In the New Scientist story, Anderson had paraphrased Hamilton, who had equated dose levels at Maralinga ‘to those in Cornwall from naturally occurring radon gas’. He had also given Geoff Williams’ rebuttal, which had described Hamilton as mischievous: ‘It is not acceptable internationally to compare levels of man-made radioactivity with those of a naturally occurring radionuclide … Doses in Cornwall could reach 8 millisieverts a year. But, according to the TAG, because of the Aboriginal lifestyle, a child living near Taranaki could inhale more than 460 millisieverts a year’. Young children were at the greatest risk, because they were closer to the dusty ground and had smaller body mass.
Anderson was asked several times in different interviews to speculate on what the British knew and when they knew it. He tried to be balanced and fair. When asked by one host if it was proved that the British had knowingly lied, Anderson replied:
Well that’s a very, very good question. Was it deceit or not? You have to go back to the time … the world was different 30 or 40 years ago. These were cloak and dagger days and it has been suggested to me particularly by a person who was involved a lot on the Australian side at the time that the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, or parts of the Establishment, may not have been talking to each other. So whether it was deceit and deliberate is another matter – I think the crucial thing from Australia’s point of view is that it happened, and therefore 40 years on Australia believes it has a moral right for the British to participate again in a cleanup.
Almost certainly Anderson was referring here to Moroney, who had guided much of his understanding of the issue. The host continued with the theme of deceit, commenting that the key question was British culpability ‘and the extent to which Australian officials may have been part of that conspiracy of silence’. Anderson said:
Whether there was any Australian duplicity in it is another interesting point … I guess one of the questions that comes up is: why didn’t Australia do a more thorough job itself at the time and find out what was going on back then? Of course I get back to the point that this was a long time ago. I think that the British position was probably to a large extent taken and not questioned. We were much, much closer to the British in those days – in fact it was suggested in the parliament in London the other day that a lot of this, as far as the arrangement to do the testing, was stitched up in a telephone call between Robert Menzies and Clement Attlee, who was the British PM at the time. I doubt very much whether telephone calls these days would come to such deals.
In an interview on South Australian radio station 5CK, Simon Royal raised the slightly qualified New Scientist editorial support. The magazine’s editorial had suggested that ‘even if Australia has right on its side, it is too much to expect that Britain should immediately offer to pay for part of the clean-up. The sums of money are not massive by government standards but they are far too big for the Treasury to part with lightly’. The rest of the piece had supported the story. Royal asked Anderson how he felt about the suggestion that Britain shouldn’t immediately offer to pay up. Anderson replied that the editorial had been suggesting Britain come clean first and ‘then, probably, pay up’. Royal asked the question again and Anderson gave his own view:
I think that, in my own personal opinion, the British should pay up, that it is quite clear that the cleanup that was done, Operation Brumby in 1967 and the report that was done into it by Pearce in 1968, it wasn’t correct. For various reasons the cleanup was not done properly. Now we have the technology to do it properly, and Australia I don’t think has been unreasonable – it was presented with a range of options from about $13 million to about $600 million to clean the place up and it has chosen, if you look at the document, bits and pieces of this and that and come up with $101 million. And that to me seems a reasonable amount and really by today’s international standards it is not a huge amount.
Royal was also interested in the role the article might play in the ministerial discussions about to get underway in London, asking if the article added more fuel to the fire. Anderson replied:
I should think so, yes. New Scientist is quite widely read in the UK – it goes to Whitehall in other words. The point is, why we concluded that it was going to be a heated meeting is that in all the public statements that have come out recently, especially in the parliament over there, it’s quite clear that unless there’s something going on behind the scenes, but at least publicly they do not intend to pay up.
The British Government faced other forms of pressure too. A documentary prepared by the BBC, with Australian Government assistance, entitled Secrets in the Sands, was broadcast in Britain on 28 October 1991. It revealed the human and environmental toll of the British tests and was screened just before Crean met Lord Arran, then undersecretary of state for Defence and the Armed Forces, to present a case based on the TAG report and early interpretations of the Roller Coaster data. The material in the New Scientist story had been in official British hands since 1991, having been presented by a senior Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation scientist, Des Davy (then general manager scientific for the organisation, and also convenor of TAG), during an official meeting in December 1991. But the information was not made public. The public and private pressure on the British Government was mounting at this time, far more than it had done during the Royal Commission some years earlier. Anderson’s story seemed to cap off the moral case that Australia had been making for compensation. Less than a week after the New Scientist story appeared, compensation was finally promised.
