On 26 June 1953, just before the Totem D-notice and when Menzies was overseas, the acting prime minister Arthur Fadden distributed a letter to the press representatives on the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee. This letter expanded upon their need to restrict information about the new mainland test series and explained that journalists would not be allowed to witness the Emu Field tests. Fadden made the case that press exclusion from the test site was intended to eliminate media pressure to hold the test before the conditions were right:
It is desirable that the man in charge of the operation should have a considerable margin of time to play with as to when the test should take place. The presence of the press has a tendency to lead to attempts to meet a scheduled date and this could cause a reduction in the value to be derived from the test.
While delays in testing, particularly during Totem and later Buffalo, did make the media restive, the media did not influence the exact timing of any tests, although they probably exerted indirect pressure. Howard Beale was asked a question in parliament on this issue at the height of media unrest at the time of Buffalo in 1956 and replied, ‘I can say that there will be no change in the standards of safety which have been, and will be, maintained from first to last in conducting the tests’.
Fadden’s argument did not convince the media chiefs, who lobbied to gain access to the test site to view Totem, and on 10 September permission was granted. The D-notice system had already done its job by drawing the media into the preparations for test publicity. This concession to media demands suggests a powerful co-operative process that seems to have been working the way it was intended.
After Totem, the operation of D-notices becomes less clear. In 1955, Frank O’Connor sought clarification on the arrangements for a D-notice for Operation Buffalo in September 1956. He wrote to his counterpart at the Prime Minister’s Department, Allen Brown, to find out what was happening. ‘It is highly desirable that any such “D” notice contemplated for “Buffalo” or any other similar operation should be accepted by the Committee well in advance of any public announcements of the trials, and before activity has reached a level which draws attention and subsequent press comment.’
A variety of almost indecipherable squiggles in different hands festoons the lower portion of this letter, including one stating, ‘This matter can’t be dealt with until…’ followed by a tantalising but unreadable reference to the 1956 Monte Bello tests, Operation Mosaic. This frustrating note is tagged with what looks like the date ‘29/8/55’. The final handwritten comment states, ‘Matter Completed 16/9/55’, which was a year before the first Buffalo shot at Maralinga. The official National Archives D-notice files contain no further documentation on D-notices for the British nuclear test series, and it seems likely that the notices were specifically issued only for the earlier tests (definitely Hurricane and Totem, and possibly Mosaic). The earlier D-notices may have been deemed to be current for the later tests. Arthur Fadden in his letter to press chiefs indicated that the Hurricane D-notice also applied to Totem, despite the fact that it had already been explicitly cancelled.
Once the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee decided on its early D-notices, it rarely met again. The committee operated independently of other Australian security authorities, so its concerns were mostly those of its parent organisation, the Department of Defence, not those of the other government entities concerned with security. The British D-notice committee regularly consulted with MI5, but Australia’s D-notice committee never seems to have had a similar relationship with ASIO. Indeed, the Joint Intelligence Committee reported that ASIO rebuffed its suggestion that it participate in the formulation of the initial draft D-notices: ‘The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation did not propose to submit draft “D” Notices at this stage because only in the most exceptional circumstances would the need arise for that organisation to sponsor a “D” Notice’.
The D-notice system remained secret until Prime Minister Harold Holt confirmed its existence in October 1967 in response to a media article by the journalist and lobbyist Richard Farmer. In November, Holt answered a series of questions in parliament about D-notices. In fact, Holt’s comments on D-notices must be among the last parliamentary questions he answered before he drowned in mysterious circumstances in December 1967. One presumes there was no connection.
The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee still notionally exists but has not met since 1982 and is unlikely to do so again. At the 1982 meeting, the committee considered all seven remaining D-notices, which did not include atomic tests, and reduced them to four. Those four are still, technically, in effect and refer to the capabilities of the Australian Defence Force, including aircraft, ships, weapons and other equipment; the whereabouts of Mr and Mrs Vladimir Petrov (no longer relevant as both are now dead); signals intelligence and communications security; and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Perhaps not surprisingly, the intelligence service submitted to the 1995 commission of inquiry into its operations that a replacement for the old D-notice system was needed. In a rather sour official submission to the inquiry, the service said:
The current D-notice [system] is inadequate because it relies on voluntary media restraint, which no longer exists. Changes in Australian society since the 1950s have led to debate as to how principles of public perception and independence of the media can be reconciled with secrecy required for the sake of national interest. This debate has engendered increasing disagreement on what constitutes the national interest. The media organisations have shown by their actions that they will decide what the public interest is in any given situation without assistance from those affected. The media organisation’s [sic] perception of the national interest appears to coincide with its own journalistic interests.
It took 15 years for the system itself to become public knowledge. By the time it did, as legal academic Laurence Maher said, ‘the Australian media was becoming more probing and diversified’. D-notices have no further influence over what Australian media publish or broadcast. As an interesting aside, however, the Labor federal government proposed an updated form of D-notices in 2010, in light of rising terrorism concerns and the WikiLeaks disclosure of sensitive diplomatic and military information. The suggestion was quickly abandoned.
The D-notice system established a formal co-operative relationship that set specific reporting ground rules that, for the most part, the media seemed willing to obey. The notion of media restraint and the prerogative of government to keep certain designated facts out of the media – with the agreement of the media themselves, secured in a committee that included senior media people – affected the way the media reported the tests. This had a cumulative effect. D-notices were not issued for the most dangerous activities at Maralinga, the Vixen B experiments in the early 1960s, but, by then, the media were in the habit of reacting to government-approved media releases. It did not seem to occur to them to investigate stories on their own account.
The conditions of the time were conducive to secrecy, and government policies strengthened those conditions. The Australian Government, with backing and pressure from the British Government, used D-notices and other information controls to restrict media scrutiny. Compliant media conditioned to receiving government information in, mostly, a controlled and predictable way were reinforced by an official, but not legally binding, system that forbade reporting certain secret activities. When the Geneva moratorium on weapons testing came into effect, the British banished Maralinga from even the weak media spotlight. The ill-equipped media did not pursue the story because they did not understand its complexities and implications. The minor trials continued for several years without media attention. No wonder the British nuclear tests in Australia remained mysterious for decades.