australia, Aborigines were administered under state flora and fauna Acts. The 1967 referendum also changed the Australian Constitution to enable the federal parliament to enact legislation on Aboriginal affairs. Before then, legislation concerning Aboriginal life was the domain of state governments.
The treatment of those affected by the atomic tests was not unusual. It was perhaps more unusual that a government employee, Walter MacDougall, was assigned to look after their interests, given the prevailing view at the time, namely that the kindest thing was to let them die out. They were practically invisible. Invisible people can be harmed with few consequences.
This attitude went right back to Operation Hurricane in 1952. In fact, it was doubtful that more than cursory consideration was given to Aboriginal safety when planning that hastily organised first British A-bomb test. The Royal Commission found that the authorities relied almost entirely on a document titled ‘Some Notes on North-West Australia’ prepared by the HER scientist ER Woodcock, whose main source was the Encyclopaedia Britannica. According to the Royal Commission report, Woodcock recorded a population of 715 people living within 240 kilometres of the Monte Bello test site, ‘excluding full-blooded Aboriginals, for whom no statistics are available’. Considerably more information was provided about the hens, ducks, cattle, horses and sheep in the vicinity. There was a paucity of information because Aboriginal people were not counted in the national census. Yet the Royal Commission found that the state government of Western Australia had better information at the time. This information specified that some 4538 Aboriginal people lived in regions on the mainland close to Monte Bello, hundreds in small townships, and the rest spread out at various missions, on cattle stations or in traditional family groups.
Titterton told the Royal Commission that he had been charged specifically with ensuring the welfare of the Aboriginal people near Monte Bello. He testified that Menzies had asked him to ‘stick your oar in to make as certain as it is humanly possible … that there will be no adverse effects on the Australian people, flora and fauna, and in particular the Aborigines. From the first five minutes I was involved a major concern of the Australian Prime Minister was Aborigines’. Yet Titterton did not apparently stick his oar in very deep, and his evidence on exactly how he did this was vague. He seemed to be under the impression that the federal government held such records, when it was only state governments who kept data on Aboriginal people during this period.
Perhaps his overall approach was summed up in this comment: ‘The overriding condition was that there would be no significant fallout on the continent. Now, if there was no significant fallout on the continent that can do anyone any damage, you do not have to differentiate between Aboriginals and Europeans’. As the Royal Commission concluded, this failed to ‘consider the distinctive lifestyles of Aboriginal people’. And since ‘no record was made of any contamination of the mainland it is impossible to determine whether Aborigines were exposed to any significant short or long-term hazards’. Aborigines leading traditional lifestyles have far greater connection to the land upon which they walk and the water, plants and animals in their vicinity. Aborigines and Europeans did indeed need to be differentiated.
When the Mosaic tests were held at Monte Bello in 1956, again the welfare of Aboriginal people on the adjacent mainland did not figure in planning. Commodore Hugh Martell, director of Mosaic, dismissed the idea: ‘Aborigines are nothing to do with Mosaic … The question does not arise. There are no Aborigines on the Monte Bello Islands’. But Aboriginal people on the Pilbara coast and inland would certainly have been affected. At no time during Mosaic were they properly taken into account.
For the 1953 tests at Emu Field, there could be no denying that Aboriginal people were in the vicinity. They were there for all to see, if they cared to look. Emu and, later, Maralinga were chosen as locations despite what would these days be considered challenging, if not insurmountable, barriers. Notions such as land rights, informed consent or occupational health simply did not arise for local Aborigines. The land was not uninhabited, but terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’, deeming there were no property rights in the continent when the British took it) was accepted in law. The lands were not settled in the Western sense of the term. Rather, people traversed them for hunting, water gathering and ceremonial purposes, as they had for tens of thousands of years. Before the major mainland tests began, the area had to be cleared. Most Indigenous people found in various sweeps by military personnel were directed to a mission at Yalata, far to the south on the Great Australian Bight (a community later ravaged by social problems). Ample evidence suggests, however, that individuals and small groups walked across the lands after the tests began. Those found from time to time in contaminated areas were given showers and driven away in trucks or cars, often suffering severe car sickness since they had never before travelled in a vehicle. In most cases, however, official ground patrols of the Maralinga range and adjacent areas simply turned Aboriginal people away, directing them to leave the test site. The locals who had lived around the Maralinga lands were scattered north and south, some never to return, others eventually to find their way to a small settlement at Oak Valley, 160 kilometres northwest of Maralinga.
Social problems have dogged the people of the Maralinga lands since the time of the tests. Three decades passed before they were compensated with a $13.5 million settlement from the Australian Government in November 1994. The people now hold the title to these lands under the Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act 1984. After a partial handover in 1984, the final part of the Maralinga lands was officially handed back to the Maralinga Tjarutja people on 18 December 2009. These days, the only permanent settlement is Oak Valley, where about 90 people live.
The Maralinga Tjarutja people own the area that encompasses the Maralinga test site as well as Oak Valley, Ooldea and Emu Field; together these are now the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. These lands cover 105 667 square kilometres (or approximately 11 per cent of the land area of South Australia). The Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands directly to the north encompass many of the Indigenous settlements affected by the British tests, including Wallatinna, Marla and Ernabella. The Western Desert peoples inhabit these lands, and the language usually spoken there is Pitjantjatjara. All these peoples have shocking family tales to tell of what happened when the men arrived with their planes and tanks and atomic weapons.
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nbsp; Ooldea Soak, 40 kilometres south of Maralinga, is one of the focal points of the Maralinga Indigenous saga. Ooldea was also known as Yuldi, Yutulynga and Yooldool in the various dialects of the diverse people who congregated there. According to scholar Odette Mazel, the name Ooldea means ‘the meeting place where there is much water’. The Ooldea Reserve covered about 1500 square kilometres. The plentiful water supply made it an important meeting place and ceremonial ground for Western Desert people. When the transcontinental railway was built between 1912 and 1917, the influx of Aboriginal people to the area accelerated, as they were attracted by the capacity to trade with railway workers. Among the items traded were dingo scalps. The advent of the railway did much to change the old patterns of life.
The area is strongly associated with the Irishwoman Daisy Bates, an extraordinary character who established herself at Ooldea in 1918 and communed with the Aboriginal people there for 16 years. Her settlement was not strictly a mission, but she did provide the locals with food and clothes, while she studied their culture and made copious notes of her observations. During her time at Ooldea she was awarded the CBE and welcomed visits by royalty three times. She also befriended the writer Ernestine Hill, who made her famous by helping her to write a series of autobiographical features that appeared in several newspapers, some later published in The Passing of the Aborigines. Bates was a strict segregationist who opposed intermarrying and was profoundly pessimistic about the future of the Aboriginal people. She was never really accepted by the anthropological community, and her work fell into disrepute. The Australian Dictionary of Biography quotes a secretary who knew her briefly at the end of her life describing her as ‘an imperialist, an awful snob … a grand old lady’.
After Bates left Ooldea in the mid-1930s, the settlement was taken over by an evangelical missionary group called the United Aborigines Mission. This group, dedicated to converting Aboriginal people to its particular brand of Christianity and attempting to eliminate traditional customs and beliefs, maintained the Ooldea Mission until 1952 when they chose to close it down. The water in the soak was drying up and soon there would be none left. Mazel stated that the activities of the mission represented the ‘first active measures taken to interfere with aboriginal social orders’, an on-going process that led to considerable sorrow. Quite a bit more disruption and sorrow was to come.
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