‘Britain’s dirty deeds at Maralinga’ was an important piece of scientific investigative journalism. It contributed (either directly or indirectly) to a political solution to a longstanding national problem. The story resonated beyond the New Scientist readership, becoming a high-profile mainstream media story in Australia and adding to the body of investigative journalism that finally illuminated Maralinga. The story also provided conclusive proof that the old way of reporting on the British nuclear tests in Australia was gone. Accepting official information, explanations and undertakings was no longer sufficient. The journalists covering the tests and their aftermath now were watchdogs and, true to the metaphor, were dogged in seeking the truth. Anderson’s story was a pivotal moment in the uncovering of Maralinga, marking at last the full transition from opacity to transparency. In this sense it was the culmination of a process that had begun 15 years earlier. Although the Maralinga lands may not have been completely remediated by the compensation deal that was finally struck a few days after the story was published, more was done than if the issue had languished without such intense public scrutiny. The outrage of a wronged servant of the British nuclear tests, John Moroney, found the right outlet. Much to his frustration, terminal illness prevented Moroney from playing the central role he believed his involvement warranted. He did not live to see the outcome of his painstaking Roller Coaster analysis, either, but one must imagine he would have been well pleased.
12
The remains of Maralinga
The little bridge they crossed on the oleander-lined path leading from the airfield to the terminal was called the Bridge of Sighs. Last rites – a sigh of trepidation by those arriving; a sigh of relief by those departing – were often performed on that spot.
John Keane, ‘Maralinga’s afterlife’, 2003.
The whole story, when one looks at it in detail, is rather sordid and the major villain in that sordid story is without doubt the then Prime Minister in the early 1950s, the lickspittle Empire loyalist who regarded Australia as a colonial vassal of the British crown. I refer of course to Sir Robert Menzies, the twentieth century satrap who invited the British to pollute Australia with nuclear fallout: the pseudo patriot who cravenly surrendered Australian sovereignty to a declining imperial power.
Senator Peter Walsh, minister for Mines and Energy,
Australian Senate, 1984.
Thomas Tooke has been with the RAAF since 1943 and has seen service in K
orea and Japan. Now he is sent to Maralinga as a despatch corporal, having been kitted out at the Edinburgh RAAF base north of Adelaide with an extra pair of drab pants, a shirt and a pair of boots. He is bemused that when he arrives at Maralinga in 1956 he is issued with an army uniform as well, without explanation. He has a bigger shock when he arrives at Camp 43, not far from the forward area. The bulldust is like nothing he has ever seen. It’s as fine as talcum powder and gets into everything. He and his comrades find that the bulldust conceals a layer of hard limestone when they try to drive tent pegs into the ground. They have to get jackhammers to make holes in the limestone to raise their two-man tents. They get some gravel from the Watson railway siding to try to damp down the swirling, annoying dust.
The men eat in the marquee and the food’s okay. The blowflies, though, are terrible. Unfortunately, they ‘blow’ the food by laying maggots in it, and bad things happen as a result. He and everyone else he knows have bouts of terrible diarrhoea. He drops from 86 kilograms to 70. That is not the only discomfort. Any metal at the camp is so hot that you can’t touch it, as temperatures soar above 38 degrees Celsius. The open showers have a drum holding several gallons of muddy, salty water held aloft by a hook on the side of a tent. If it’s windy when you take a shower, you have to follow the droplets of water around before they are carried away. There is a coconut oil soap called Seagull Soap, which can lather even in the hard water. Every fortnight on pay day the men get one cake of soap and two razor blades. Tooke hears a rumour about an attempted lynching of a civilian, one of the construction crew, caught cheating at cards. A South Australian policeman apparently stepped in and stopped it. The desert conditions make everyone a bit crazy. Lennie Beadell swings by every so often, with his Land Rover packed to the gunwales, on his way to an even more remote location.
After a while, Tooke moves from the tented camp to Maralinga village. It is a bit more luxurious, but the aluminium sheeting on the roof constantly lifts up and flaps around, requiring endless running repairs. Still, most of the cooks in the village are navy men, and the food is excellent. There are movies six times a week, although sometimes the same film is shown two nights in a row. As the day approaches for the first Maralinga atomic test, the village fills up. Boffins from Britain start to arrive, and observers from New Zealand, America, Canada and other places. Even the observers are pressed into service. No man is left idle; they all get to work on myriad construction tasks. Tooke drives his 10-tonne crane to the forward area. He sees a working group and asks if they know where a colleague is. A cultured voice replies, ‘What regiment is he with?’ Tooke drives off laughing.
One Tree at Maralinga, 27 September 1956. Finally the winds have died down and the countdown begins. Tooke is less than a mile away from the forward area when the awe-inspiring explosion takes place, and eight hours later he enters the forward area with his crane. There are people everywhere, carrying out lots of different tasks. Tooke must recover vehicles deliberately placed there. The health physics people have given him bootees to wear, the only items of protective clothing he is ever given. His other garb is his RAAF overalls. He never receives a film badge or dosimeter. Most of the people sent to recover vehicles from the forward area are RAAF personnel. Some of the vehicles have been tipped over onto their sides. There are tanks, Land Rovers, Commer vans, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, Humber Scout cars and even Swift aircraft. After he comes back from work that day, a Geiger counter is run over him and it clicks slowly. The new, expensive, permanent nuclear test site in the South Australian desert is now fully functional. Tooke has a lot of work to do.
