Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  William Bovill was a young Australian navigator in a Lincoln aircraft whose job was to find and track the fast-moving Totem One cloud from Emu Field. He had already been involved in the same task after the Montebello explosion. He was aware of a dust canister under each wing, but he and the bomber crew were not issued with protective clothing, film badges or dosimeters. Bovill sat in his normal position in the nose of the plane during the operation; as well as flying into the cloud, he was on the cleaning parties which, either at Woomera or at Amberley in Queensland, washed down the Lincolns after their dangerous flights. He could not remember if it was after the first or second test that his crew were given film badges, and all men were required to shower—but then donned their contaminated uniforms again.

  By contrast, a British Canberra bomber, totally sealed off from the dust cloud, and its three-man aircrew wearing protective suits and using oxygen masks, also flew through the cloud, encountering darkness and turbulence. On landing the Canberra was parked to allow radioactivity to disperse, and the crews were decontaminated. Their gear was taken away and monitored. The question was whether the difference demonstrated greater care of its crews on the part of a wise RAF leadership or a form of discrimination against the RAAF. Much later, the royal commission would decide it was the latter.

  Bovill’s Lincoln crew tracked the Totem Two cloud to west of Charleville in Queensland. Landing at Williamtown in New South Wales, they were required to remain in the plane for two hours and guards were placed around it. When they went back to the plane the next day it was with an American airman from one of the two B29s sent to Australia to observe the test. The American walked around the aircraft with his Geiger counter, saying periodically, ‘Oh, shit . . . oh, shit.’ Bovill’s crew asked the American as they boarded if he wanted to catch a lift with them back to Richmond near Sydney. ‘Christ no!’ he told them. ‘That bloody machine is hot.’

  The Australian bomber crews were anxious enough to approach the Americans to find out the degree of contamination they had suffered. Ultimately the shock of the truth penetrated the RAAF and bureaucratic circles, and the Australian authorities insisted that two members of the British radiation hazard teams from Emu Field go to Amberley, which was the Lincolns’ home base, to check out all their planes. The worst-affected plane was the one that had so horrified the American airman.

  There was one small mercy: although live troops had been deployed in American atomic tests, the British and Australians at Emu Field used dummies in army uniforms and placed Centurion tanks, jet aircraft, aircraft frames, concrete shelters, specially built girder bridges and railway tracks, mines, food, jerry cans filled with water, sacks filled with earth and even live animals, near the explosion site.

  Generally the Sydney Morning Herald and Age supported the tests, but the Daily Mirror in Sydney frequently raised questions of safety. By 1956, trade unionists in Adelaide and Brisbane were holding protests against further British tests, and nine scientists in Adelaide wrote to the Advertiser challenging Titterton’s assurances that there was no risk to public health. Perhaps the majority of Australians were, even by 1956, opposed to the tests.

  In 1956, at the height of the Maralinga tests, public attention was taken by other matters. In July, President Nasser of Egypt announced that he was going to nationalise the Suez Canal. The RAF bombed Egyptian airfields, and Britain and France sent troops into Egypt. The Suez crisis occupied the second half of the year, until Britain and France, as a result of a United Nations call on them to withdraw their forces, did so.

  In November, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in a bid to put down growing numbers of dissidents in one of its main European satellites. This produced the feeling that World War III was inevitable. And yet there were high expectations of and pride in the Olympic Games to be held late in the year in Melbourne. Athletic fervour had been induced over the past two years by the competition to run a sub-four-minute mile, a seemingly unbreakable barrier that Englishman Roger Bannister had smashed in 1954. Bannister and John Landy both broke it at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, also in 1954.

  By the mid-1950s, hydrogen bomb tests had occurred in the United States. These involved the fusion of lighter hydrogen isotopes into heavier ones, and thus released energy classified as thermonuclear. There was growing public opposition in Australia to the testing of hydrogen bombs on Australian territory. When challenged in Parliament Menzies and Beale insisted that there would be no hydrogen bombs exploded in Australia.

