The tests themselves had many foolhardy elements to them. The clean-up attempts during the 1960s were no better. All three test sites in Australia were left unsafe. By the time Pearce wrote his report and cleared out, no doubt thinking (incorrectly) that his association with Australia was over, probably only the Soviet Union rivalled parts of Australian territory for radioactive contamination. Robert Milliken, writing before the 1990s clean-up, quoted evidence given to the Royal Commission confirming that ‘Maralinga is probably the only place in the Western world where plutonium is dispersed without precise knowledge of how much is above and below the ground’. There is no doubt that the British authorities would have been pleased if matters had remained that way. They did not. A great uncovering was about to begin.
10
Media, politics and the Royal Commission
It would seem that rumour, innuendo and conveniently selective recollection place an obligation upon me every six months or so to seek to quieten public agitation which is fomented with respect to the Maralinga tests. The motives of the activists seem, at best, curious.
I am aware that the British Government and some members of the Australian scientific establishment have adopted the view that this Royal Commission is largely a waste of time.
What a difference a generation makes. The great uncovering of the events at Maralinga depended upon factors that now seem inevitable – because they happened. But in fact, the aftermath of the nuclear tests need not have been uncovered at all. The contamination of the test ground might have stayed buried at the site, under layers of secrecy and inertia. This book might not exist but for multiple little uncoverings that brought the saga to light. Journalists played an honourable role, as did nuclear veterans, politicians and Indigenous activists, among others. The secrecy agenda that had seemed so monolithic and immovable at the time of the tests started to crumble in the mid-1970s.
The D-notice system was still in place and the relevant laws had not changed, but Australian politics and media had. In fact, Australian society itself had shifted. In a more complex political situation, the simple truisms of the anti-communist 1950s and 1960s no longer prevailed. The Soviet bloc was not yet dismantled, but, after global progress towards nuclear non-proliferation, the good-versus-evil grand narrative of the Cold War had lost much of its power to animate Australian politics.
The Australian media, having dropped their Menzies era compliance, began nurturing some influential and resourceful investigative journalists who were not interested in comforting the powerful. This transformation of Australian society followed the election, on 5 December 1972, of an ALP government headed by the exhilaratingly reckless Gough Whitlam, a man who crashed through the landscape, exciting some and scaring others. After many years of conservative government, Whitlam threw out the conservative playbook and redesigned the underpinnings of Australian society. A rising generation of ambitious investigative journalists had much to write about, particularly when the governor-general John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975, after a period of rapid reform and political scandal. It lasted only three years, but it burned bright and changed everything before it burned out.
The transformation was pervasive. It affected the perception of Maralinga not so much directly, but through the subtle shifts in the public view of government, a casting-off of deference. The way the media treated ministers shifted markedly too. During the 1950s the minister for Supply Howard Beale, the government face of the test program, had informed the media about the tests. This generally involved quarantining some information, and carefully managing the rest. Journalists had largely obeyed his requests to abide by information restrictions, backed by D-notices that outlined specific limits on what the media could report.
Liberal Party Defence minister Jim Killen, who had prime responsibility for managing the issue from 1975 to 1978, had no such control over the media. Initially he seemed caught out about what was at Maralinga. Skilled, motivated journalists kept up the pursuit and placed enormous pressure on him and the government. Killen’s bon vivant and urbane image, not dissimilar to Beale’s, was by this time something of an anachronism. His disdain for media scrutiny worked against him rather than protecting him as it had Beale. The journalists who worked on the Maralinga issue from the mid-1970s had no interest in waiting for carefully crafted and officially cleared media statements. They went looking for their own information.
The development of the more assertive media in Australia was not in itself sufficient to reveal the story about Maralinga’s plutonium contamination. The ongoing health problems suffered by both service personnel and Indigenous people who had been in the vicinity of the Maralinga and Emu Field tests led to public campaigns. Also, with the rise of the Indigenous rights movement throughout the 1970s, the prospect of returning the Maralinga lands (including Emu Field) to the traditional owners in 1984 forced discussion on the state of the site into the open.
At first, the issue came to the surface intermittently but quickly died down again. In parliament on 14 September 1972, Lance Barnard, the deputy leader of the Opposition, asked Liberal minister for Supply Vic Garland about radioactive contamination at Maralinga. Barnard specifically inquired as to whether the British had flown in lead-lined boxes of radioactive waste to bury surreptitiously at the test site. Garland’s less than satisfactory answer, and a misleading public statement at the same time, came back to haunt Killen a few years later when he initially followed Garland’s inaccurate lead. Garland maintained that the radioactive waste buried at Maralinga had a half-life of 15 to 20 years and did not acknowledge the much more dangerous plutonium contamination at the site. Garland had access to the classified Pearce Report, which had been available since 1968 to all security-cleared members of the Australian Government, but his 1972 statements suggest that he had no knowledge of its contents.
In that year, 1972, the French were carrying out atmospheric atomic weapons tests at French Polynesia in the Pacific. This created anxiety in Australia because the tests were so close, and, inevitably, some commentators turned their thoughts to Australia’s own role in testing atomic weapons. In June 1972, a story by Michael Symons in the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few that picked up on Garland’s statements, harked back to the British test series, quoting Ernest Titterton’s response to the airdropped Buffalo shot in October 1956: