Atomic Thunder
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Toohey prepared two more stories in this series. On 12 October he quoted Killen saying, ‘It is characteristic of a certain kind of so-called journalism in this country that certain sections of my Cabinet submission were reported accurately, while other parts were selected for distortion to contrive a mixture that would create a sensational impact and alarm the public’. The next day Toohey questioned whether the size and unwieldiness of the Defence Department bureaucracy had contributed to the Maralinga plutonium controversy: ‘In the Maralinga case … there have been accusations within the department that relevant information about the plutonium buried at the South Australian site of the British nuclear tests has not flowed to all levels of the department that needed to know’.
By 13 October 1978, both government and Opposition politicians were claiming that they were ignorant of what was at Maralinga, that others had misled them, or that someone from the other side had misled parliament. Hayden said Garland had misled parliament in 1972, while former Labor Defence minister Lance Barnard said his own department had misled him about Maralinga in 1973. The former Labor minister for Environment and Conservation Moss Cass said that he could not remember being told about plutonium buried at Maralinga, a claim undermined by a letter he wrote dated 3 December 1974 in which he referred to ‘long lived and highly radioactive wastes contained in the Airfield Cemetery’, seemingly a reference to the ‘discrete mass’ later removed by the British. The letter did not specifically mention plutonium but did mention contamination both at the airfield and at Taranaki and called for a survey to better understand how radioactive wastes had been stored, dispersed and taken up by the ‘biosystem’. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser countered by saying that the previous government had had as much information available as the current one. While this claim was true, it did not reflect much credit on the efforts of his own ministers.
Reacting to media reports about Maralinga and concerns from his state constituency, the premier of South Australia Don Dunstan wrote to Fraser asking for a full inquiry. The letter was tabled in evidence to Senate Estimates on 17 October 1978 and contained the following statement: ‘On a matter of such fundamental significance to public health and safety as the proper disposal of plutonium and other high level radio active wastes, it is essential that the fullest information on security and other precautions be assembled’.
As the story reverberated around Canberra, Fraser asked for briefings. A senior adviser in the Resources Branch, GF Cadogan-Cowper, set out the history of the issue in parliament from 1972 in a briefing note dated 13 October. He noted that the Opposition might focus on Vic Garland’s answer: ‘Should you be questioned on the dumping of wastes it may be necessary to note that the advice Mr Garland received was apparently incomplete’. In questionable advice, given the long half-life of the Maralinga plutonium, he told Fraser, ‘Emphasis could be laid on the short half life of the fission products and that because of their short half life the quantity has decreased rapidly over the 20 years since the tests’.
A few days later in the Herald, Peter Bowers took stock of the frenetic activity since the Toohey story had broken: ‘We have learned more about what is buried at Maralinga in the past week than in the past 20 years. And there is much more yet to be learned about the Maralinga caper’. The era of revelations was now underway. Bowers summed up his view of the events:
The real issue is why the presence of plutonium had been kept so long not only from the Australian people but, apparently, from the Australian Government. The real danger – the ever present danger – is that governments and their bureaucracies are secretive and tell the public only what they think the public should know. The Australian public would still be ignorant of what was buried by the British at Maralinga 20 years ago [were] it not for the fact that a Cabinet document was leaked to a reporter.
Brian Toohey set in motion years of media scrutiny of the legacy of Maralinga. He maintained an interest in the story well into the term of Bob Hawke’s Labor government that came to power in March 1983. By then Toohey had moved to the National Times. Several months before the McClelland Royal Commission into the British nuclear tests began, Toohey wrote a feature based on another leak titled ‘Plutonium on the wind: the terrible legacy of Maralinga’, which contained a detailed examination of the Vixen B issue. Toohey had obtained the full, uncensored Pearce Report, still classified at that time and available publicly only in what he called a ‘sanitised’ form. He was unable to reveal his source but said, ‘The backdrop was a concern that a proper clean-up occur’.
