Cavanagh also asked two questions as to whether Department of Supply personnel and vehicles were to keep native Aboriginals off the area, and whether Aboriginals were kept off the area at the time of such experiments. The briefing paper disputed the implication
that we had to take positive action to keep aborigines off the area. The facts are that we conducted land and air surveys, and found no natives in the area at the time in question. We did not have to keep them off. However, one group of natives was encountered on walkabout outside the area, and they were transported (with their willing consent) to their destination.
Even had this action not be taken, the briefing paper asserted, there was no reason to believe ‘they would have been in the area at the time of the explosions’.
A fourth question asked if the government had ‘any knowledge of harmful effects on natives as a result of these explosions’. The briefing document answered by saying:
There have been attempts to blame the tests for various ills suffered by the natives, but after investigation we have been unable to find any foundation for such claims. One instance of penetration into the area subsequent to the trials is known, but the natives concerned were removed from the area, and were given a thorough decontamination and examination. They were taken to the Aboriginal Mission at Ooldea [actually, the Milpuddies went to Yalata], where they remained for some time, but no detectable effects were observed.
One of the most perplexing episodes in this history is the so-called black mist. This little-understood phenomenon occurred after Totem 1 at Emu Field in October 1953. Many later commentators have wrongly associated it with Maralinga. The black mist story has gone into local Indigenous folklore, but its first broad public airing was in the Adelaide Advertiser on 3 May 1980. When the Royal Commission investigated the Emu Field tests, it concluded that weather conditions for the first Totem blast had been unsuitable and the test should not have proceeded.
The Indigenous people most prominently associated with the black mist are Yami Lester and Lallie Lennon, both of whom experienced it and reported their experiences publicly, and to the Royal Commission. The allegation is that after the first bomb in the Totem series was detonated on 15 October 1953, an unpleasant greasy black cloud enveloped the land around Wallatinna and Mintabie and deposited material on the people in the vicinity. Uniformly, they reported vomiting, diarrhoea and skin conditions, as well as blindness (in the case of Yami Lester, who was a child at the time) and a number of deaths. Ernest Titterton called the allegations ‘a scare campaign’ and denied the possibility of a black mist. He said, ‘If you investigate black mists you’re going to get into an area where mystique is the central feature’. William Penney stated to the Royal Commission, ‘I was not aware at the time of any of the alleged reports of “black mist”’.
Totem 1 was a 9.1-kilotonne atomic device detonated from a 30-metre-high steel tower at 7 am on 15 October 1953. The evidence is unclear exactly how long after the detonation the black mist rolled across the land, but some estimates say it was first seen about five hours later. Wallatinna is 173 kilometres from the Emu Field test site, and Mintabie just over 16 kilometres from Wallatinna. Scientific estimates have confirmed that the fallout cloud would have passed over the area about five hours after the detonation.
British scientists WT Roach and DG Ballis in evidence to the Royal Commission supported the possibility of a black mist from the Totem test, saying that all the reports ‘had a measure of internal consistency about them’. Both scientists asserted that the conditions of firing at Totem could conceivably have delivered to the Indigenous people of Wallatinna a fallout cloud that had raced along near ground level. ‘It would have been a strange and awesome sight to anyone beneath it. A fine “drizzle” of black particles would also have been noticed.’ However, they did not think that the cloud would have caused health problems for anyone standing awestruck beneath it.
And that is the problem. While most people who have looked at this issue in any depth agree that the black mist occurred, disagreements about the harm it caused have never been resolved. But the compelling evidence of the Aboriginal people in the area is hard to ignore. The most famous of those affected, Yami Lester, said, ‘Almost everyone at Wallatinna had something wrong with their eyes. And they still do … I was one of those people, and later on I lost my sight and my life was changed forever’. One of the Aboriginal people who was a spokesperson for Aboriginal witnesses to the Royal Commission, Kanytji (also known as Kantji), said the cloud was ‘very black’, but reddish towards to the top, and it dimmed the sun. It produced a strange shadowing effect, seeming to give people multiple shadows. Kanytji said that the cloud deposited a moist black substance on the ground, like a bizarre kind of frost. Other eyewitnesses said that it smelled like a dead kangaroo or like liquid petroleum gas. Whatever it was, it was not healthy.
