When Maralinga was abandoned in 1974, the men from Yalata were granted salvage rights. Its onetime buildings can be found today across South Australia: I’d stopped at a campsite near Port Lincoln whose toilet block once stood here; Ceduna’s basketball hall had been the range store; Pam’s pottery studio, she’d told me, was once a British barracks. Most of the buildings were gone, but from the water tower you could still trace the outlines of the outpost’s “roads”: London Road, Ottawa Street, Perth Road, Cardiff Road. In the distance, between the settlement and the main gate, with its Tardis, a couple of kilometres away, was the airfield, an expanse of concrete big enough to land the Shuttle on, still maintained and lit up at night. Below the water tower the memorial ground remained, with its flagless flagpole and a cross laid out in white stones; but the church was gone, along with the cinema, the shop, the post office, the barracks and the laboratories. From the water tower I could see the small dry patio beside the hospital where Robin and Della lived, with its pot plants and a sign painted by Robin: FORT MARALINGA.
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DELLA’S GRANDMOTHER had been born in the spinifex country south of Maralinga, and had been brought up at the mission station at Ooldea (spinifex is the name given to the various species of sharp, tussock-forming grasses that abound in desert Australia). There she had met Della’s grandfather, who was visiting from his homeland north of Maralinga. Della had seemed physically small to me when we first met, but later I saw that it was just that she had the kind of shyness that makes people seem slighter than they are. Robin often spoke for her or amended what she said: “What you mean, Della, is…”; “Why don’t you tell him about…?”; “No, Della, remember…?” It was partly instinctive protectiveness.
Her grandparents married and moved to Ceduna, by the sea, where her grandfather—she said it with some pride—was the first blackfella in the town to be issued with a licence, a “dogtag,” to buy alcohol and drink in the white pub. Nevertheless, the family was hardly welcomed by Ceduna’s white majority. Frequently, “tribal people,” as Della called them, would arrive at the house without warning, having walked the 240 kilometres from Ooldea, and camp, fifty or more of them at a time, around her grandparents’ home.
The council made her grandfather an offer: give up your home, choose a plot of land anywhere on the outskirts of the town, and it’s yours for free, on a ninety-nine-year renewable lease. The plot he selected, a few kilometres along the coast, was sixty hectares overlooking the beach, with fresh water close to the surface. Today it is worth millions, and Della’s extended family of twenty households had made the plot their own. It was to the house Robin had built there—“Duckponds,” the place was called—that he and Della retreated when they returned to the coast from the desert every week or two. Often their granddaughter, Tori, stayed at Maralinga with her boyfriend, Bobby, and their young children. Tori was prettily snaggle-toothed, with one eyebrow permanently raised. Each evening she brought a meal to my caravan, lovingly made, meat and potatoes and gravy, and always cold. I didn’t have the heart to ask her to warm it through. She called Robin “Pappy” and they adored one another. She and her family came here to escape some damaging influence. In the same way, the people of Oak Valley had hoped that their community’s isolation would protect their young people.
Sometimes Robin wore a plaid shirt or a hoodie but usually he just wore a singlet. He wore a Royal Australian Air Force baseball cap and smoked Log Cabin tobacco in loose roll-ups that he finished in half a dozen crackling draws. Log Cabin was a good brand to smoke, because it was what the Aboriginal fellas smoked, which meant you could get it in any of the community stores. He had superb recall and was a terrific mimic. When you told him something he didn’t know, he’d look at you closely and say, “That right? Well, bugger me dead.” He’d been born in Port Lincoln, down along the coast from Ceduna, and on his left bicep a tattoo was just legible: “Port Lincoln Outcast.”