The National Times feature had much more to say about the nature of Vixen B than his earlier stories: ‘The experiments were usually described as point safety tests, despite the obvious irony in the use of the word “safety” for operations that left plutonium scattered across the countryside’. The feature was an indictment of the Maralinga plutonium legacy. ‘It would seem that what the British and Australian authorities described as minor experiments in fact involved the cavalier dispersal of plutonium and have created a far greater health hazard at Maralinga than the full-scale atomic tests.’
Most mainstream news media began reporting the Maralinga story after Toohey’s articles in the Australian Financial Review. One political casualty of the tumult was soon apparent when Cabinet moved responsibility for Maralinga from Killen’s Defence portfolio to the minister for National Development Kevin Newman. ‘This follows a row which highly embarrassed the government over the deposits of plutonium at the toxic waste site at Maralinga in South Australia’, The Australian reported on 10 November 1978.
The removal of Jim Killen did not slow the story down. The Australian kept up pressure on the federal government with a front page story featuring the huge headline ‘“Take it back” requests ignored: British snub on plutonium plea’. This story highlighted a problem that dated back to the time of the tests themselves – that the British were slow to answer an Australian request.
The Government realises that it must take some action over the ‘recoverable’ plutonium because of its obligations under international nuclear safeguard agreements which have a strong bearing on the future development of the Australian uranium industry. It is understood that the government decision that the plutonium should be removed has received a sympathetic response from bureaucrats in England but this has not been matched by the response of the politicians.
This story prompted more activity in federal parliament. Labor senator Gareth Evans drafted a question to the leader of the government in the Senate John Carrick, a rough draft of which, with short-hand forms of expression, remains on the official Maralinga file:
Is it true as reported in this morning’s Australian that the British govt has snubbed Ausn requests to remove waste plutonium buried at Maralinga … in that it has failed to respond to Ausn requests to this effect by the required deadline of 7 November? If this is so, and if the British govt continues to remain unbeguiled by the subtleties of Ausn diplomacy, what other plans does the Ausn Govt have in mind for the safeguarding of this material?
Senator Carrick prepared a reply claiming he hadn’t read the story and had no knowledge of any breakdown in discussions between the Australian and British governments. The reply belied the activity behind the scenes. The Department of Foreign Affairs sent a cablegram to its London officials summarising the substance of The Australian story. This followed up a cablegram five days earlier, in which the growing crisis was spelled out:
Ministers remain under considerable pressure on this issue from press and parliamentary questioning … In addition to questions without notice, some fourteen questions on Maralinga and the visit of the British technical team are on notice to be answered. There is also press speculation that we have to rely on Britain on the alleged ground that AAEC [Australian Atomic Energy Commission] is not capable of dealing with the problem.
Finally the pressure was relieved when the federal government extracted an undertaking from the UK to remove the airfield plutonium. It was a win. Ma
lcolm Fraser wrote to Premier Dunstan in February 1979, saying, ‘I am glad that a result so satisfactory to both our Governments has been achieved’. Fraser also became more comfortable about Maralinga information being released to the public. He said in this letter that ‘as much information on Maralinga as possible should be made public’. He even recommended the release of most of the discredited Pearce Report, minus details about the locations of buried contaminated materials. It was months after Brian Toohey had made the main information in the report public.
The Advertiser began a high-profile campaign seeking justice for the nuclear veterans, resulting in a series of stories run over a week in April 1980. The stories, by reporters David English and Peter De Ionno, presented case studies backing the calls for compensation for service personnel said to have been harmed by their service at Maralinga. The stories were bolstered by an editorial on 17 April 1980:
The testing of British atomic weapons at Maralinga … ended many years ago, but the consequences linger on. There was a brief flurry in 1978 when it was revealed that potentially radioactive waste material, since removed to the UK, had been left at the test site. Now there is further, and more serious, concern at the disclosure of the possible effects of radiation contamination of people exposed to the fall-out from those tests.
