Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

  On 23 September 1968, the Australian Government, headed by the Liberal prime minister John Gorton, allowed the British to sign away responsibility for the Maralinga site. The memorandum outlining the terms of the agreement was backdated to 21 December 1967. The agreement was struck on the basis of the flawed Pearce Report and was not seriously challenged by any Australian official until the issue was forced in the early 1990s. In part, the agreement stated that the UK Government was ‘released from all liabilities and responsibilities’. In years to come, the British would assert this agreement with considerable vigour and, for quite a while, with notable success. When the British formally withdrew from Maralinga, the federal government assumed responsibility. The plan was eventually to return it to South Australia, although it took longer than originally envisaged.

  Did Pearce know that his clean-up operations were inadequate and his infamous report misleading? The question is difficult to answer. At the Royal Commission Pearce vigorously defended his record and stood by his report. He resisted any attempt by lawyers cross-examining him to admit his work was sub-standard or the report was intended to give a false impression. At the same time, he was a British physicist with little real understanding of the differences between the Australian landscape and the gentler fields of England. And he had no real incentive to spend time or effort on divesting the British Government of a site that was by then a white elephant. He was an AWRE insider, so he may well have had access to the data from Roller Coaster that proved to be the key to understanding the true level of Maralinga contamination. However, the Royal Commission did not know about Roller Coaster, and Pearce was not questioned about it. Whether the deficiencies were of commission or omission cannot be determined, although either way the outcome was the same. Moroney defended Pearce at the Royal Commission. Like him, he believed that no-one was likely to come to live at the test site. The whole thing would fade from people’s minds leaving a deserted backwater, both physically and metaphorically. Moroney changed his views in the early 1990s, when he calculated the weight of British deceit in terms of kilograms of loose plutonium.

  If anything, the clean-up at Monte Bello, which was not subject to an agreement, was even more inadequate than that of the mainland. Some fences and signs were erected at the time, but the islands were not patrolled. The areas were tested in 1962, and radiation levels were found to have fallen somewhat from their 1956 heights. Operation Cool Off in 1965, sparked by news that oil exploration was about to get underway at nearby Barrow Island, involved putting up a few fences around the G1 and G2 sites, but that was about the extent of remediation measures at Monte Bello until much later.

  The most concerted effort to bury contaminated debris and remove rubbish was a 1979 Royal Australian Engineers rehabilitation program called Operation Capelin. In 1983, the team from the ARL visited Monte Bello. Geoff Williams and his colleagues found pieces of the frigate HMS Plym, including a massive drive-shaft (hot with cobalt-60 from the neutron irradiation of the steel), scattered over the beach of Trimouille Island adjacent to where the Plym device had been exploded. ARL chief Keith Lokan wrote to the British high commissioner in Canberra pointing out the problem of the British leaving the island contaminated with activated pieces of steel debris from the Plym. In response came the put-down ‘Everyone knows when you explode a nuclear weapon on a ship, the whole ship is vaporised’. Australian scientists had proof that the ship did not disappear into the ether, in the form of substantial contaminated material lying on the beach. Trimouille was also left with a coating of black dust made up mostly of iron oxides from the Plym metal. The 1956 Mosaic tests left about eight islands contaminated.

  The tests themselves had many foolhardy elements to them. The clean-up attempts during the 1960s were no better. All three test sites in Australia were left unsafe. By the time Pearce wrote his report and cleared out, no doubt thinking (incorrectly) that his association with Australia was over, probably only the Soviet Union rivalled parts of Australian territory for radioactive contamination. Robert Milliken, writing before the 1990s clean-up, quoted evidence given to the Royal Commission confirming that ‘Maralinga is probably the only place in the Western world where plutonium is dispersed without precise knowledge of how much is above and below the ground’. There is no doubt that the British authorities would have been pleased if matters had remained that way. They did not. A great uncovering was about to begin.

  10

  Media, politics and the Royal Commission

  It would seem that rumour, innuendo and conveniently selective recollection place an obligation upon me every six months or so to seek to quieten public agitation which is fomented with respect to the Maralinga tests. The motives of the activists seem, at best, curious.

  James Killen, minister for Defence, House of Representatives, 1978.

  I am aware that the British Government and some members of the Australian scientific establishment have adopted the view that this Royal Commission is largely a waste of time.

  Justice James McClelland, opening remarks at the London sessions of the Royal Commission, 1985.

  What a difference a generation makes. The great uncovering of the events at Maralinga depended upon factors that now seem inevitable – because they happened. But in fact, the aftermath of the nuclear tests need not have been uncovered at all. The contamination of the test ground might have stayed buried at the site, under layers of secrecy and inertia. This book might not exist but for multiple little uncoverings that brought the saga to light. Journalists played an honourable role, as did nuclear veterans, politicians and Indigenous activists, among others. The secrecy agenda that had seemed so monolithic and immovable at the time of the tests started to crumble in the mid-1970s.

