It was hyperbole—the hyperbole of despair. On the other side of the railway was a sign in red, white and black: “WARNING: NO ALCOHOL / NO DRUGS on the Maralinga Tjarutja Lands.”
“We been here fifty thousand years.” It was a conservative estimate. “How long you been here?” He meant whites; he wasn’t being impolite. “Two hundred and fifty years? God hasn’t been in Australia very long.”
True, but look around. On the horizon, rising over the sandhills to the east, was the pale mountain of overburden from the Iluka mineral-sand mine—the largest source of zircon on earth. Every day, fifteen 100-tonne trucks left the mine for the port at Thevenard, which had been visible that morning across the bay from Ceduna. All those precious materials waiting in the aboriginal ground.
A few years ago, said Roger, a French oil firm had paid for the rights to survey the Maralinga lands; they were here for months, cutting access tracks for their drilling rigs, inching the rigs in on low-loaders. His friend Shorty, an Anangu man, had been employed by the firm to push its access roads into the bush. The foreman knew little about the country. He’d direct Shorty to take the grader over a sandhill, and if Shorty told him it was too steep, he would insist. Eventually, sick of miring the bloody thing, a solution occurred to Shorty. When the foreman told him to take the road through impassable country, he would frown and shake his head: “Sacred land.” And the foreman, not knowing where was sacred and where was not, could only return to his maps and find another route.
We carried on north towards Oak Valley, the fallen leaves at the road-edge glinting like broken glass. There was a spark of reflected sun on the horizon, and a car came jouncing over the brow towards us. “There’s young Lancey, my little mate,” Roger said, raising a steering-wheel finger to the battered four-door Polo. “He’s had about twenty cars in the last five years.” The Oak Valley cars were not made for the outback. In the scrub along the way dozens of vehicles lay abandoned—cars and trucks from the sixties and seventies and every year since, scavenged for parts until nothing useful was left.
Beside the road was a white bonnet propped upright on stakes and peppered with rust-ringed shotgun holes, “LIFT EM FOOT” daubed in blue. We were nearing Oak Valley. For two or three kilometres the land was grey and treeless where fire had swept through in the summer. “Kids get bored,” Roger explained. A hundred metres from the roadside, ravens and a vulture were circling. Two dingoes stood beside a shot camel, spotlighted by a cluster of sunbeams.
* * *
—
WAITING AT THE STORE in Oak Valley were Pam, Roger the maintenance man (another Roger) and four attentive dogs. We unloaded the provisions and Roger the driver went to drop off a petrol pump that was strapped to the bed of the truck. The nurse from the elderly-care centre, an Anangu woman in her fifties, came to collect some boxes of drugs. With her was a two-year-old girl in a nappy. The little girl gripped one of the bigger dogs by its mane and shrieked “Baby! Baby!” as it dragged her along. Her knee was bleeding but she was too excited to notice.
“Wanna see some camels?” maintenance Roger asked me.
“Of course.”
“Good! I’ll take you out tonight.”
Pam, another of Oak Valley’s white employees, was a potter and ran the Aboriginal art gallery in Ceduna. Her husband had been involved in the clean-up operation at Maralinga in the nineties, she said. She held art classes in Oak Valley, driving the three hundred kilometres here and back once a week, staying overnight in one of the prefabs reserved for staff, which were within fenced compounds away from the main community. She was strong and skinny and boyish, with cropped grey hair and an excited, wary smile. “I’ll show you the art centre,” she said.
The population of Oak Valley fluctuated from one week to the next, with a mean of about eighty, but today the place had been abandoned. Roger and I had passed three cars travelling the other way, as well as Lancey’s, each of them containing six or seven passengers piled onto one another’s laps. A funeral, Pam explained. The murder in Yalata. A girl had been stabbed, her partner arrested. The graffiti: “Domestic Violence! Wiya!” There are two Pitjantjatjara words even the whitefellas know, Pam told me: wiya, meaning “no”; and mamu. “Mamu means ‘devil,’ ” she said. It was a word I’d hear again.
