Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  The Milpuddies camped near Marcoo crater, where they lit a fire and dined on a kangaroo Charlie had killed. The next morning, a military officer leading a patrol from Maralinga was surprised to see the Milpuddies wandering towards a site near Pom Pom, where a caravan was stationed for the health physics team, the experts monitoring radiation exposures. Frank Smith, then a member of the Radiation Detection Unit at Maralinga, got an urgent call to rush to Pom Pom and assess the Milpuddies. When he got there he persuaded the family to go to the health physics caravan, but kindly decided not to put on his white protective clothing and head gear because the sight might frighten them. Edie Milpuddie would tell an Australian royal commission in Maralinga that her family were naked when the soldiers picked them up at Marcoo. She had never seen a motor car or a shower before. The showers were necessary because the boy proved to have a high reading. When Edie went to the shower in the caravan she thought there was another Aboriginal woman there too, but then realised it was herself in a mirror. After the shower, the soldiers held something near Charlie and his son that made a clicking noise. Crazily, Edie and her daughter had not been checked with the radiation counter. Smith the radiation officer would say, ‘The elderly English pilot officer did not mind us washing the son or the father. But he had some sense of indignity that we would get too close to the female members of the tribe. I don’t know why, but he insisted that [there was] no hanky-panky, etcetera, etcetera, and that is why we did not go on with that.’

  The whole family was now loaded with their four hunting dogs into a Land Rover and driven to Yalata, 320 kilometres south. Edie Milpuddie had been pregnant when they camped at Marcoo crater. She would give birth out in the bush to a stillborn child. She buried the child there. Her next child died of a brain tumour at two years old. Sarah, her next child, weighed under a kilogram at birth. The Edie Milpuddie story is not necessarily conclusive of a connection with radiation, but the succession of natal problems and the fact that her daughter Rosie and her grandchildren were plagued by illness is indicative. The royal commission would declare, ‘Her family and indeed, her grandchildren since that time seemed to have suffered extraordinary ill health and numerous deaths.’

  John Hutton, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Australian army at the time, recalled the men being mustered together and addressed by a colonel who told them they had not seen the Milpuddie incident, because the British and Australian governments had poured a lot of money into managing the press and if the story got into the newspapers that money would be wasted. The colonel reminded them that they were bound by the Official Secrets Act.

  So imminent did the threat of war seem at the time that not only was the potential harm caused to outback whites and Aborigines considered an irrelevance, but so was the impact on the environment and on animal species, native and introduced. Rabbits killed by radiation were eaten by eagles, who then began to suffer the symptoms. There was no evident impact yet on kangaroos and dingoes.

  In the end, Britain decided to limit the 1957 Antler trials to three bombs: two mounted on towers and a third suspended from balloons. The first two, fired on 14 and 25 September that year, yielded one and six kilotons respectively. The final bomb, Taranaki, was fired a fortnight later from balloons suspended 300 metres above the ground and yielded 25 kilotons.

  A number of workers were employed to go into the Ground Zero areas in Maralinga and retrieve battle dress and boots from experimental dummies. The workers wore no protective clothing themselves. The bombs had not been hydrogen devices, but the Australian Safety Committee did not tell Menzies that a highly radioactive component, Cobalt 60, had been secretly included in the first Antler test. The information emerged a year later when Doug Rickard, a young Australian member of a health physics team at Maralinga, came across radiation levels so high that his instruments could not measure them. He collected metallic particles, put them in a tobacco tin and drove them 48 kilometres back to the health physics laboratory at Maralinga. As he approached the laboratory, the instruments there became confused by the radioactive levels.

