And pondering all this, I think first about the words of the secretary of the safety committee—“The range is a long way from anyone, no one will go there, so why worry?”—and then I remember the girl in Ceduna, as I do from time to time, the gutter-water surging around her ankles; stood there, staring up at me on my hotel balcony.
For Tietkens the desert was terra nullius: unowned, untenanted, unexploited. An affront to capital and to God. Australia was every man’s for the taking, and to take it was every man’s duty, no less. Terra nullius was more than doctrine. From 1827 it was law. With whom, after all, was a white man expected to sign a treaty? Could a wandering black be said to “own” a claypan or a mountain? Does the dingo own the plain he crosses in search of food? Does the kangaroo own the rockhole he pauses to drink from?
A century and a half after Tietkens sunk his wells, William Penney, the head of the British bomb project, was assured by the Australian government that, while the area had once been crossed by tribes travelling to and from Ooldea, it was now only frequented “by one or two elderly blacks and then on rare occasions.”
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THERE ARE TWO translations of “Maralinga.” When the British named the site, what they had in mind was a word belonging to the indigenous Garik dialect of the Northern Territory, meaning something like “Field of Thunder.” Apt for the anticipated drama. But the site was far from the Northern Territory. For the people who crossed it barefoot for sixty thousand years, speakers of the Southern Pitjantjatjara dialect, these sandhills and saltbush plains were a thousand places with a thousand names, and to them “Maralinga” meant something different: “Up above, looking down.”
Robin had showed me an aerial photograph of the Breakaway and Biak sites, which lie about three kilometres east of Taranaki. They resembled an eight, the circles overlapping slightly like a Venn diagram. As a teenager in the 1990s, even as the likelihood of nuclear war was apparently diminishing, I would pore over books describing the Soviet targeting strategies of the previous lucky decades; in particular a map of the country where I lived. Two maps, in fact. The first showed Great Britain scattered with red discs. Those the size of a penny were centred on cities of strategic importance—London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Portsmouth and so on. Smaller discs meanwhile overlaid smaller cities, and still smaller discs overlaid large towns, until the whole map was coated in a kind of variegated chainmail.
What struck me most, however, and what today I find most repulsive, was not the descriptions I read of the aftermath of the bombs that were dropped on Japan—people and animals alike “petrified in an attitude of indescribable suffering,” in Marcel Junod’s account of Hiroshima—but rather the second map. It charted the final phase of a projected attack. Where the edges of three or four discs on the first map touched, there was an unshaded zone, a concave-walled triangle or square of sanctuary, where the blasts could not reach. And it was these omissions that would be the targets of the second phase. Smaller nukes—mere Marcoos—would be dispatched to obliterate any life or infrastructure that had escaped the initial phases. Here was another kind of desert. And I knew, too, even if the book omitted it, that the red discs covered America and France and Germany, and all of Europe and, of course, the Soviet Union; and that the whole world, in the planners’ careful phasing, was to be turned red, which was not the red of blood, but of hell.
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AS WE DROVE east towards the Marcoo site we passed a mob of six female camels facing into the wind. It was necessary for Robin to cull sick or elderly ones. “You knock one down,” he said, “and it’ll just rot. Within the test zone dingoes won’t touch it; eagles won’t touch it. I don’t know why, but they seem to know. Look at this place—” He gestured to the red-grey plains on all sides. “The spinifex’ll get to twelve inches tall, then it dies.”
From the truncated-pyramid obelisk that marked the Biak test site, a kilometre south of Marcoo, you could turn full circle and not see a single shrub above knee height for 800 metres, only the line of low grey mulga that crowded the edge of the zone of sterility. At Maralinga itself, in the winter, Robin would see budgerigars flocking in the trees as they migrated north. But here in the test zone you never saw them. They skirted it as a stream skirts a boulder. And again he said: “They seem to know.” The site was safe, he stressed again: “Don’t worry about that.” But what was it, I wondered, that the animals “seemed to know”? What told the dingo not to touch the fresh-killed camel, or the birds coming north to veer east or west?
At Biak the ground glittered like a lake that has just begun to freeze, and crunched underfoot as I walked. I looked back after ten minutes and could see Robin standing smoking by the ground-zero obelisk. The stuff encrusting the surface was trinitite, named after the place of its first earthly creation, the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico. This glassy green substance occurred when the sand was fused by the heat of the bombs; you could fill your pockets with pieces of it, if you wanted. It was the dull black-green of wood mould or the sherbety green of verdigris. In consistency it was volcanic, coarsely glossy, like the hard caramel top of a pudding, or a potter’s glaze that has been fired too hot. Some pieces were as big as my palm and had preserved the molten gloopiness of those bubbling hours after the blast. I gathered a handful of beadlike fragments and put them in the pocket of my rucksack. We got back into the truck and made our way north to Marcoo. The camels turned their heads to watch us go. They alone among the animals did not avoid the blast zones, Robin said, and I wondered if it was because they were not native.