After the years of shark fishing, Robin worked on the tuna boats out of Ceduna. In the seventies he’d been employed by the transcontinental railway, stationed at the siding at Watson, Maralinga’s main staging post. During that time he’d helped dismantle the settlement, and in the eighties, when the Yalata people moved to Oak Valley, he became their supplies driver, the job Roger inherited (Roger was his nephew, it turned out). As a fourteen-year-old on the shark boats Robin would work each day until midnight, only then repairing to the galley with his shipmates for dinner. This habit had stayed with him for fifty years. While we were camping in the desert, he ate as a kind of soporific, bolting down his meal hours after I’d eaten, then slipping into his swag and falling asleep immediately. He was of the sea first, and then of the desert, and he and Della still lived between the two: between Duckponds and Maralinga. Even in the winter, when the heat at Maralinga was liveable, they would drive down to Ceduna once a week—for a meal at the pub, see the kids, take a boat out fishing. And yet both of them, after a while, found they longed to be back.
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WILLIAM PENNEY, the British scientist in charge of the tests in the 1950s, described the proposed range as “gently undulating and covered with low saltbush and occasional sparse patches of mulga which give it the appearance of English downland.” If, as a result, the British scientists and servicemen expected pastoral ease, they were disappointed. Tietkens had used the same word, downs, as had St. John Philby describing the dunes of the Empty Quarter (only eight years earlier, but it seems like a different century), as if any land of gentle undulation, however denuded, was merely a version of bucolic western Europe. The pioneer’s customary yearning to reconcile his lexicon to the unfamiliar. Describing the first Anglos to confront the American West, Mary Austin wrote that the landscape simply could “not be expressed in terms invented for such purpose in a low green island by the North Sea.” It was these same limitations that caused Renaissance painters to depict St. Antony’s hyper-arid Eastern Desert as a glebe of dappled knolls.
Next day before dinner I took a walk out to the old rifle range. It was a couple of kilometres away along a track scattered with camel prints and closely flanked by eucalyptus. The eucalyptus each had their own domain, so that their branches scarcely touched. In the trees’ shade there was tall white spinifex grass growing in ring or crescent formations (the tussocks die off from the centre first) and inside these “nests” were scattered the empty white shells of snails, as if they had gone there to die, or had been eaten there by sheltering birds. In my memory the land was that simple, and in its simplicity archetypal.
Something like two hundred millimetres of rain falls on the Great Victoria Desert each year: compare that with the Empty Quarter’s annual five millimetres. Nor is evaporation anything like as intense. But there was no question that desert was the correct word. The dominance of the mineral world—this is a defining characteristic of desert. As defining as the heat and dryness that creates that dominance. The red earth overwhelmed the green of vegetation.
Repetition, the same composition of eucalyptus, spinifex, snail shells and sand, in every direction, generated a sense of infinitude as powerful as a featureless plain. Once I was out of view of the settlement and its water tower, and beyond hearing-range of the generator, and beyond shouting distance, it would require only ten strides into the scrub, and a blind-man’s-bluff twirl, to be lost, with no real likelihood, in these thousands of identical square kilometres (eucalyptus, spinifex, snail shells), and in my ignorance, of finding either the track or the settlement. It was a reminder that, for those men based here in the fifties and sixties, the camp was an island, and the tracks serving it pontoons from which it would be suicidal to step.
At the rifle range, the sand berms were littered with hundreds of flattened bullets and shards of brown glass. It had been used for training by the military guard that monitored the test zone during the Cold War. Maralinga’s isolation had been a matter of secu
rity as well as public safety. Fencing off such a vast area was impossible; but the desert is its own barrier—ask U.S. Border Patrol. Any white stranger was to be treated as a Russian spy. Interlopers were to be shot on sight.
Alongside the rifle range was a doorless wooden toilet hut from the fifties, its floor deep with leaf litter. Unthinkingly, before walking back, I took a photo, one of thousands I’d scarcely look at. When I told Robin where I’d been, he asked, “Didn’t go near the dunny, did you?”
“Why d’you ask?”
“Only, I meant to tell you—I always say to the grandkids: ‘Kids, don’t go near that dunny: king brown lives in there, and a king brown’ll kill you, don’t worry about that.’ ”
And sure enough, there in the photo, coiled in the leaf litter, bugger me dead, was Pseudechis australis.
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NEXT MORNING, Robin wanted to take me to where the Milpuddie family had been found in 1956. On the corridor wall in the hospital he showed me two pictures: a mushroom cloud, black with its hoard of scorched earth; then, from the air, the crater. This was the “Marcoo” test and its aftermath. He also had something to tell me about the “black mist,” the cloud of fallout that had been created by the first mainland test, Totem 1, in 1953.
It was chiefly the testimony given by an Anangu man, Yami Lester, who was ten years old in 1953, that led to the setting up of the Royal Commission. He recalled hearing early one morning a giant crack and boom from the south-west, several such noises: it was later that morning, or the following morning, he couldn’t be sure, that he and others saw the cloud. It was not a mushroom cloud rising obediently to the heavens, but more like a black wave approaching from the horizon. It was evident that it would engulf anything in its path, and the people were terrified: the men shook their spear-throwers at it; the women dug holes and tried to hide the children. “They reckon it was mamu,” Lester told the commission.
As we were leaving the hospital, a puppy bounded into the corridor. Crawling after it came Tori’s one-year-old son with his beautiful long hair, beautiful in the way of Anangu kids, dark but streaked with gold. Robin shepherded them back into the room before opening the door at the end of the corridor. The morning light charged in, and with it all the sounds of the bush.
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OPERATION BUFFALO, which took place on Tietkens’s Plain between 27 September and 9 October 1956, comprised four nuclear detonations: One Tree, Marcoo, Kite and Breakaway. The following year there was a second series, Operation Antler, again taking place during the cooler months of September and October, comprising three detonations: Tadje, Biak, and the last and largest on the Australian mainland, Taranaki. One Tree (at fifteen kilotons about the same yield as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), Breakaway (ten kilotons), Tadje (one) and Biak (six) were exploded on steel towers, and Marcoo (1.5) at ground level. (A kiloton is equivalent to one thousand tonnes of TNT.) Kite, three kilotons, was dropped from a bomber. Taranaki, suspended from a balloon, was twenty-five kilotons. British and American tests of thermonuclear devices in the Pacific Ocean and Nevada were measured not in kilotons but megatons—a megaton corresponding to one million tonnes of TNT. In 1954 the United States exploded a bomb on Bikini Atoll with a yield of fifteen megatons. In Kazakhstan in 1961, on the steppe not far from Almaty, the Soviet’s “Tsar Bomb,” the largest ever detonated, measured fifty megatons—two thousand Taranakis.
The “minor trials,” codenamed Vixen, took place between 1957 and 1963. Cutesy, wink-wink names: Kittens, Rats, Vixen, Tims…They were designed to assess how a nuclear device would behave in an accident—an air crash, for instance, or an explosion at a weapons dump—and while they did not involve a nuclear reaction, their effect was to disperse fragments of radioactive plutonium and contaminated metal over hundreds of hectares. It was in fact these minor trials that caused the worst contamination. It remains unclear how much of it was ultimately cleared away or safely buried. I’d done my research. Sixteen milligrams of plutonium dust caught in the lungs will cause death in a month.
In 1967, following the official closure of Maralinga, the British undertook a clean-up. They called it “Operation Brumby.” (It might as well have been done to tuba music.) At Taranaki it had two phases: the ploughing and grading of the test site to disperse and cover the scattered plutonium; and the burial of plutonium and other waste in nineteen shallow pits. In a statement to the Royal Commission in 1985, the British government’s representative, hoping to avoid the expense of a further clean-up, stated: “Scientific knowledge is not now, and certainly was not then, sufficiently advanced to enable a complete decontamination of an area in which nuclear explosive tests have taken place.” But the Royal Commission found that Brumby had been wholly inadequate, in fact little more than cosmetic. It wasn’t until 1999 that the British assented to carry out a second clean-up, employing “in-situ vitrification,” whereby the ground is heated to temperatures sufficient to turn it to glass, thus, in principle, containing any pollutants.