Despite Titterton’s scepticism, the Royal Commission officially recognised the credibility of the black mist allegations but found insufficient evidence to say whether the phenomenon caused injury or illness. This finding still causes considerable distress to the Indigenous people who were present when the black mist rolled in.
More recently, scientists from ARPANSA have attempted to get to the bottom of the black mist, including Dr Geoff Williams, from the team who uncovered the radioactive contamination at Maralinga in 1984 and who has extensive knowledge of the British nuclear tests. In 2010, with his colleague Dr Richard O’Brien, he carried out a scientific appraisal of the black mist in response to The Black Mist and Its Aftermath: Oral Histories by Lallie Lennon, prepared by oral historian Michele Madigan in 2006 and 2009 and published with transcription and commentary by Paul Langley in February 2010. The scientists affirmed the strong evidence that the black mist incident happened but, again, were unable to say that it caused illness and injury. They pointed instead to the measles epidemics around the time of Totem 1 as more likely causes. They also raised the possibility that ‘non-radioactive factors’, such as chemical irritants in the mist, might have caused the reported skin conditions and allergic reactions.
The terrible harms caused to the Indigenous peoples of the Maralinga lands have been partly salved by the determination of the people themselves not to be defeated. One measure of their spirit is the establishment of a tourism venture at Maralinga owned by Maralinga Tjarutja people based at Oak Valley. Maralinga Tours now takes paying customers to the old test range. The audacity of this venture cannot but lift the spirits.
8
D-notices and media self-censorship
The press in both Britain and Australia, at least initially, did not probe at all into the political, scientific, moral, economic or any other aspect of the atomic project. They allowed themselves to be bound by a series of D-notices.
Robert Milliken, No Conceivable Injury, 1986.
When the media acquiesce, the very existence of censorship is unknown to citizens. In Australia, D-notices, used to censor the media, seldom receive publicity.
Sue Curry-Jansen and Brian Martin, ‘Exposing and opposing censorship: backfire dynamics in freedom-of-speech struggles’, 2004.
Why bother to muzzle sheep?
Attributed (possibly incorrectly) to Ernest Bevin, postwar UK foreign secretary, 1940s.
In the 1950s, Australian newspapers were popular, opinionated and dominated by legendary media barons, notably Ezra Norton, Keith Murdoch and Frank Packer. For the most part they focused on growth, politics and postwar prosperity. Media owners and editors were not used to covering scientific issues, and there was no imperative to do so. They filled their pages with the economic and population boom, and the red scares and paranoid preoccupations of the Cold War. The intricacies of nuclear weaponry were not at the top of the minds of newspaper people, even as the pall of mutually assured destruction descended on a nuclear-armed world.
Since Australia had no nuclear energy or weapons program of its own, the country and its media were several steps removed. And because they
were not attuned to matters nuclear, the Australian media were easily controlled when it came to managing atomic weapons secrecy. Ignorance was helpful in this process. The British nuclear test authorities prepared the way well to manage the media and did so with almost unbelievable success throughout the entire test program.
Why were the Australian media so compliant to the secrecy requirements of the test authorities? At least part of the answer may be found in the top-secret agreements between government and media called D-notices, which encouraged media self-censorship. While their influence was relatively fleeting, D-notices in Australia had their greatest impact during the 1950s. The D-notice system established a formal co-operative relationship between the government and the media in the lead-up to, and during the first few years of, the British nuclear tests in Australia. This relationship set specific reporting ground rules – rules that for the most part the media seemed willing to obey.