At Marcoo there was no trinitite because the crater had been filled in. You wouldn’t know there’d ever been a hole here fifty metres across and thirteen deep. Unlike the others, Marcoo had been detonated in a shallow pit, and so it alone had made a crater. Perhaps because the contaminated soil had been diluted by fresh soil when the crater was filled in, there was some vegetable life here, and not only that, a flower: a tiny desert daisy, white with a dash of mauve and a yellow heart. Excavated beside it in the sand was a mulga ants’ nest, a circular hole like one dibbed by a finger. Ringing the hole was a raised rampart of sand half a centimetre high, coarser than the surface sand. Around it, slender acacia leaves no bigger than nail-clippings had been heaped by floods. The ring of sand was the ants’ dyke against cloudbursts. I was struck, as I often have been in the greener deserts, by lives passing in anonymity—flower, ant, camel, saltbush, raven. Absolute anonymity. A hundred metres away, beyond the crater-fill, I picked out a single modest acacia bush, little more than a metre tall, effectively indistinguishable from the countless others surrounding it; and I imagined all the other acacias and black-oaks and eucalypts, let alone the ants, deep in the desert, far from any track, that would never be seen by a human being. Don’t ask why this seemed remarkable: it was not a matter of anthropomorphism—nothing “lonely” about these specimens consoled my quivering heart. It was just a shock to consider that, even in this assaulted place, life was going on as if humankind had never been. It shocks me less today.
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THE MARCOO EXPLOSION took place on 4 October 1956, late in the afternoon, watched by a group of Australian parliamentarians. According to William Penney, they were “delighted with their visit—and very friendly.” After the test there was “thunder and heavy rain”—those two hundred millimetres of annual rain tend to come violently, as the ants know—and Penney added to his report: “See Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verse 6.” (“The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.”) It is natural to resort to scripture on being shown hell.
As well as the usual stubbed pyramid marking ground zero, there was a cement obelisk like an anti-terrorist barricade, commemorating the work of the men who’d backfilled the crater during Britain’s Operation Brumby “cle
an-up” in 1967. On top of the obelisk, like pebbles left on a headstone, was a collection of rusted steel fragments: unidentifiable shards, torqued, sheered, buckled. The people at Yalata told stories of hot jeeps, hot bulldozers, hot washing machines, buried a few metres down. All the white man’s poisoned booty. I remembered the photos on the hospital wall—the mushroom cloud, black with burnt earth thrown up by the blast, like an upsurge of foul gas rising from the bed of a stagnant lake. And the other photo, the crater with its steep walls, and its base of cracked clay where water had collected.
We walked in circles around ground zero while Robin told me the following story:
“Eight months after the blast, the scientists were coming here doing the experiments, and they saw smoke, and when they got here there was an Aboriginal family on the edge of the crater, camped. They’d actually been going down into the crater, out of the wind, cooking and eating rabbits down the bottom.”
He was talking about the Milpuddies, whom I had read about in the report of the Royal Commission: Edie, Charlie; their kids Henry and Rosie. The family was from near Ernabella, four hundred kilometres away in the north of the state. They’d been travelling for nearly a year, heading for Ooldea to trade dingo pelts, unaware that the mission there had been closed down five years before and the people moved to Yalata. When the Royal Commission visited Maralinga twenty-five years later, Edie, whose family had settled at Yalata, addressed the commissioners through an interpreter: “At a waterhole called Unguntju we heard an explosion and the earth seemed to be moving.” This would have been one of the first series, at Emu Field. Robin knew the story well; Edie was one of Della’s aunts. But his version differed somewhat from the official one. In his version, for example, there were not three dogs but twenty:
“The scientists rang up the range commander at Maralinga, and he said, ‘I want you to shoot the dogs, because we can’t decontaminate the dogs. And you take the family and you shower them until they’re down to safe radiation-levels, then you put ’em in the truck and take them straight to Yalata.’
“That was the idea,” Robin added. “If they found people they’d take them straight to Yalata, two hundred kilometres away on the Nullarbor, even if they’d come from the north. Now, to shoot a dog in front of an Aboriginal person is a real big no-no. Because they treat those dogs like children. Literally like children. They sleep with the dogs, they use the dogs for hunting, they use the dogs to keep warm. I’ve seen a dead bitch with six pups there, and the old girls will walk straight over—the dog might have got run over—and the pups will be looking for the mother for milk. The old girls will walk straight over, grab the whole six pups, and they’ll go to the young women, and they might have a baby on the tit, they’ll give them two pups, and she’ll put a pup on the tit straightaway.
“Then the scientists actually showered the couple and the two kids. Now, these people were naked, and the scientists were all dressed up in the white suit and the big air mask. And they were scrubbing the lady and the man, intimately, to get rid of any contamination. And that would be another hell of a shock. Maybe never seen a white man in their lives. And to be touched by a man in a white suit with a big nose, a big air-mask nose. They would have thought they were being washed by the devil, the mamu.”
