At Taranaki Owen operates a bulldozer and also helps to remove the metal bunkers built of steel 2.5 centimetres thick. Later he helps place concrete caps over the pits where much detritus is buried. One of the pits even contains a Canberra aircraft, although this was buried before Owen arrived so he missed the Herculean effort involved in getting the aircraft into the pit.
It’s way too hot even for normal clothing, let alone protective gear. Owen discards his long gloves, even though he is picking up glazing known to be emitting gamma rays. He finds his respirator and hat too uncomfortable, so they come off too. The temperature tops 49 degrees Celsius, and sweat pours into the respirator. He can’t see and his eyes sting.
At the start he is issued with a minicom – cotton one-piece underwear meant to absorb perspiration. In the early stages of his service he wears a double nylon coverall over the top. The blue film badge he dutifully wears is sent away every month, but he never hears what it says about his exposure to radiation. By the time he gets to One Tree and Taranaki, he wears only shorts, army boots and a white cap. It is the only way to cope with the temperatures.
Every day when he breaks for lunch he wanders over to the mess caravan, operated by Australian civilians, known by the men on site as Queen Mary. Queen Mary herself will later be buried in a pit along with other contaminated vehicles. Owen places his hands inside a hand monitor that is designed to bleep if it detects radiation. It detects radiation nearly every time. He scrubs to remove the traces, but even he – with no prior experience of radioactivity – knows that it is a waste of time since he stays in the same clothing.
Burned out cars, trucks, scrap metal and all sorts of waste including contaminated soil are pushed into the capacious pits at Taranaki, to be covered with sandy soil and concrete. Owen can see the shallow layer of soil placed over the contaminated material is nearly useless. The wind picks it up and swirls it around like whirlwinds he has seen in American movies, 120 metres high and a metre across. Willy willies.
After five months working on Operation Brumby at Maralinga, Owen is discharged from the British Army. Soon after that he notices strange growths on his hands.
In June 1967, the Australian health physics representative JF Richardson visited Maralinga to see how Operation Brumby was going. His brief and remarkably undetailed report was presented to the AWTSC on 17 July. Brumby was still in operation during his visit, so he paid most attention to the visible state of the range, the progress to date and any unexpected problems. He was told during his visit that 633 samples had been collected, including 500 from Taranaki, suggesting that Taranaki was the most problematic site. Despite this, Richardson said of Taranaki, ‘A low background [radiation] exists due to induced activity in the soil but no radiological hazard arises for this source’. He witnessed the 30-centimetre slabs covering the pits at Taranaki – ‘well-cured concrete resting on the surrounding limestone’, each carrying a sign warning of the radiation hazard. He also acknowledged the collection of a large quantity of cobalt-60 beads from the failed cobalt experiment at Tadje. The beads were placed into large lead pots and buried near the airfield cemetery. Richardson’s report was among the last formal requirements before the departure of the British from the site. Everything seemed to be in order.
Just as no-one associated with the atomic tests could possibly imagine the specific conditions of the Maralinga lands 24 000 years before them, imagining that far into the future (when only half the radioactivity of the plutonium-239 will have died away) is impossible. McClellan tried to get Pearce to imagine this, but it was a doomed exercise. Whatever use the land will be put to, whatever climatic and geological changes will occur, no-one can predict. As the heavy undertone of the exchanges between McClellan and Pearce attested, leaving the land contaminated was expedient, not prudent. It was not based upon any depth of understanding about the future, or who could be harmed by the radiation now part of the soil and the dust. Geoff Eames, counsel for the Aboriginal people at the Royal Commission, put to Pearce a hypothetical scenario about sprinkling the grounds of Blenheim Palace in England with plutonium in the same concentrations found at Maralinga. Pearce said in this case he would not have recommended the plutonium be ploughed into the earth. It would not be okay at Blenheim, he said, because many more people would be in contact with the soil than at Maralinga. It was essentially a numbers game. And in any case, he said, it was up to the Australians to determine the future use of the range. That was not a matter of concern to the AWRE.
On 23 September 1968, the Australian Government, headed by the Liberal prime minister John Gorton, allowed the British to sign away responsibility for the Maralinga site. The memorandum outlining the terms of the agreement was backdated to 21 December 1967. The agreement was struck on the basis of the flawed Pearce Report and was not seriously challenged by any Australian official until the issue was forced in the early 1990s. In part, the agreement stated that the UK Government was ‘released from all liabilities and responsibilities’. In years to come, the British would assert this agreement with considerable vigour and, for quite a while, with notable success. When the British formally withdrew from Maralinga, the federal government assumed responsibility. The plan was eventually to return it to South Australia, although it took longer than originally envisaged.
Did Pearce know that his clean-up operations were inadequate and his infamous report misleading? The question is difficult to answer. At the Royal Commission Pearce vigorously defended his record and stood by his report. He resisted any attempt by lawyers cross-examining him to admit his work was sub-standard or the report was intended to give a false impression. At the same time, he was a British physicist with little real understanding of the differences between the Australian landscape and the gentler fields of England. And he had no real incentive to spend time or effort on divesting the British Government of a site that was by then a white elephant. He was an AWRE insider, so he may well have had access to the data from Roller Coaster that proved to be the key to understanding the true level of Maralinga contamination. However, the Royal Commission did not know about Roller Coaster, and Pearce was not questioned about it. Whether the deficiencies were of commission or omission cannot be determined, although either way the outcome was the same. Moroney defended Pearce at the Royal Commission. Like him, he believed that no-one was likely to come to live at the test site. The whole thing would fade from people’s minds leaving a deserted backwater, both physically and metaphorically. Moroney changed his views in the early 1990s, when he calculated the weight of British deceit in terms of kilograms of loose plutonium.
If anything, the clean-up at Monte Bello, which was not subject to an agreement, was even more inadequate than that of the mainland. Some fences and signs were erected at the time, but the islands were not patrolled. The areas were tested in 1962, and radiation levels were found to have fallen somewhat from their 1956 heights. Operation Cool Off in 1965, sparked by news that oil exploration was about to get underway at nearby Barrow Island, involved putting up a few fences around the G1 and G2 sites, but that was about the extent of remediation measures at Monte Bello until much later.
The most concerted effort to bury contaminated debris and remove rubbish was a 1979 Royal Australian Engineers rehabilitation program called Operation Capelin. In 1983, the team from the ARL visited Monte Bello. Geoff Williams and his colleagues found pieces of the frigate HMS Plym, including a massive drive-shaft (hot with cobalt-60 from the neutron irradiation of the steel), scattered over the beach of Trimouille Island adjacent to where the Plym device had been exploded. ARL chief Keith Lokan wrote to the British high commissioner in Canberra pointing out the problem of the British leaving the island contaminated with activated pieces of steel debris from the Plym. In response came the put-down ‘Everyone knows when you explode a nuclear weapon on a ship, the whole ship is vaporised’. Australian scientists had proof that the ship did not disappear into the ether, in the form of substantial contaminated material lying on the beach. Trimouille was also left with a coating of black dust made up mostly of iron oxides from the Plym metal. The 1956 Mosaic tests left about eight islands contaminated.