* * *
—
THE ART CENTRE was a corrugated tin building. Inside, sitting at a long table in torn jeans, was Archie, an Anangu man in his thirties, who seemed to be the only resident who had not gone to the funeral; I wondered why. “What are you painting?” I asked. He didn’t look up, just carried on painting. Beside him on the table was a coffee-jar lid containing fried witchety grubs. He was painting flowers, black stipples on a red background. Sturt’s desert pea, perhaps. He spoke some English, Pam said, but he wouldn’t speak to me. I didn’t persist; I was not his guest.
The paintings done in the art centre were sold at a gallery back in Ceduna, and this was one of Oak Valley’s few sources of income. Passing tourists—the moneyed “grey nomads” in their enormous RVs—would pay well for what they believed to be the real thing. There was after all no employment in the desert other than teaching and doctoring and the maintenance of the village, and those jobs were done mainly by whites.
Oak Valley had been founded when most of the land requisitioned for the British, some 76,000 square kilometres, was returned to the Anangu in 1984 following the Royal Commission enquiry into the nuclear tests and their aftermath. In the 1970s the British had superficially cleaned up the radioactive contamination, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that compensation was paid to the Aboriginal owners for their dispossession and the ruination of their land, and significant investment made in cleaning up the sites. Even now it was not deemed safe to camp or cook in the test area.
It was in part the British pay-off that had financed the amenities at Oak Valley: the school, the sports centre and the playground, the elderly-care centre, the power station and the art centre. Like Yalata and other Anangu communities, Oak Valley continued to depend on government grants. In November 2014 the premier of the neighbouring state of Western Australia had announced a plan to close 150 of that state’s 273 remote Aboriginal communities. In straitened times the taxpayer could no longer be expected to pay for such uneconomic outstations. The PM, Tony Abbott, backed his man: “What we can’t do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices.” There was support for this view. The middle-aged owner of the guesthouse where I had stayed in Adelaide, a model of courtesy and grace, told me confidingly one evening: “They want to screw us for every penny we’ve got, to get us back for what we did to them.”
Pam showed me to the Oak Valley guesthouse, a stilted three-room prefab on the edge of the community. On the bedroom door was a sticker: a composite image of a steel guitar overlaid with a picture of a red sand dune that in turn merged into a waterfall, as if these visions were reflected in the guitar’s surface. Over this cluttered image were printed lines from Isaiah, and I did not know what to make of them or their presence here: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”
* * *
—
THAT EVENING WE cooked steaks on the fire in the backyard of the house Pam used when she was here. Tomorrow morning she would be driving back to Ceduna, and she offered to drop me at Maralinga. I hadn’t seen any black faces since meeting Archie that afternoon; the people were not due back from Ceduna for a couple of days, Pam said. Things were pretty bad. In Yalata they had always been bad, but even in isolated Oak Valley, where the elders had come in the eighties precisely to escape the influence of the cities, alcohol and petrol-sniffing were problems. Just as Pam was telling me this a metallic knocking came from the direction of the store. “That’s bloody someone on the roof!” she said, and we listened. And it did sound like creeping footsteps on hollow metal.
I left Pam by her fire and hopped over the fence and climbed up beside Roger. We spent a minute circling the store but there was nobody there. Roger, in any case, was more interested in his camels. “I’ve told them before, ‘It’s your bloody store, boys; you want to loot it, that’s your business, but you’re only stealing from yourselves.’ ”
He was big and wore a short grey beard on his round face, and tended to begin each statement in that southern Australian way, as if confessing to some regretted weakness: “Ah, look, Will…” We drove out of the community, past the power station and the dump and the water tower and the graveyard on its hill, into the night-time bush—“black as dog-guts.”
“You’ll usually find them hanging about the road,” Roger said. We drove for half an hour, deeper and deeper into the cool desert, the windows open. I looked back and two dogs were running after us, red in the truck’s rear lights. Roger was suddenly animated, eager to be interviewed, to share his love for the place where he’d wound up. “I’ve never felt safer than I do here,” he announced. “Nobody here wants to do anybody any harm.”