  Rickard was interviewed by a British security officer who ordered him not to speak to anyone, particularly any Australians, no matter what their position at Maralinga. ‘I was under the distinct impression that the British authorities did not want the Australian Government to know anything at all about what happened.’ Over the next four months, similar segments were found; these were put in lead cases that were buried in concrete pits near the Maralinga airfield. Some of the cobalt fragments were however too dangerous to handle and were left lying at the site. Rickard himself received higher radiation doses during the time he spent at Maralinga from October 1957 to June 1959 than any other member of the health physics team. He suffered permanent bone marrow damage and other physical disabilities that doctors told him were consistent with high exposure. Rickard would ultimately launch a claim for compensation from the Australian government, and his right to compensation would be acknowledged.

  Rickard’s team leader at Maralinga, Harry Turner, a physicist trained at the University of Western Australia, complained to the Australian Safety Committee about the dangers his team faced: ‘For about nine months we had walked in that area where the Cobalt 60 pellets were, not knowing that they were there.’ Titterton came and spoke to Turner and tried to resolve the issue. ‘It left us a little bit unhappy as to why the British did this without informing us,’ Turner said about the use of Cobalt 60. Much later Titterton would say that the safety committee had not been told because their work was boring and the presence of cobalt would ‘give Harry and his workers a bit of a test, quite a small test because the radioactivity of the Cobalt was quite trivial compared to the radioactivity in the weapon’. He added, ‘It was interesting to us, who were responsible for this operation, to see how quickly they found it. They came out of it with flying colours, actually.’

  Britain continued to test hydrogen weapons in the Pacific during 1958, but the Antler trials at Maralinga turned out to be the last of the most notable series of bomb tests conducted in Australia. The moratorium on nuclear tests between Britain, America and the Soviet Union came into operation in late 1958. It ended in 1961, but by then Britain’s nuclear estrangement from the United States was no more. Australia was dealt out of the game. After 1961, Britain conducted her nuclear tests jointly with the United States underground in Nevada. Minor trials at Maralinga continued until 1963. Technically, Britain considered these not a breach of the nuclear-testing ban it had entered into.

  MEETING SOVIET MAN

  In modern times, particularly for most of the twentieth century, conflicting perceptions of the Soviet Union dominated Australian intellectual life. Manning Clark’s Meeting Soviet Man, a record of his first visit to the USSR in 1958, has been pronounced ‘silly’ and ‘foolish’ for its romantic reaction to Russia. Clark was a disciple of Dostoevsky more than of Marx; the Melbourne Communist writer Judah Waten, who travelled with him, complained of the fact. Indeed, an Australian Soviet expert, Harry Rigby, who worked for the British Embassy, met Clark and said the same thing in different terms: ‘Manning regarded our particular variant of Western society as fatally flawed but he could not make up his mind about a remedy: was it to be found in Rome or in Moscow?’ Clark himself wrote that the Soviets wanted to ‘prune away all the inwardness and sobbing souls and stress hope and strength’. Clark recognised that apart from members of the Communist Party and a dwindling band of fellow travellers in Australia, Australian people had stopped ‘taking Soviet Man seriously—they were no longer bothered to study his solution to the problem of equality, his contributions to culture, his solutions to the problems of the life of man without God’.

  To its most recent critics, Meeting Soviet Man is too perfunctory in its condemnation of Stalin, too circumspect in its comments on the invasion of Hungary and too equivocal in its account of the Boris Pasternak affair, the refusal of Soviet authorities to permit the publication of Doctor Zhivago. Clark’s condemnation of Bolshevi
k crimes exonerated Lenin.