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IT TOOK AN HOUR to get to Taranaki. We stopped at Tietkens’s Well so Robin could have a smoke, and dropped stones into the darkness, a tribute to Tietkens’s fly-maddened well-sinkers. We drove past two open hangars that had been used to store and decontaminate the equipment used in the vitrification process in 1999. They were empty now, their concrete floors gleaming with rainwater. During the Vixen series, plutonium had been subjected to explosives inside heavy steel boxes. In 1967 these boxes, along with their concrete mounting slabs, had been dumped in burial pits capped with concrete. It was these pits that in 1999 had been vitrified to seal in their poison. Next to the largest of these was a sign: “WARNING: BURIED RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS.” It carried two symbols: the three-leafed radiation icon, and a pictogram of a tent and a campfire scored out diagonally. Under this pictogram were the words “Ngura wiya.” No camping.
At the centre of the site, a hundred metres from the burial pit, was a truncated concrete pyramid about a metre and a half tall. This memorial obelisk had appeared here in 1979, as similar pyramids had been trucked in and lowered by crane at each of the nine desert sites. On one face, cast into the concrete: “A British atomic weapon was exploded here on 9 October 1957”; on the adjacent face: “Warning: radiation levels for a few hundred metres around this point may be above those considered safe for permanent occupation.” I clambered up the overburden of limestone rubble that capped the largest burial pit. From its flat surface, about five metres higher than the surrounding ground and the size of a football pitch, I turned and looked down onto the plain—Tietkens’s Plain. Robin was rolling a cigarette on the tailgate of his ute. I wondered whether his assurances about the site’s safety were to be trusted. There were still zones—Tims, Kittens—where it was unsafe to go. Who knew exactly where the thresholds of those zones lay?
“You think I’d live here if it wasn’t safe?”
“Remind me,” I said. “How many years did you spend fishing for sharks?”
Beyond him was the harrowed land, and beyond it a verge of mulga, and then, in the distance, red sandhills rolling out to the northern horizon and Australia’s “dead centre.”
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THE ANANGU UNDERSTOOD that there was no transmutation so thorough that it could erase what had been done. The land was spoiled, and it could not be remediated, any more than a heap of kangaroo bones can be made to jump. In 1969, long after the final test, the secretary of the Maralinga safety committee had reassured one of the chief scientists: “The range is a long way from anyone, no one will go there, so why worry?” And with that he spoke for every outsider confronting the native desert. This was also the liberty the desert permitted: the moral liberty available to us in dreams, the liberty to perpetrate outrages.
For the Anangu there are the Ancestors, then there are the plants and the animals. Finally
there is the land; the land that is the nexus between physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal, and whose every feature was created by the Ancestors. Try not to think of these three elements—the Ancestors, organisms and minerals—as separate things.
The Anangu’s relationship with the land is a matter of religion. You do not, for example, clear a waterhole in order to maintain a water supply, but because it is your obligation to the Ancestors. Your lawful obligation. There is no founding myth of alienation from nature, no Fall, for the distinction does not exist: there is no “nature” to be alienated from. The desert is a place neither of banishment nor of atonement. It is not your proving ground. It is not your sanctuary. It is not St. Antony’s realm of demonic temptation; nor, above all, is it the “hideous blank” of the pioneers.
The desert monotheisms tip their heads skywards, seek divinity in the heavens. Anangu know that it is the land—the ground beneath their feet—where the creative spirit resides. To destroy the land is not to deprive a person of their property; it is not a matter of “displacement” or theft. It is to unpick the weft of their being. “The land,” Roger the delivery driver had told me, “is like their children.” Or put it in Christian terms. To destroy the land is not to, say, burn down a church or even a cathedral. It is not some insult that can be remedied or revenged; there’s no rebuilding to be done. Take some holy scripture: cut from it an integral vein, so that the very faith is diminished, so that whatever it is that strengthens or consoles is reduced. Or take the body, the unbelieving body: to have a hand intruded and some organ hooked out, the gall bladder, say, then brandished before you, into the furnace.
The Immeasurable World Page 9