Edie when she entered the shower block was relieved to see another black woman: but when she spoke to her she received no answer; the woman merely stared. It took her a moment to understand that she had spoken to her reflection, that she was alone.
“They were taken to Yalata and left down there,” Robin said. “Well, two weeks after, the old girl, old Edie—she was only a young woman then; my wife’s auntie—she gave birth to a stillborn baby. And everybody blamed the radiation. But low-level radiation like that, it doesn’t work that quick. I blame the shock of seeing the dogs shot, then the shock of being touched by these people. I think that’s what shut her system down and killed the baby.”
The facts surrounding the health of the Milpuddies and their children and grandchildren, like the number of dogs, are uncertain. Robin maintained that the effects of the radiation itself had “gone to the next generation,” that it had not affected the immediate family. The Royal Commission report records that Edie Milpuddie’s third child died aged two from a brain tumour, while her next was born premature. As for the two surviving children, Rosie as an adult developed a heart condition, and lost a child herself, while Henry developed tuberculosis and pneumonia in his early twenties, and one of his daughters died of a heart condition.
“Old Charlie, the husband,” said Robin, “he passed away in 1974 from pneumonia, but it was indirectly from alcohol—he turned into a drunkard down at Yalata, and he went to sleep in the rain drunk, and got pneumonia and died.”
This corruption would be carried onward, and onward. There were Milpuddies living in Ceduna and Yalata. “It’s gone to the next generation. But indirectly—” and Robin nodded to the sacred ground, to the great simmering bolus concealed in it, and I recalled that for his wife’s people the ground is the dwelling place of the Ancestors, the source of all creation. “Indirectly, it’s come from here, don’t worry about that.”
Robin believed there would have been dozens of Aboriginal families crossing the prohibited area throughout the test period. The task of ensuring that the area—thirty thousand square kilometres—was clear of Aboriginal people had been assigned to one “native patrol officer” working alone and without so much as a radio; he was Walter MacDougall, and his name was still well known among the people of Oak Valley and Yalata. MacDougall had been brought up at mission stations and had spent most of his life working with Aboriginal people. He was tall, pale, red-headed. The Anangu called him brother. In 1955, about two years after the first tests at Emu Field, MacDougall gave an interview to an Adelaide newspaper. “Whenever a white man finds something of value to him in any Aboriginal area the Aborigines are pushed aside,” he said. “I believe that what is happening to these natives is contrary to the spirit of the United Nations charter.” Alan Butement, one of the Australian government’s chief scientific observers, dashed off a letter to MacDougall’s boss. This individual, he said, was “placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
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THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, submitting its final argument to the Royal Commission enquiry into the tests, declared that the commission had “found no evidence that any Aborigine has suffered harm from any of the tests or minor trials.” And it was true that the council representing Maralinga’s indigenous people had failed to prove any link between the tests and the ill health suffered by the Milpuddies and other Anangu. Nevertheless, the commission found it would be “grossly irresponsible of the UK Government if it did not now accept that it has a continuing obligation to clean up the contaminated areas.” It was recommended by the Australian government that the British pay 35 million Australian dollars in compensation to the “traditional owners.” The British demurred, agreeing only to contribute the same figure to a “final” clean-up of the Maralinga site. In the event, the Anangu of Yalata and Oak Valley received less than half the recommended figure, and that came from the Australian government.
The Royal Commission was set up following public concern about Maralinga’s radiological legacy and the safety of the site, which had been largely handed back to the Anangu the previous year as a result of a Land Rights Act. A newspaper had published a leaked report concerning high levels of plutonium at the site, and on Australian TV a deathbed interview had been aired with a veteran who claimed to have seen the bodies of four Aboriginal people at the edge of a crater, presumably Marcoo, since it was the only known crater, though his allegation was never verified. Over the course of 188 days the commission interviewed 311 witnesses in Adelaide, London and Maralinga itself, and concluded that several of the trials were done under dangerous meteorological conditions, including Marc
oo, which was “fired in conditions which violated the firing criterion that there should be no forecast of rain.” As for the Milpuddie incident, “those responsible for security seemed at least as concerned about the exposure of…flaws as the welfare of the Milpuddie family.” Operation Brumby, the “clean-up” undertaken just before the British handed over the land to the federal government in 1967, was “planned in haste to meet political deadlines.”
It was not until 2009 that the Anangu were finally handed back most of the rest of their land; but by now they wanted nothing to do with it. It was mamu, said Robin, and when they visited the Maralinga settlement—as they would from time to time for meetings or, last year, for the ceremony marking the official handover of the remainder of the land—they would lock themselves in the guest caravans and scarcely leave, and would return to their homes in Yalata or Oak Valley as soon as possible. There could be employment here, said Robin, but the tribal people weren’t interested. In Yalata even children born fifty years after the tests feared the place. Science was not the answer, there was no answer. The Anangu are a people who can preserve a narrative unchanged for ten thousand years.
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The Immeasurable World Page 10