  Professor Titterton wrote a series of articles to bolster faith in the tests, and the headline on the final instalment read, ‘Our A bomb tests are a MUST. They can’t harm us.’ But many Australians, despite other distractions, believed they could. The Australian Atomic Energy Commission plant was opened at Lucas Heights in New South Wales in that year of horrors and glories, 1956, and Menzies was aware there was even public alarm over that.

  British Prime Minister Eden suddenly declared that he wanted to experiment with a hydrogen bomb at the Montebellos in April 1956 since Maralinga would not be ready until September. The two Mosaic tests in the Montebellos were therefore to be in the nature of a thermonuclear explosion. One Australian interdepartmental cable in June 1955 warned: ‘Any mention of thermo-nuclear is political dynamite (in Australia) and must be avoided in announcements of trials.’

  Five weeks after Eden’s request, Menzies replied that Australia agreed in principle to the proposed test but said that Australia might not be able to provide all the logistical help Britain would like because the Australian army was stretched by being in Malaya, at Woomera and at preparations for tests at Maralinga itself. In April 1956, the Montebello tests were announced as imminent.

  The British authorities drew up a list of likely questions that would arise and the answers that should be given to them. ‘Question: Have any of these tests any connection with the H-bomb? A: There will be no explosion of an H-bomb nor any explosion of the character of magnitude of that bomb . . .’ This was of course utterly misleading to the point of being a heinous lie. Perhaps those who told it believed it could be justified at this stage of the Cold War.

  On 16 May 1956, a fifteen-kiloton thermonuclear weapon attached to a specially constructed steel tower was fired just before midday. The Australian Safety Committee was on board the HMS Narvik, the headquarters’ ship stationed offshore for the firing. The Safety Committee’s chairman, Melbourne physicist Leslie Martin, had built the particle accelerators at Melbourne University, and clashed with the biochemist Hedley Marston, who believed radiation levels from the tests were much higher and more dangerous than Martin did. Alan Butement suggested that the tests might have to be restricted to relatively small atomic devices in the air or on high towers in low wind conditions. Butement also suggested that restrictions might have to be imposed so that winds blew the cloud to the north-west, even though there were only a limited number of days in the year when such winds blew.

  On the day of the explosion, Martin sent a message to Menzies that there had been no danger whatsoever to life on the mainland, ships at sea or to aircraft, since the cloud had drifted harmlessly out over the ocean. In fact, however, parts of it swung back and dropped radioactive fallout in northern Australia.

  Even though the fallout on the mainland might be low, there were a number of British and Australian safety officers who were surprised by how high in fact the reading was. One such safety officer, James Hole, packed a laundry basket full of radiation detection equipment and two boiler suits and took a helicopter across from the Montebellos to Onslow on the Western Australian coast. He deliberately avoided wearing formal contamination gear for fear of causing alarm. Hole himself ended up receiving a bigger dose of radiation than anyone in Onslow because he had gone into the bomb crater soon after the explosion. He described it as looking like a skating rink—the sands in the crater had become as smooth as glass. ‘There were lots of colours in it. One of the problems in standing in this crater was you could get fascinated and forge
t you were receiving a dose.’

  The second firing on Montebello was to occur on Sunday, 10 June, but when that was announced, Beale, a Methodist minister’s son, objected strongly on religious grounds and asked that it be postponed. The British test director, Hugh Martell, was very angry, but his masters knew that it was politically necessary to satisfy Beale and his churchgoing constituency. After 10 June the weather was bad, but at last, on 19 June, the second Mosaic firing occurred. The yield of the bomb was 60 kilotons, a fact that was kept secret for decades. Immediately after the detonation, a mushroom cloud rose 1600 metres into the air. Buildings at Onslow, 100 kilometres across the sea, were jolted. Windows and roofs rattled at Marble Bar, 400 kilometres inland, where radioactive rain was later reported. Throughout Australia, there were rumours that the G2 Mosaic bomb had created serious problems and had somehow gone wrong. Beale, visiting Woomera at the time, had earlier made a statement between the two bombs, saying that the second one would be smaller than the first. The British tried to correct that, but it had been believed by the public. After the test Beale was pursued on the matter, but one of his officials, with or without his orders, closed the Woomera telephone exchange so that reports could not be phoned through. The minister in any case assured the press that from a cloud at a height of 1600 to 3300 metres all significant particles would have gone into the sea. The Australian Safety Committee had already assured Beale that the cloud was 160 kilometres out to sea.