  The D-notice system was still in place and the relevant laws had not changed, but Australian politics and media had. In fact, Australian society itself had shifted. In a more complex political situation, the simple truisms of the anti-communist 1950s and 1960s no longer prevailed. The Soviet bloc was not yet dismantled, but, after global progress towards nuclear non-proliferation, the good-versus-evil grand narrative of the Cold War had lost much of its power to animate Australian politics.

  The Australian media, having dropped their Menzies era compliance, began nurturing some influential and resourceful investigative journalists who were not interested in comforting the powerful. This transformation of Australian society followed the election, on 5 December 1972, of an ALP government headed by the exhilaratingly reckless Gough Whitlam, a man who crashed through the landscape, exciting some and scaring others. After many years of conservative government, Whitlam threw out the conservative playbook and redesigned the underpinnings of Australian society. A rising generation of ambitious investigative journalists had much to write about, particularly when the governor-general John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975, after a period of rapid reform and political scandal. It lasted only three years, but it burned bright and changed everything before it burned out.

  The transformation was pervasive. It affected the perception of Maralinga not so much directly, but through the subtle shifts in the public view of government, a casting-off of deference. The way the media treated ministers shifted markedly too. During the 1950s the minister for Supply Howard Beale, the government face of the test program, had informed the media about the tests. This generally involved quarantining some information, and carefully managing the rest. Journalists had largely obeyed his requests to abide by information restrictions, backed by D-notices that outlined specific limits on what the media could report.

  Liberal Party Defence minister Jim Killen, who had prime responsibility for managing the issue from 1975 to 1978, had no such control over the media. Initially he seemed caught out about what was at Maralinga. Skilled, motivated journalists kept up the pursuit and placed enormous pressure on him and the government. Killen’s bon vivant and urbane image, not dissimilar to Beale’s, was by this time something of an anachronism. His disdain for
media scrutiny worked against him rather than protecting him as it had Beale. The journalists who worked on the Maralinga issue from the mid-1970s had no interest in waiting for carefully crafted and officially cleared media statements. They went looking for their own information.

  The development of the more assertive media in Australia was not in itself sufficient to reveal the story about Maralinga’s plutonium contamination. The ongoing health problems suffered by both service personnel and Indigenous people who had been in the vicinity of the Maralinga and Emu Field tests led to public campaigns. Also, with the rise of the Indigenous rights movement throughout the 1970s, the prospect of returning the Maralinga lands (including Emu Field) to the traditional owners in 1984 forced discussion on the state of the site into the open.

  At first, the issue came to the surface intermittently but quickly died down again. In parliament on 14 September 1972, Lance Barnard, the deputy leader of the Opposition, asked Liberal minister for Supply Vic Garland about radioactive contamination at Maralinga. Barnard specifically inquired as to whether the British had flown in lead-lined boxes of radioactive waste to bury surreptitiously at the test site. Garland’s less than satisfactory answer, and a misleading public statement at the same time, came back to haunt Killen a few years later when he initially followed Garland’s inaccurate lead. Garland maintained that the radioactive waste buried at Maralinga had a half-life of 15 to 20 years and did not acknowledge the much more dangerous plutonium contamination at the site. Garland had access to the classified Pearce Report, which had been available since 1968 to all security-cleared members of the Australian Government, but his 1972 statements suggest that he had no knowledge of its contents.

  In that year, 1972, the French were carrying out atmospheric atomic weapons tests at French Polynesia in the Pacific. This created anxiety in Australia because the tests were so close, and, inevitably, some commentators turned their thoughts to Australia’s own role in testing atomic weapons. In June 1972, a story by Michael Symons in the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few that picked up on Garland’s statements, harked back to the British test series, quoting Ernest Titterton’s response to the airdropped Buffalo shot in October 1956:

  The chairman of the newly formed Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee, Professor E. W. Titterton, said ‘There is no danger of significant fallout outside the immediate target area’. That was virtually all that was reported in the newspapers at the time, although there was a continuing debate among politicians and scientists about the Maralinga tests.

  The issue rapidly died away. Prominent left-wing ALP politician Tom Uren revived it four years later in federal parliament, when he was deputy leader of the Opposition. Uren was broadly attuned to nuclear issues and had a strong record in opposing uranium mining. His stance was influenced by a series of 1960s articles in The Age by Barry Commoner, an American biologist, who had suggested that there was no possible solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Uren was also responsive to representations from nuclear veterans concerned about their health and among the first to place the plutonium legacy at Maralinga onto a crowded political agenda.

  Uren asked Killen a bombshell question in parliament on 9 December 1976: ‘Is it true that, during the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing between 1958 and 1961, Australia co-operated with the British on conducting secret atomic “trigger” tests at Maralinga and that waste and debris from these tests were buried at Maralinga?’ Uren explicitly requested that a Royal Commission be set up to investigate all aspects of the Maralinga test program. He simultaneously issued a public statement saying, ‘During [the test] moratorium period the Australian government co-operated with the British government to secretly carry out certain atomic tests in the Maralinga area … The explosions caused by these tests were so small that they could escape public scrutiny and international detection’.

  In his response Killen wrongly described Operation Buffalo in 1956 as the last test series, overlooking Antler, the final major trial in 1957. It was long before the Vixen B tests, too, although he alluded to the minor trials: ‘I am not aware of any explosions that took place between 1958 and 1961. I am aware of certain trials, which I distinguish from explosions, as presently advised, that took place. They were conducted pursuant to an agreement between the United Kingdom and Australia’. Killen undertook to carry out further inquiries, while telling parliament he had witnessed the second test in Operation Buffalo. A number of Australian parliamentarians, including Gough Whitlam, had attended this test, having originally been scheduled to attend the first Buffalo test but missing out because of the chaos caused by the delays. Killen even wrote a story for Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, published on 7 October 1956, titled ‘Watched “small” A-blast: sight I will never forget’.

  So some tantalising pieces of information were emerging, but the media did not pick up the story. Maralinga was not yet a significant political issue and few people knew the name. The only substantial media references to possible plutonium in the South Australian desert were in the Adelaide papers: the Advertiser in a sequence of stories between 3 and 10 December 1976, and the News in a prominent article on 17 December.

  The first Advertiser story, on 3 December, was based on the revelations of Maralinga veteran Avon Hudson, who had been interviewed on the ABC radio program AM the previous day. Hudson told the Advertiser that plutonium was buried at Maralinga. ‘Mr Avon Hudson, of Balaklava, broke 15 years silence last night to talk of his role in what he called a dumping ground for radioactive waste from Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s.’ He asserted that the British has also shipped in radioactive waste to be buried at Maralinga, saying that his conscience had driven him to the media to tell his story: ‘It has had a marked effect on my life, knowing there are dangerous elements out there – elements that I now know are the most dangerous things in the world’. These were the same claims that Barnard had asked Garland about in 1972. Hudson told an anecdote about an Aldermaston official who, when he was ‘under the weather’, asserted that the radioactive contents of barrels that Hudson believed contained plutonium should have been dumped into the Atlantic Ocean in order to save ‘a lot of trouble’. While it now appears unlikely that the British actually imported waste to bury at the Maralinga site, Hudson’s allegations did direct attention to exactly what was there.

  The next day the Advertiser quoted a member of a salvage party recovering building materials at Maralinga, Mr E Dutsche, who, citing Defence Department officials, said he had been assured by people at the site that no plutonium had been buried in the area. When Hudson was approached for comment, he said he was not surprised by the denials since this was all he had ever received from politicians. The South Australian minister for Mines and Energy Hugh Hudson (no known relation to Avon) said the issue was a Commonwealth matter. A spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Authority in the UK said ‘it was “highly unlikely” Britain had ever exported nuclear waste to Australia’.

  Further stories ran in the Advertiser. On 9 December, science writer Barry Hailstone brought some scientific fact into the coverage. He reported that Professor HJ De Bruin, who had been a principal research scientist for the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, had called for an inquiry into waste at the site. On 10 December the paper ran a front page story reporting that Killen had ordered an inquiry. The story also reiterated British denials about radioactive waste at Maralinga. It quoted John Coulter, then vice-president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and later an Australian Democrats senator, who said that ‘the Australian and British governments had maintained secrecy about nuclear testing at Maralinga after 1957 because such tests would have violated international agreements. But there [still] seems to be a blanket of silence about this’.

  Like the stories in Advertiser, the front page story in the News, which appeared with the huge banner headline ‘Plutonium buried at Maralinga’, could not have been more prominent. It referred to three reports on the issue of radioactive waste, and although it was not named, on
e was most likely the Pearce Report, which was still secret. The story indicated that Minister Hudson had called on the federal government to instigate ‘radiation monitoring programs for the Maralinga area’ and recommended health checks for local Aborigines, a step forwards from his earlier more dismissive position. Still, it seemed everyone wanted to keep their distance. The federal minister for the Environment Kevin Newman advised his department not to get involved, saying that the problem was primarily one for Defence. Foreign Affairs was also concerned about the media interest in Maralinga, especially as Australia pursued its ambition to mine and export uranium.

  The claims by Avon Hudson were causing high-level concern. Under Australia’s agreement with the IAEA it had to provide an inventory of all fissionable materials and guarantee that no such materials could be used to manufacture weapons. The possibility of this story becoming a serious and potentially damaging problem for the federal government was well known to insiders, including Roy Fernandez, the acting deputy secretary in Foreign Affairs, who pointed out that ‘the safety criteria applying 15 to 20 years ago to the storage of plutonium might not be acceptable in the climate of to-day’s opinion’. This made ‘excessive publicity’ and ‘unwarranted speculation’ about Maralinga undesirable.

  In February 1977, Killen, echoing Garland, wrote to Uren saying that there was no evidence to substantiate the claim of plutonium contamination at the site, a position he later had to retract. In fact, around the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald contradicted Killen’s stance, using his own department’s report. The story quoted the government’s chief defence scientist Dr John Farrands and claimed that