The atomic age arrived when the US dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, heralding an era that seemed to be even more dangerous than the war just ending. When nuclear scientist spies wreaked havoc on postwar security, the British, sidelined by the Americans, were on their own. They embarked on their pigheaded, quixotic, ill-advised, careless but still rather remarkable quest to match the Americans and the Soviets in the nuclear club. In fact, they were not entirely alone, as they co-opted the Australian Government for the task. At all times, the relationship between the British and the Australians was unequal. The British were the masters, and the Australians were the servants. The Australians obediently provided the site and considerable financial and military resources, as well as staunch political backing. The atomic test authorities made the decisions and relayed them, often with inadequate technical detail, to the Australians. When the tests were over and the British were gone, the picture of what they had left behind was alarmingly incomplete. The Pearce Report was no help. What exactly the tests had wrought remained hidden to successive Australian governments and the Australian people for far too many years.
But, one by one, the jigsaw pieces fell into place and the Maralinga story started to take shape. The British authorities have still not given up all the missing pieces. No-one outside a small circle knows why the UK Ministry of Defence still retains some files relating to Vixen B and other issues (including information recently released by WikiLeaks). Whether those files will ever be released is currently unknown. Given Vixen B’s impact on Australian territory, the ongoing refusal to release all the information that relates to those experiments could reasonably be called outrageous. This saga tells us, though, that the British authorities charged with testing the nuclear deterrent did not factor in Australian feelings. The truth is unpalatable but must be faced: Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s was essentially an atomic banana republic, useful only for its resources, especially uranium and land.
Australia tried without the slightest success to have some status in the arrangements. It was not to be. When the world turned and Australia no longer had anything vital to offer, the British left without properly cleaning up their mess. Tellingly, the legendary official British historian Margaret Gowing rarely mentioned Australia throughout her magisterial accounts of the British nuclear enterprise. Australians were not a partner in any sense of the word, just lackeys and useful idiots for the most part. All the historical circumstances that converged after World War II made this inevitable, and it should not perhaps be surprising that this was the reality.
Other realities have to be faced too. Australia, not Britain, was left with severely contaminated territory requiring remediation that took several years to complete. Money was finally squeezed out of a resistant UK, but it covered less than half the cost of the most recent clean-up. And the controversies continue. The 1990s remediation plan was devised using guidelines provided by the IAEA and the International Commission on Radiological Protection. It was monitored by ARPANSA and agreed to by the Maralinga Tjarutja traditional owners. This plan involved securing 500 000 cubic metres of contaminated waste from the tests in 21 pits at the site. When it was completed in 2000, Australian prime minister John Howard called it the ‘world’s best practice clean up’. But nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson, sacked from the clean-up, and Jim Green, an anti-nuclear activist, among others, continue to criticise its inadequacies.
The clean-up project used the expensive electronic technique in situ vitrification, which involved placing electrodes in the pits and running an electric current of up to 4 megawatts through the buried debris, raising it to temperatures up to 2000 degrees Celsius and effectively turning it to glass. But it did not go as planned. The vitrification equipment exploded while in operation at pit 11 (the 13th ‘melt’ in the clean-up program) and sprayed molten material from the pit about 50 metres all around. Fortunately no workers at the site were injured. But the vitrification process was abandoned before all 21 pits were processed, and the remaining waste pits were capped with concrete. The glassy material that had been vitrified was excavated and reburied amid fears that it was too close to the surface. Recently, some media reports have claimed that the Maralinga pits are subsiding and eroding, creating fears that the contamination is not permanently secure. Nevertheless, in March 2003, minister for Science Peter McGowan triumphantly ta
bled the final MARTAC Report in parliament. MARTAC hailed the clean-up as successful.
Alan Parkinson vociferously disagreed, saying that ‘of the hundreds of square kilometres contaminated, only 2.1 square kilometres have been cleaned to the clean-up criterion and, of that, only 0.5 kilometres permits unlimited access. The only people who claim the [clean-up] project a success are paid by the government’. Stuart Woollett, an ARPANSA scientist involved in the clean-up, presented a different view: ‘The release of the MARTAC report marks the end of the considerable work of health physicists, radiation chemists, plant operators, security personnel, surveyors, camp staff, senior public servants, seed planters – the list goes on. Operations, beginning in 1996, have rehabilitated the Maralinga lands for their return to the Maralinga-Tjarutja’. Gregg Borshmann addressed the ongoing controversy in a Background Briefing documentary titled ‘Maralinga: the fall out continues’, that aired on ABC Radio National in April 2000. Every so often, public disquiet about Maralinga still bubbles to the surface.
The Maralinga story is filled with outrages. A story that began to appear in the Australian media in September 2001 described one particularly distasteful aspect of the saga, namely the analysis of (mostly) babies’ bones to detect radioactive fallout. At a meeting in Harwell on 24 May 1957 attended by Ernest Titterton, along with his confreres from the AERE and the AWRE, a variety of sampling tests was ordered, including soil, vegetation, milk and sheep bones. And babies’ bones.
As many samples as possible are to be obtained (the number available is expected to be small). The bones should be femurs. The required weight is 20–50 gm. Wet bone, subsequently ashed to provide samples of weight not less than 2 gm. The date of birth, age at death and locality of origin are to be reported.
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