  This test came to be seen by the public and press as one too many and support began to fade even further. That Beale’s statement about the second explosion had turned out to be totally unreliable, had not helped. It was decided by the government that the yield from the two bombs should be kept secret. Meteorological data should have shown from the beginning that the Montebello Islands were an unreliable site for thermonuclear explosions—the weather was erratic, cyclones could hit it. In every case, radioactive fallout had occurred on the mainland in some instances as far away as Charleville in Queensland.

  Neither the atomic weapons research establishment at Aldermaston in England nor the Australian Safety Committee took any account of the Aboriginal presence on the mainland a little east of the Montebellos. The question of acceptable dose levels for Aborigines was stated as a problem at the Buffalo tests at Maralinga in September–October 1956 but had been ignored in the Mosaic tests three to four months earlier.

  It turned out that the first of the two Buffalo series at Maralinga, and especially the first firing, One Tree, occurred in weather conditions that would violate standards laid down by the Australian Safety Committee itself. The fallout exceeded acceptable limits at Coober Pedy and for Aboriginal people in surrounding country. The second series, Antler, in 1957, violated the rule that there should be no forecast of rain in the detonation period except in areas more than 800 kilometres from Ground Zero.

  At the time of Mosaic, some seventeen hundred Aborigines were recorded as being in the Pilbara region, the closest stretch of Australian land to the Montebellos. When asked later about these Aborigines, the British scientist Penney said, ‘All right, but let me tell you the other end of the story. The top priority job was thermonuclear.’ It had to be done, the implication was, whatever the cost, and he had mentioned that if they had waited until Maralinga was ready, the Australians would probably have refused to allow a bomb of 50 kilotons to be exploded there.

  Penney was back in Australia in August 1956 to direct the first bomb trials to be held at the new Maralinga testing ground—the Buffalo series, beginning in September. These tests really had to be not only a scientific but a public-relations exercise as well. By now Evatt and Calwell were attacking Menzies for not telling the British to go away. Evatt’s plan was that Australia should take the lead in persuading the three major powers to abandon all future tests.

  Everyone involved in the program was aware that if something went wrong at Maralinga it would be disastrous in terms of public opinion and would bring an end to the tests. That was why at the last moment Penney delayed the firing of the first device: ‘Difficult for me here,’ he cabled London, ‘because I cannot fully assess political strength of troublemakers raising scares by rainwater counts.’ The many technical delays before the firing increased speculation about potential dangers. Beale blamed the press for spreading such rumours. But Labor’s Eddie Ward, Curtin’s old nemesis, called for the abandoning of the tests.

  At last the first bomb in the Buffalo series at Maralinga, the one codenamed One Tree, set in a tower, was exploded on 27 September. A group of officers, Australian, New Zealand and British, intended to become vocal champions of the bomb, were distributed around the site. Four were put inside a Centurion tank one and a half kilometres from the blast, twenty-four watched from a series of covered trenches in the ground nearby, and the rest stood in the open, three kilometres from Ground Zero. At the end of the test they all declared they were more ready in purely military terms to accept a nuclear missile as a tactical weapon than they had been before. They were despatched back to their various units in Britain, Australia and New Zealand to ginger up their fellow officers on the matter.