The imposition of controls over the media, exercised by both the British and the Australian governments, arose from a long chain of circumstances. A vicious world war in recent memory. The rise of the Soviet Union, a major totalitarian state – now a superpower – whose postwar armaments and strength derived at least partially from the leaking of official Western secrets. To Australia’s north, there was the 1949 communist revolution in China and in 1950, just before Clement Attlee asked Robert Menzies about atomic testing in Australia, North Korea invaded South Korea. When United Nations forces, mainly American, were called to defend the South fears grew that the Cold War might become hot at any time. Australian troops soon joined the action. All of these factors made Australia generally, and its government in particular, jittery and insecure – and ready to do whatever it took to buy postwar security.
In addition, a series of postwar scandals about supplying security information to the Soviet Union had implicated the Australian public service. Australia found itself in the uncomfortable position of needing to convince both the UK and the US that it could keep security secrets. Collaboration on national security issues between Australia and its two main allies depended upon making fundamental changes to the way Australia conducted itself, particularly with the new dynamics around nuclear weaponry and the arms race. In June 1948, relations with the US were ruptured when Washington suspended the flow of classified military information to Australia. Combined pressure from Westminster and Washington led to the establishment of ASIO as a domestic spy service in March 1949.
Later that year Menzies led the Liberal Party to its first term in government, ushering in a lengthy era of conservatism. Menzies, a former constitutional lawyer, was a fatherly figure, with his shock of white hair, his beetle-brow, his tall and well-built frame and his double-breasted suits. Revisionists have since portrayed his politics as opportunistic, relying upon Cold War fears to shore up his support, but during his stately, 16-year second prime ministership, mainstream Australia mostly viewed him as solid and safe.
The Liberal Party of Australia was formed in 1945. Menzies had previously been prime minister between 1939 and 1941 when he headed the soon-to-be-defunct United Australia Party. His short and unhappy two years as a wartime prime minister taught him valuable lessons. Keeping tight control of national security matters came naturally to him, and his distrust of the media had a long history. His second prime ministership came at a time of pervasive anti-communism in Western countries, set in motion in part by the aggressive pursuit of atomic weapons by the Soviet Union. Menzies was elected to his first postwar term on a national security platform and a pledge to outlaw the Communist Party. The government passed anti-communist legislation, but its bill was struck down by the High Court. A referendum intended to give the Australian parliament the power to ban the Communist Party was narrowly defeated in 1951.
Despite this failure, Menzies gained great political capital out of defence and security issues throughout his long tenure, which spanned seven general elections, until his retirement in January 1966. In his autobiography, Menzies wrote about tightening national security with the advent of ASIO, noting that his predecessor Ben Chifley ‘laid down a rule, which I subsequently strictly observed, that ASIO must work in secret (since it was trying to counter an enemy who worked in secret), and that the details of its activities should not be exposed in Parliament or to the public at large’.
ASIO’s role, roughly equivalent to that of Britain’s MI5, was to deal with internal security issues. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, a new (and for many years totally secret) external security organisation equating to Britain’s MI6, was established in 1952, although the government did not acknowledge the service publicly until the 1980s. It remains subject to a (notional) D-notice to this day, despite some controversial breaches by the Australian media over the years.
Fear was in the air and the world seemed more dangerous than ever. The atomic arms race escalated, along with international political tensions. Britain had been testing long-range guided missiles since 1946 at Woomera in the South Australian desert, and, apart from the brief cessation in the late 1940s because of security scandals, the Woomera test range was used until 1980. In fact, Australia hosted a large proportion of the UK’s postwar weapons testing program. Given this central involvement in the weapons testing activities of another nation, initiating an Australian D-notice system to manage media information now looks as inevitable as establishing a spy service.