These stories began putting names and faces to the statistics of service personnel who had been at Maralinga. The Irish immigrant James Barry had died of cancer in 1966 at the age of 50 after working as a builder at the test site. His photo appeared under the heading ‘A victim of Maralinga?’ alongside a picture of his widow. The story claimed that about 20 ex-service personnel had died of cancer or had contracted it. It quoted Barry’s widow, Mary Jane Barry: ‘He wasn’t supposed to tell me anything, because of the Secrets Act and all, but he told me bits and pieces. He said that things were very lax up there; they didn’t take enough precautions’.
The Advertiser series gave a forum to prominent aggrieved ex-Maralinga hands such as Avon Hudson in more detail than ever before. In one article, Hudson addressed the possible breaching of international agreements: ‘Mr Hudson believes that nuclear bomb tests were conducted by the British on the range after the [official] bomb-tests. Atomic weapons tests after 1958 would have been in breach of an informal moratorium on bomb experiments made between the UK, US and USSR in 1958’. The same article mentioned Maralinga veteran Richard (Ric) Johnstone, one of the first (in 1973) to receive a Commonwealth pension when unable to work because of symptoms, he said, that were due to his six months of service at Maralinga during the 1956 Buffalo series. In 1988, he was the first person to be awarded damages by the courts, after a long battle, winning $679 500 in compensation.
In April 1984, the Australian magazine New Journalist ran a critique of the test era journalism. In ‘Buffalo Bill and the Maralingers’, Lindy Woodward was scathing of their role. Journalists had, as now, an important role in deciphering pronouncements on the safety of atomic technology, she wrote, but instead took ‘the experts’ at their word that the tests were totally safe and crucial to peace. ‘It was a national suspension of disbelief, indulged in and encouraged by the media.’ Even British journalist Chapman Pincher, seen as a trouble-maker and ‘scoop journalist’ by the Australian and UK governments at the time, fell short in this account: ‘Chapman Pincher, the science writer from the London Daily Express, was the Advertiser’s own “expert” on the tests, but his reports were short on scientific analysis, and big on British enthusiasm for what was going on in the Australian desert’.
A new federal government came to office on 5 March 1983 under the leadership of Labor’s Bob Hawke. For its first 18 months, Senator Peter Walsh as minister for Mines and Energy was responsible for dealing with the Maralinga aftermath. Walsh was widely disliked, a dour, ‘dry’ economic rationalist, with little of the urbane charm of Beale or Killen. He soon understood the issue of British nuclear tests could become a major political problem for the new government if it was not dealt with expeditiously. During 1984, he issued prolific media releases on the tests, until a reshuffle late in the year saw him head off to a legendary stint as Finance minister. After Walsh’s departure, Gareth Evans took on the portfolio.
Walsh commissioned the Kerr Report into the risks to the Australian population from atmospheric fallout during the tests. He announced the report, under Charles Kerr, professor of preventive and social medicine at the University of Sydney, on 15 May 1984, and it reported 16 days later. It was not a public inquiry, but Kerr did have powers to call expert witnesses and to examine all published scientific literature and other data relevant to the tests. Kerr’s report forcefully criticised the most comprehensive account of the British nuclear tests to that point, the 1983 AIRAC 9 report, commissioned in 1980 by the minister for Science and the Environment David Thomson. The McClelland Royal Commission subsequently endorsed the demolition job carried out by Kerr.
AIRAC fought back. Emeritus Professor AM Clark, its chair in 1984, wrote to Barry Cohen, minister for Home Affairs and Environment, saying the Kerr Report was not objective and contained numerous ‘internal contradictions and apparent misunderstandings’. Clark’s objections came to nothing – AIRAC, with its roots in the AWTSC, was discredited. Kerr called for a public inquiry to further probe the serious issues that his team had turned up. Walsh, although apparently opposed to setting up an expensive inquiry (according to radiation scientist Peter Burns, Walsh ‘said the Royal Commission was just a lawyer’s picnic, a waste of time and money’), was forced into it as the weight of evidence became too heavy and the political risk too great. The ARL scientific team in 1984 came back with evidence of loose plutonium in large quantities on the site, prompting Walsh to make statements about the need to fully understand exactly what was there. The fundamental disagreement between AIRAC and the Kerr Report was the final straw.