  Meanwhile, the fallout from One Tree drifted east directly across Coober Pedy. This was predicted and had been allowed for as safe for whites—a much higher level of radiation than that considered safe for any tribal Aborigines in the area. Now that the tests had moved back to Maralinga, some attention was given by the Australian Safety Committee about fallout from atomic bombs on Aborigines, moving naked and with bare feet across the fallout area. The report the British and Australians came up with indicated that Aborigines should not be closer than 240 miles (386 kilometres) from the blast site, but a number of sites where Aborigines lived were well within this distance of Maralinga, including Ernabella, Commonwealth Hill, Coober Pedy and Granite Downs. The Australian Safety Committee conscientiously tried to fix contamination levels at a lower level for Aborigines who lacked clothing, would be likely to sleep on contaminated ground and eat contaminated food, and were unlikely to wash contamination from their bodies. Thus acceptable Aboriginal levels of contamination were made one-fifth of that for whites, who did wear clothing and who did have showers.

  The second Buffalo bomb, Marcoo, was exploded on the ground a week later with the lowest yield so far, one and a half kilotons. The third bomb, Kite, was released from a RAF Valiant bomber. It exploded 165 metres above the ground, with a yield of three kilotons. It was believed that this bomb would suck up less material from the ground and that the cloud would drift north-east into the desert. Instead, it travelled south-east and low-level contamination occurred on the edges of Adelaide.

  Twenty-five politicians, including Beale and deputy Labor leader Calwell, and a corps of journalists visited Maralinga in 1956. Beale presented Penney with an inscribed cigarette case on behalf of the Australian government. Calwell said that he and his party were in full agreement with what was going on at the range. He had always been far more in favour than Evatt and Ward. Calwell and John Armstrong, a Labor senator and former Chifley minister, said that they were both sure the tests must continue. This put them at a pole removed from their leader, Evatt’s position.

  When in September 1956 a request had arrived in Canberra for Australia to agree to a further program of nuclear trials for 1957, codenamed Antler, the Menzies government refused to give its assent straight off and Australia asked for more details. The British High Commissioner argued as well as he could in favour of the tests. When Britain finally responded to Australia’s request for more information, in April 1957, it came in the form of a personal message to Menzies from the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. It revealed that Britain was preparing to explode six bombs at the new trials and that the maximum likely yields would range from three to 80 kilotons, the latter larger even than the biggest bomb in the Mosaic program.

  The delay in approving Antler was based on the fact that Menzies knew that Britain had not been frank in the past about the nat
ure of earlier trials. One clause of the memorandum of arrangements between Britain and Australia for setting up the Maralinga range stated that no thermonuclear or hydrogen weapons should be tested on the site. The question was now asked whether Britain was violating this clause. Professor Leslie Martin of the Safety Committee also proposed that the committee’s functions be divided into two bodies—one in charge of weapons safety at Maralinga itself, another to assess the radiological dangers and fallout on a national level. He felt an imperative akin to Penney’s to keep the tests going, but at the same time was aware that public unease must be addressed.

  Events, rather than a specific decision, however, would bring a close to the Australian bomb tests.

  EXPOSURE

  The most remarkable case of Aborigines wandering into the bomb zones involved a family called the Milpuddies. They lived near the Ernabella Mission Station in the north of South Australia and were what the Aborigines themselves called spinifex people—nomadic bush natives, the father a spear-bearing hunter. In May 1957, about midway between Buffalo and the start of the Antler trials in September, the Milpuddies had gone south of Maralinga, following the waterholes towards Ooldea to visit relatives. They had not seen their relatives for so long that they did not know that Ooldea had already been closed down as a settlement, because of the tests, in 1952. The family consisted of Charlie Milpuddie, his wife Edie, a little boy, Henry, and Rosie, a girl of four. Charlie also carried twelve dingo pelts which he had intended to sell in Ooldea. Their journey took them directly into the path of a crater at Marcoo near Maralinga where seven months earlier, on 4 October 1956, an atomic bomb had been exploded at ground level, the only one set off on the Australian continent as a ground-burst, and designed so that the scientists could observe radioactive fallout should a street-level bomb explode in a city.