  Australian literature on the Soviet Union had a long pedigree. Lincoln Steffens, an American visitor to Soviet Russia, had famously declared, ‘I have been over into the future and it works.’ Before and after Clark, this is the tone of many of the travel journals published by prominent cultural figures not only in Australia but also elsewhere. Tom Wright, an official of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union of New South Wales and of the Communist Party of Australia, wrote a 1928 account after spending the previous autumn as a guest of the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions in what he says is the end of ‘the first decade of working-class dictatorship’. Wright travelled from Moscow to Donetsk in the south, to Baku, and back to Leningrad and Moscow, inspecting factories, mines, sanitoria and creches and recording inspiring statistics of socialist construction. He admits that much remains to be achieved—there is still unemployment, poverty, crime and prostitution ‘in but little diminished intensity’. Religion and superstition remain, and the countryside displays its face of ‘age long poverty’, but he was sure that soon the agricultural system would achieve a level of the industrial success. He could not foresee the fierce results of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan or look forward to the famine of the 1930s. So his idea was that the Communist Party could have brought a similar transformation to Australia. In the decade following the adoption of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan in 1928, visits and accounts like Wright’s became increasingly numerous.

  All these texts chronicled uniform progress in industrial productivity, living standards and social services, particularly notable in this period of the Depression. There’s no lack of optimism in these works, but in many cases also a surprising level of acknowledgement of collectivisation, assassination and other Stalinist ills. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Real Russia (1934), is a more literary production. People like her were looked after in Russia by VOKS, the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and MORP, the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1930. The difference between Prichard and MORP was that they were considered by the regime to be apparatchiks of the state, something every fibre of Prichard’s soul cried out against. The Real Russia is characteristic of accounts of such writer-travellers as Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, André Gide, Romain Rolland and others.

  Prichard, a member of the Communist Party of Australia since 1920, was the only Australian writer at all well known in Russia. She declared, ‘I did not want to be a tourist in Russia; to have it said that I made a “conducted tour” . . . saw only what the Soviet government wanted me to see.’ Yet she does mention how much information is available from the guides. She writes, ‘Whether you approve or whether you don’t approve of the politics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, philosophical minds cannot fail to recognise its achievement as historically one of the greatest performances of the human race.’ She even approves of the purges as they are portrayed by those she meets—the 1933 purge was ‘drastic and searching, clearing out of the Party all members whose light does not shine by their work’. She met a number of Russian writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita) and Mikhail Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don), and called the followers of Maxim Gorky ‘the shock brigades of the world’. She saw Soviet theatres as supplanting churches as ‘temples of a living faith in humanity’.

  Travelling with her were the young playwright Betty Roland (not as yet a Communist) and Roland’s lover, one of the founders of Australian Communism, Guido Baracchi. Roland’s memoir Caviar for Breakfast is questioning and ironic. She describes Prichard, returning from Siberia, as ‘sadly disillusioned. None of her former optimism remained. During the weeks she spent there she had seen so much and learned so much she had never dreamt of, and her heart was sick.’ Roland declares that Prichard pursued Communism as a reaction to her husband’s suicide in 1933. Hugo Throssell had not recovered from the pressure of his service in World War I or his financial problems in the Depression.

  Roland’s Caviar for Breakfast is an enlightening counterpoint to The Real Russia because she experienced living as a favoured guest with Baracchi at the Hotel Lux, where there really was caviar for breakfast, only to be decanted to squalid flats once they decided to stay on, and thus her awareness of housing shortage, bread queues (which she joined), and her sightings of pauperised peasants and homeless children and of the prostitutes swarming around the international hotels, while Prichard declares in her book, ‘Prostitution no longer exists in the Soviet Union.’ All this coexisting with elegant and abundantly supplied shops reserved for foreigners and the Party elite. Roland also speaks of the shortcomings of gynaecological care. Her consciousness of ‘the universally feared OGPU’, the Soviet secret police, later to become the UVD, and her distaste for the purges is intense. Despite her misgivings, Roland saw Russia as struggling towards the light, and joined the Communist Party on her return from the Soviet Union.

  The Russian impressions of Jessie Street from her 1938 journey to Moscow, undertaken in a spirit of scepticism about the claims regarding the status of women in the USSR, led to her being convinced that Soviet society would put an end to the exploitation of women forever.