Unlike Pam, he lived in the community, and his son went to the community school. I’d seen a picture of a school group in the guesthouse, and there was no question which of them was Roger’s boy, all of them bare-chested but him, and he the only white child. “He’s lost some weight since then. It’s been the making of him, coming here. You wouldn’t believe what it’s done for his confidence. He was having trouble with bullying at his old school; now we worry he’s doing the bullying!”
Neither his son nor his wife were here at the moment, he said; they were in Ceduna. It wasn’t clear to me if this was a permanent arrangement. “Look,” he said, “for some people it’s too much. They need a break.”
We drove for longer than I wanted, two hours or more, and I was cold by the time we got back to Oak Valley. Pam’s fire was out and she’d gone to bed. We’d seen only one camel, an old bull swaying slowly away from the road into the bush. Roger was disappointed, and his reluctance to give up had pushed him on: “Another minute, then we’ll call it a night.” We must have done a hundred kilometres. “Usually you can’t move for them.”
He loved the camels, he said; loved the desert, and the old fellers. As I got out, he said: “Truth is, I’d be initiated tomorrow, if they’d let me.”
* * *
—
“YOU’LL LIKE NOBSY,” said Pam, as we drove towards Maralinga the next morning. “He’s an ‘outback character.’ ” Nobsy was what people called Robin, the Maralinga caretaker, though I never heard anyone call him it in his presence. The dogs saw us off, nipping at our tyres, the idiots, and on the edge of the community we passed a car returning from the funeral. The “lifestyle choice”—to live without employment among the glaucomic dust, in a land that could never be truly safe again; to live hundreds of kilometres from the next community and to travel those distances regularly and without hesitation, seven to a car, not in climate-controlled Land Cruisers like ours, but in wrecked Polos and Golfs without glass in the windows, a child dozing on each lap.
Roger had said, “I’d be initiated tomorrow, if they’d let me.” They would never let him, he knew; and for all that he loved the desert’s freedoms, there were rituals that would forever be forbidden to him as a white man. We could be guests here, or trespassers. Whites understood the land little better than Tietkens had when he arrived with his visions and his sheep and his pistol 150 years ago. It would never be theirs and they knew it; that was the power white Australia could not accept, the power remaining to the people of Yalata and Oak Valley and all the other impoverished communities.
* * *
—
IN 1953, a group of British army surveyors delivered a report to the atomic research facility in Aldermaston: “Beyond the northern limits of the Nullarbor Plain, the country becomes rather more attractive, consisting of low sandhills, thickly covered by mulga and malee trees.” They added: “In this country it is very easy to get lost.”
As we neared Maralinga, the road climbed towards a high ridge, higher than the sandhills we’d been crossing. The Ooldea Range, it was called. It formed 35 million years ago as a coastal dune system when what is now the Nullarbor Plain was underwater. The turn-off to the compound was tarmacked, unlike the main track or the roads in Oak Valley or Yalata, and still flawless after forty years. “You Brits made sure everything was top quality,” said Pam. And there, finally, was the sign: “This land contains artefacts of the nuclear test era, including items contaminated at low levels with radioactivity.”
A padlocked chainlink gate blocked the road. Beside it was an upright cylinder of concrete, a metre wide and 2.5 metres tall, a section of water pipe with a doorway cut into it. It was painted blue, with the words “The Tardis” over the entrance. Inside was a black rotary phone from the 1970s; it still worked, apparently, but there was no need to call: we were expected, and within minutes a truck was roaring towards us from the other side of the gate. Pam and I said our farewells. “Tell Nobsy hi,” she said.
