The chairman of the newly formed Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee, Professor E. W. Titterton, said ‘There is no danger of significant fallout outside the immediate target area’. That was virtually all that was reported in the newspapers at the time, although there was a continuing debate among politicians and scientists about the Maralinga tests.
The issue rapidly died away. Prominent left-wing ALP politician Tom Uren revived it four years later in federal parliament, when he was deputy leader of the Opposition. Uren was broadly attuned to nuclear issues and had a strong record in opposing uranium mining. His stance was influenced by a series of 1960s articles in The Age by Barry Commoner, an American biologist, who had suggested that there was no possible solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Uren was also responsive to representations from nuclear veterans concerned about their health and among the first to place the plutonium legacy at Maralinga onto a crowded political agenda.
Uren asked Killen a bombshell question in parliament on 9 December 1976: ‘Is it true that, during the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing between 1958 and 1961, Australia co-operated with the British on conducting secret atomic “trigger” tests at Maralinga and that waste and debris from these tests were buried at Maralinga?’ Uren explicitly requested that a Royal Commission be set up to investigate all aspects of the Maralinga test program. He simultaneously issued a public statement saying, ‘During [the test] moratorium period the Australian government co-operated with the British government to secretly carry out certain atomic tests in the Maralinga area… The explosions caused by these tests were so small that they could escape public scrutiny and international detection’.
In his response Killen wrongly described Operation Buffalo in 1956 as the last test series, overlooking Antler, the final major trial in 1957. It was long before the Vixen B tests, too, although he alluded to the minor trials: ‘I am not aware of any explosions that took place between 1958 and 1961. I am aware of certain trials, which I distinguish from explosions, as presently advised, that took place. They were conducted pursuant to an agreement between the United Kingdom and Australia’. Killen undertook to carry out further inquiries, while telling parliament he had witnessed the second test in Operation Buffalo. A number of Australian parliamentarians, including Gough Whitlam, had attended this test, having originally been scheduled to attend the first Buffalo test but missing out because of the chaos caused by the delays. Killen even wrote a story for Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, published on 7 October 1956, titled ‘Watched “small” A-blast: sight I will never forget’.
So some tantalising pieces of information were emerging, but the media did not pick up the story. Maralinga was not yet a significant political issue and few people knew the name. The only substantial media references to possible plutonium in the South Australian desert were in the Adelaide papers: the Advertiser in a sequence of stories between 3 and 10 December 1976, and the News in a prominent article on 17 December.
The first Advertiser story, on 3 December, was based on the revelations of Maralinga veteran Avon Hudson, who had been interviewed on the ABC radio program AM the previous day. Hudson told the Advertiser that plutonium was buried at Maralinga. ‘Mr Avon Hudson, of Balaklava, broke 15 years silence last night to talk of his role in what he called a dumping ground for radioactive waste from Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s.’ He asserted that the British has also shipped in radioactive waste to be buried at Maralinga, saying that his conscience had driven him to the media to tell his story: ‘It has had a marked effect on my life, knowing there are dangerous elements out there – elements that I now know are the most dangerous things in the world’. These were the same claims that Barnard had asked Garland about in 1972. Hudson told an anecdote about an Aldermaston official who, when he was ‘under the weather’, asserted that the radioactive contents of barrels that Hudson believed contained plutonium should have been dumped into the Atlantic Ocean in order to save ‘a lot of trouble’. While it now appears unlikely that the British actually imported waste to bury at the Maralinga site, Hudson’s allegations did direct attention to exactly what was there.
The next day the Advertiser quoted a member of a salvage party recovering building materials at Maralinga, Mr E Dutsche, who, citing Defence Department officials, said he had been assured by people at the site that no plutonium had been buried in the area. When Hudson was approached for comment, he said he was not surprised by the denials since this was all he had ever received from politicians. The South Australian minister for Mines and Energy Hugh Hudson (no known relation to Avon) said the issue was a Commonwealth matter. A spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Authority in the UK said ‘it was “highly unlikely” Britain had ever exported nuclear waste to Australia’.
Further stories ran in the Advertiser. On 9 December, science writer Barry Hailstone brought some scientific fact into the coverage. He reported that Professor HJ De Bruin, who had been a principal research scientist for the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, had called for an inquiry into waste at the site. On 10 December the paper ran a front page story reporting that Killen had ordered an inquiry. The story also reiterated British denials about radioactive waste at Maralinga. It quoted John Coulter, then vice-president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and later an Australian Democrats senator, who said that ‘the Australian and British governments had maintained secrecy about nuclear testing at Maralinga after 1957 because such tests would have violated international agreements. But there [still] seems to be a blanket of silence about this’.
Like the stories in Advertiser, the front page story in the News, which appeared with the huge banner headline ‘Plutonium buried at Maralinga’, could not have been more prominent. It referred to three reports on the issue of radioactive waste, and although it was not named, one was most likely the Pearce Report, which was still secret. The story indicated that Minister Hudson had called on the federal government to instigate ‘radiation monitoring programs for the Maralinga area’ and recommended health checks for local Aborigines, a step forwards from his earlier more dismissive position. Still, it seemed everyone wanted to keep their distance. The federal minister for the Environment Kevin Newman advised his department not to get involved, saying that the problem was primarily one for Defence. Foreign Affairs was also concerned about the media interest in Maralinga, especially as Australia pursued its ambition to mine and export uranium.
The claims by Avon Hudson were causing high-level concern. Under Australia’s agreement with the IAEA it had to provide an inventory of all fissionable materials and guarantee that no such materials could be used to manufacture weapons. The possibility of this story becoming a serious and potentially damaging problem for the federal government was well known to insiders, including Roy Fernandez, the acting deputy secretary in Foreign Affairs, who pointed out that ‘the safety criteria applying 15 to 20 years ago to the storage of plutonium might not be acceptable in the climate of to-day’s opinion’. This made ‘excessive publicity’ and ‘unwarranted speculation’ about Maralinga undesirable.
In February 1977, Killen, echoing Garland, wrote to Uren saying that there was no evidence to substantiate the claim of plutonium contamination at the site, a position he later had to retract. In fact, around the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald contradicted Killen’s stance, using his own department’s report. The story quoted the government’s chief defence scientist Dr John Farrands and claimed that