  The first travel account published by an Australian in the early years of the Iron Curtain was Jack Lindsay’s A World Ahead (1950), which was written for a British readership. And then a few years later was Frank Hardy’s Journey into the Future. Like Lindsay, Hardy emphasised the significance of the cultural situation by contrast with the decadence of British intellectual life.

  Arriving in Russia from the Soviet-inspired World Youth Festival of Peace in Berlin, Hardy and his wife spent five weeks in the autumn of 1951 as guests of the international section of the Union of Soviet Writers, the successor to MORP. ‘The Soviet worker,’ he wrote, ‘has the highest standard of living in the world.’ He spoke of educational standards. The Soviet atom bomb had secured world peace. The Moscow Metro was an underground fairyland. The ballet and the opera, which were preserves of the rich in the capitalist world, had become mass entertainment, and public entertainment far excelled in quality ‘the decadent culture of the American ruling class’. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were cherished and ground-breaking composers. But he did not take account of the stultifying art of Stalinist Russia.

  The threats to the Soviet Union, Hardy claimed, were the capitalist press, ‘the gangster Truman’, ‘the quisling Menzies’ and ‘wealthy men of Toorak, Park Lane and Long Island’. Talk of alleged purges and ‘accusations of dictatorship, totalitarianism, police state etc’ are a ‘gross and obviously deliberate misunderstanding’. The outrageous accusations about forced labour camps were in the first place the invention of none other than Dr Goebbels. Hardy, an energetic punter, says he found an outlet for his interest in sport and beer amongst the ordinary Russians. And with considerable accuracy he says, ‘All in all, you’d like Russians.’

  Hardy saw a socialist Australia arising naturally out of mateship and out of the angry fraternal and socialist poems of Henry Lawson, and that ‘a mighty socialist state’ would be ‘stamped with the features of our grand Australian tradition’. An Australian Communist state would thus have an added inheritance to draw on.

  Geoffrey Blainey in Across a Red World (1968) would in part agree with Hardy: ‘One dislikes the Russian system . . . but likes the people.’ By the time of the Soviet intervention in the Prague uprising, ‘the Prague spring’ of 1968, for many Communist members and supporters of the principles of the Russian version of Marxism, Communism ceased to be the force for genuine freedom. The repression the Russians brought down on the Czechs was a final disenchantment, and ended the idea that the Soviets were reaching towards the equality and rights of the species.

  CHAPTER 11

  A million immigrants and the advance towards Vietnam

  New people; new ally

  WARDS: HASLUCK AND NAMATJIRA

  The 1953 Northern Territory Welfare Ordinance, whose principal advocate was Minister for Territories Paul Hasl
uck, was subtitled ‘An Ordinance to Provide for the Care and Assistance of Certain Persons’. The 1953 ordinance gave priority to education, vocational training and the ‘social, economic and political’ advancement of ‘certain persons’ who came within its ambit. Until they could take their place as members of the community of the Commonwealth, these persons were to be treated as ‘wards of the state’ in ‘need of guardianship and tutelage’. The persons in question were Aborigines.

  Hasluck, who had power to legislate only for the Northern and other territories, with the states maintaining control still over their own Aboriginal populations, had announced his ambition to abolish race as a legal category. Legislative use of the term ‘Aborigines’ was, apart from being racially odious, beset by problems of definition. The legal identification of Aborigines as a separate category of person, he argued, had been the paramount problem of earlier legislation. In any case, the problems of the Aboriginal people were ‘problems of “coming together” with white society, and they could never be overcome by the methods of “keeping apart”.’ Rigorous definitions of Aborigines had always diminished the rights of those so defined, and devalued their social responsibilities.

  He urged the states to amend their own legislation in that way. None did. C.D. Rowley, an historian of Aboriginal affairs, saw the ordinance, despite Hasluck’s goodwill, as ‘one of the last big efforts to use authoritarian legislation to control the processes of social change’. The welfare ordinance left in place many of the traditional and unjust practices of white management and control of Aborigines, and this would soon enough become apparent.