Walsh announced the establishment of the Royal Commission on 5 July 1984. In his media release, he indicated that the inquiry had been charged in particular with examining ‘measures that were taken for protection of persons against the harmful effects of ionising radiation and the dispersal of radioactive substances and toxic materials as judged against standards applicable at the time and with reference to standards of today’. The Royal Commission was headed by Jim McClelland, a colourful former Whitlam government minister known to many as Diamond Jim. At that time, McClelland was chief judge of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales. The two other commissioners were Jill Fitch, senior health physicist for the South Australian Health Commission, and William Jonas, lecturer in geography at the University of Newcastle.
By the time he wrote his autobiography, Walsh had major regrets about the McClelland Royal Commission, labelling it as ‘the most unambiguous mistake I made in Government. As is usual with Royal Commissions, the terms of reference were stretched, the budget blew out and the reporting date extended … Lots of us approved when Jim McClelland tipped buckets on Menzies, but this did not justify the $3.5 million it cost the taxpayers’. However, at the time, he showed public support. He had little choice, particularly given the plutonium uncovered at the site in May 1984.
The McClelland Royal Commission was officially opened in Sydney on 22 August 1984, with a second formal opening in Adelaide on 11 September. Oral evidence was taken in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, London and Perth, as well as in remote locations at Marla Bore, Wallatinna and Maralinga in South Australia, and Karratha in Western Australia. After 116 sitting days, all in open session, the final sitting was supposed to be on 26 July 1985, although another sitting was needed in September to hear final submissions. The Royal Commission took oral evidence from 311 witnesses, including 48 Aboriginal people, 18 Australian scientists or technicians and 241 Australian service personnel. It travelled to London to interview a full roster of British witnesses, 40 in all. William Penney, the star witness, was subjected to questioning that was much more probing than any he had been exposed to in the 1950s; enduring it must ha
ve been difficult for someone more accustomed to keeping his own counsel. McClelland actually liked Penney, describing him in a later interview as ‘a nice old man. I got the impression that he wasn’t terribly proud of having used his immense scientific skills on an exercise that was really an exercise in futility’. McClelland thanked Penney warmly for his evidence, given while the old nuclear scientist was ailing, and singled him out in the official Royal Commission acknowledgments, saying, ‘In particular, Lord Penney, who interrupted his retirement to give the Royal Commission the benefit of his unique experience and vast knowledge’.
The epic transcript contains the historical and technical story of the test series, but also the human story. In many ways it is a remarkable document, with moments of tears, sadness, humour, frustration and fury. The final report strongly condemned just about every aspect of the British nuclear tests. It was long-delayed national revenge, needed to lance a boil. Australia has held scores of Royal commissions over more than a century. Few have been as thorough, angry or applauded as this one. Not all of its recommendations were achieved, however. First, the recommendation that a Maralinga commission be established to oversee a clean-up and manage the range, with representation from the traditional owners as well as the UK, Australian and South Australian governments, did not come to pass in the form envisaged by Jim McClelland. However, the Maralinga Tjarutja people were represented on the Maralinga Consultative Group with representatives from the South Australian and UK governments. Also, the Australian Government paid for independent scientific advice for the Maralinga Tjarutja people beyond the recommendations of the Royal Commission report. Second, no national register of Indigenous people and veterans harmed by the tests was ever established. Third, despite the report’s recommendation that the UK Government pick up the tab for the clean-up, after years of wrangling, Britain paid less than half. The real power of the Royal Commission was in the fact that it took the side of Australia against its nuclear coloniser.