The British Government needed Australia’s geographic assets and its distance from the British electorate but was not convinced of Australia’s soundness in managing security issues. These doubts were not helped by the Petrov spy scandal that began in April 1954, on the eve of a federal election, when Vladimir Petrov, a Canberra-based junior Soviet diplomat, defected to Australia. Petrov claimed there was a communist spy ring in Australia that included diplomats, journalists, academics and even Labor Party staff members. This quintessential Cold War saga was sparked by the disruption in the Soviet Union after the death in March 1953 of the cruel dictator Joseph Stalin. Petrov feared for his life if he returned home. His wife, Evdokia Petrova, taken forcibly by armed Soviet escorts and on her way back to Russia, was rescued by ASIO agents at Darwin airport on Menzies’ direct orders. A famous photograph of her being manhandled by KGB operatives on the tarmac evokes the paranoid atmosphere of that time. The drama led to an Australian Royal Commission on Espionage and the severing of diplomatic relations with the USSR until 1959. In fractious and paranoid times, Menzies brought security issues to the top of the political agenda.
When its security record caused significant damage to its international relationships, Australia had some fence-mending to do. The Americans in particular were extremely wary of Australia’s approach to security, and the British became hypersensitive about lax secret keeping, particularly as they developed their plans to test nuclear weaponry. In fact, evidence suggests that the British even used Australian security slackness as an excuse. An official from the CRO, the authority that liaised between the British Government and members of the Commonwealth, wrote in April 1952, ‘By explaining to the Australians the [security] measures we consider satisfactory, we shall deprive ourselves of the easiest excuse for withholding from them information about atomic matters in the future’. The perception of slack Australian security could be valuable to the Brits.
Democratic governments have to tread carefully when they seek to manage the media. Media culture (if not the daily reality) adheres strongly to the idea of the fourth estate, which demands that journalists hold power structures to account. This idea arose during the Enlightenment and forms a backdrop to media in democratic countries. Limiting the media by legislation is politically unwise because the backlash can be brutal. How, then, to achieve control? In Australia, for a short while, as the insecurities and heightened patriotism of the Cold War played out, D-notices became the favoured mechanism. These new directives particularly influenced the coverage of the early atomic tests.
The D-notice system, guided by
a secret committee that numbered senior media representatives, politicians, bureaucrats and military leaders among its ranks, set up a dynamic between the British nuclear test authorities, the Australian Government and the Australian media. It proved an effective way to get the media to report officially vetted information and to dissuade them from seeking other sources for their stories. The media were in effect ‘trained’ not to step into the realm of independent inquiry in relation to the British nuclear tests. The D-notice system was important in establishing this relationship.
The British system of D-notices, short for Defence notices, dates back to 1912. That system was set up following the proclamation of its famous Official Secrets Act 1911 and has been used extensively since. It has never had any legal authority, since legislation aimed at media censorship would cause unproductive outrage among media organisations and the general public alike. Also, for the UK authorities D-notices were a way of ensuring ‘prior restraint’ – in other words, media self-censorship. Convincing media practitioners not to publish national security information was less hazardous and more effective than pursuing media outlets if and when they did so. Australia has never had an exact equivalent of the Official Secrets Act, although the Crimes Act 1914 does cover aspects of unauthorised disclosure of Commonwealth classified information.
The Official Secrets Act (which was updated in 1990) applied to all British test personnel, military and scientific, in Australia, while the Crimes Act covered Australian personnel. Both limited what participants could say about what they knew and saw. The British legislation was especially rigid, stipulating lengthy prison sentences for breaches. Many of the people who took part in the tests would have found this sufficiently threatening to silence them, and certainly to constrain them from talking to the media. The Australian Crimes Act was not as prescriptive, and the penalties for talking to journalists were less severe. However, the laws of both countries placed real restrictions on potential sources for journalists. But while that side of the equation – the potential sources – seemed under control, knowledgeable insiders could still surreptitiously disclose information to the media. The D-notice system was established to manage the other side of the equation, the media themselves.
Atomic Thunder Page 22