Totem 1 was a 9.1-kilotonne atomic device detonated from a 30-metre-high steel tower at 7 am on 15 October 1953. The evidence is unclear exactly how long after the detonation the black mist rolled across the land, but some estimates say it was first seen about five hours later. Wallatinna is 173 kilometres from the Emu Field test site, and Mintabie just over 16 kilometres from Wallatinna. Scientific estimates have confirmed that the fallout cloud would have passed over the area about five hours after the detonation.
British scientists WT Roach and DG Ballis in evidence to the Royal Commission supported the possibility of a black mist from the Totem test, saying that all the reports ‘had a measure of internal consistency about them’. Both scientists asserted that the conditions of firing at Totem could conceivably have delivered to the Indigenous people of Wallatinna a fallout cloud that had raced along near ground level. ‘It would have been a strange and awesome sight to anyone beneath it. A fine “drizzle” of black particles would also have been noticed.’ However, they did not think that the cloud would have caused health problems for anyone standing awestruck beneath it.
And that is the problem. While most people who have looked at this issue in any depth agree that the black mist occurred, disagreements about the harm it caused have never been resolved. But the compelling evidence of the Aboriginal people in the area is hard to ignore. The most famous of those affected, Yami Lester, said, ‘Almost everyone at Wallatinna had something wrong with their eyes. And they still do… I was one of those people, and later on I lost my sight and my life was changed forever’. One of the Aboriginal people who was a spokesperson for Aboriginal witnesses to the Royal Commission, Kanytji (also known as Kantji), said the cloud was ‘very black’, but reddish towards to the top, and it dimmed the sun. It produced a strange shadowing effect, seeming to give people multiple shadows. Kanytji said that the cloud deposited a moist black substance on the ground, like a bizarre kind of frost. Other eyewitnesses said that it smelled like a dead kangaroo or like liquid petroleum gas. Whatever it was, it was not healthy.
Despite Titterton’s scepticism, the Royal Commission officially recognised the credibility of the black mist allegations but found insufficient evidence to say whether the phenomenon caused injury or illness. This finding still causes considerable distress to the Indigenous people who were present when the black mist rolled in.
More recently, scientists from ARPANSA have attempted to get to the bottom of the black mist, including Dr Geoff Williams, from the team who uncovered the radioactive contamination at Maralinga in 1984 and who has extensive knowledge of the British nuclear tests. In 2010, with his colleague Dr Richard O’Brien, he carried out a scientific appraisal of the black mist in response to The Black Mist and Its Aftermath: Oral Histories by Lallie Lennon, prepared by oral historian Michele Madigan in 2006 and 2009 and published with transcription and commentary by Paul Langley in February 2010. The scientists affirmed the strong evidence that the black mist incident happened but, again, were unable to say that it caused illness and injury. They pointed instead to the measles epidemics around the time of Totem 1 as more likely causes. They also raised the possibility that ‘non-radioactive factors’, such as chemical irritants in the mist, might have caused the reported skin conditions and allergic reactions.
The terrible harms caused to the Indigenous peoples of the Maralinga lands have been partly salved by the determination of the people themselves not to be defeated. One measure of their spirit is the establishment of a tourism venture at Maralinga owned by Maralinga Tjarutja people based at Oak Valley. Maralinga Tours now takes paying customers to the old test range. The audacity of this venture cannot but lift the spirits.
8
D-notices and media self-censorship
The press in both Britain and Australia, at least initially, did not probe at all into the political, scientific, moral, economic or any other aspect of the atomic project. They allowed themselves to be bound by a series of D-notices.
When the media acquiesce, the very existence of censorship is unknown to citizens. In Australia, D-notices, used to censor the media, seldom receive publicity.
Why bother to muzzle sheep?
In the 1950s, Australian newspapers were popular, opinionated and dominated by legendary media barons, notably Ezra Norton, Keith Murdoch and Frank Packer. For the most part they focused on growth, politics and postwar prosperity. Media owners and editors were not used to covering scientific issues, and there was no imperative to do so. They filled their pages with the economic and population boom, and the red scares and paranoid preoccupations of the Cold War. The intricacies of nuclear weaponry were not at the top of the minds of newspaper people, even as the pall of mutually assured destruction descended on a nuclear-armed world.
Since Australia had no nuclear energy or weapons program of its own, the country and its media were several steps removed. And because they were not attuned to matters nuclear, the Australian media were easily controlled when it came to managing atomic weapons secrecy. Ignorance was helpful in this process. The British nuclear test authorities prepared the way well to manage the media and did so with almost unbelievable success throughout the entire test program.
Why were the Australian media so compliant to the secrecy requirements of the test authorities? At least part of the answer may be found in the top-secret agreements between government and media called D-notices, which encouraged media self-censorship. While their influence was relatively fleeting, D-notices in Australia had their greatest impact during the 1950s. The D-notice system established a formal co-operative relationship between the government and the media in the lead-up to, and during the first few years of, the British nuclear tests in Australia. This relationship set specific reporting ground rules – rules that for the most part the media seemed willing to obey.
The imposition of controls over the media, exercised by both the British and the Australian governments, arose from a long chain of circumstances. A vicious world war in recent memory. The rise of the Soviet Union, a major totalitarian state – now a superpower – whose postwar armaments and strength derived at least partially from the leaking of official Western secrets. To Australia’s north, there was the 1949 communist revolution in China and in 1950, just before Clement Attlee asked Robert Menzies about atomic testing in Australia, North Korea invaded South Korea. When United Nations forces, mainly American, were called to defend the South fears grew that the Cold War might become hot at any time. Australian troops soon joined the action. All of these factors made Australia generally, and its government in particular, jittery and insecure – and ready to do whatever it took to buy postwar security.
In addition, a series of postwar scandals about supplying security information to the Soviet Union had implicated the Australian public service. Australia found itself in the uncomfortable position of needing to convince both the UK and the US that it could keep security secrets. Collaboration on national security issues between Australia and its two main allies depended upon making fundamental changes to the way Australia conducted itself, particularly with the new dynamics around nuclear weaponry and the arms race. In June 1948, relations with the US were ruptured when Washington suspended the flow of classified military information to Australia. Combined pressure from Westminster and Washington led to the establishment of ASIO as a domestic spy service in March 1949.