* * *
—
THE ABANDONED MILITARY outpost was now dominated by the hospital, a long aluminium building whose western flank each evening became a screen of dazzling orange as it reflected the setting sun. It was in the hospital that Robin (“Nobsy”) the caretaker lived with his wife, Della, who was from an Anangu family. Robin was white and in his mid-sixties. He had been a shark fisher off Ceduna until Della insisted he pack it in. In the “pub” in Ceduna I’d been told there were Great Whites in the bay: “but don’t let that stop you swimming.” He was stocky with a stance like a ram, wide-legged and primed, his skin weathered to a reddish-bronze so dark that it was hard to make out his tattoos. He had a straggly pale-grey beard that parted around his mouth before flowing down under his chin to converge with his chest hair. There was a mischievous mobility about that mouth, but his eyes always remained still and watchful. When he’d finished laughing at something his face would turn back to blankness without passing through the usual intermediary stage of the smile.
Sometimes, over the coming days, I would sense he was impatient to be rid of me. There was a subdued fierceness about him—a lifetime of proximity to violence that still simmered away under the bonhomie and the beard. He had spent a lot of time gutting fish, and knew how to drive a road-grader and how to kill a camel: you need to shoot it right in the ear hole. Since giving up fishing he’d worked first for the community up at Oak Valley, then, for the past five years, as caretaker of Maralinga and the bomb sites.
* * *
—
IN 1953 the British search had begun for a “permanent proving ground” in Australia. It had to be at least 160 kilometres from human habitation but close to road and rail communications; there should be an airstrip nearby, a good water supply and a tolerable climate with minimal rainfall, in order to prevent contamination of the water table. X300, as the chosen site was initially codenamed, lay on a flat plain ringed by sandhills (this was Tietkens’s Plain) and measured some thirty kilometres east to west and twenty-five north to south. Maralinga was the name of the settlement built to serve the test zone, but it was also used informally for X300 itself.
It took me a while to get my bearings. The best view was from the water tower, Robin told me. Ten metres up a rusted iron ladder. From its gantry you gained a sense of the site’s isolation: twenty kilometres to the north, the green thinned to the dull red of Tietkens’s Plain;
to the south, beyond the railway Roger and I had crossed yesterday, the green yielded abruptly to the blue-grey of the Nullarbor Plain, which extended to the sea. For the British, the most pressing objective in establishing the new site was to carry out an “airburst” explosion, from a balloon, to prove “Blue Danube,” its first operational nuclear weapon. A newer, smaller, tactical nuclear bomb for battlefield use, codenamed Red Beard, was also to be tested. Finally, according to the initial plan, a test was to be done to establish the effect of an atomic detonation at ground level. But these tests turned out to be only the start: in total seven nuclear bombs were exploded, followed by some six hundred non-nuclear trials.
In December 1954, Australian and British engineers began building the camp and the airfield and, thirty kilometres away, down on Tietkens’s Plain, levelling the test sites and constructing field laboratories. They continued their work through the flyblown furnace of the southern Australian summer.
On the eastern edge of the outpost, visible from the water tower, I could see a stepped platform ten metres across, like a dais for a Roman senate. A signpost read “Pit 68U.” At the top of the steps there was only a rectangle filled with rubble: not one of the radioactive burial pits, but the settlement’s swimming pool. The sign indicated the presence of nothing more dangerous than asbestos. The diving board had gone, but stainless steel ladders still vanished into the rubble. It had been the centre of the outpost, especially during those stupefying summer months before the tests took place. A swimmer resting with his arms on the pool’s rim could gaze out fifty kilometres across those rolling “downs” of mulga (eucalyptus) and malee (acacia) and imagine himself on leave.
To one side of the pool was a crumbling stucco fountain, long dry but once used to filter the pool’s mineral-heavy water; beside it was a plastic patio chair on which I’d sometimes sit and read, resting my feet on the wall of the dry fountain. Nearby were a couple of tennis courts. The net-posts and umpire’s platform were still standing; but the tramlines were no longer visible and the bitumen was corrugated and cracked and scattered with saltbushes. At first I mistook the low intermittent roar I kept hearing for jets, but I realised that it was only the noise the wind made in the dry boughs of the malee. Although it was not particularly loud, there was somehow a massive suppressed energy contained within it, like the energy of a rally waiting to be addressed.
The Immeasurable World Page 8